Variety is the key to school sport – not spending five years sucking at netball

In this lull between the Olympics and Paralympics, everyone has their own idea about what we should learn from Team GB’s success. It’s the opposite of last year, when everyone was asking what we should learn from the riots. The compulsion to take messages away from any event inspiring an extreme of emotion seems to have become a national affliction: not necessarily a bad thing. If there are people in the UK asking themselves “what can I learn from the appalling state of my ironing pile? What will be the legacy of this triumphant Victoria sponge?”, well, they’re a bit odd, but their lives are no doubt a journey of discovery.

For the Labour leadership, one of the lessons to take away is the importance of regular sport at a school level: our last government introduced the target of two hours a week, and by 2010 that target was being met for 90% of pupils.

Naturally, the Tories disagree. They’re not so keen on targets. Instead what Cameron reckons schools need is a more ‘competitive ethos,’ with particular derision reserved for those schools, real or imaginary, whose pupils spent their two weekly hours of exercise doing ‘Indian dancing, or whatever’. (Because if there’s one thing the Olympics really has taught us, it’s that dancing is not a sport unless you’re a horse.) This stems from the prevailing belief among Conservatives and their newspapers that under New Labour, children were banned from competing with one another, PE lessons consisted largely of cross-country Talking About Your Feelings, and at Sports Days parents were encouraged to applaud as their children stood still. Just…stood there.

I’m holding off from calling this a myth, because I always thought that about the nursery that banned Baa Baa Black Sheep until I met someone who used to go there. Anecdotal evidence suggests there are many, many schools in which competitive sport never went away (it certainly didn’t while I was at school in the first few years of New Labour) – and, interestingly, I’ve also seen tweets from a few people saying that they took part in non-competitive sports days back when John Major was Prime Minister, which suggests what every child, teacher and parent already knows: every school is different, and what teachers do has much more of an impact than whatever the current flavour of government is banging on about this week.

What I want to know is – who are these children who need help understanding competition? If two six-year-olds are walking along and one of them breaks into a run, will the other one start racing them or just shrug and go “well, bye then!”? Either way, I don’t think either the two-hour target or Cameron’s proposed culture change have much to do with what we’ve seen in the Olympics. As Jon Worth pointed out on LabourList over the weekend, two weekly hours of exercise won’t make anyone into an Olympian – which is not at all to say we shouldn’t aim for it. PE lessons may be the only exercise some children get. It certainly was for me. (I used to walk a lot, but since I usually ate a share-size bag of mint cream Poppets on the way, it probably didn’t count.)

But surely one of the biggest lessons the Olympics teach children is that there are all kinds of sports out there they’ve never tried. What we should be aiming for is giving them the chance to try. Variety is the key – not spending five years sucking at netball (and essentially standing still for two hours a week because you’re standing as far away from the ball as it’s possible to do while remaining on the court….it took a certain amount of skill, let me tell you), but mixing it up with a little time in the gym, and maybe a trial session of judo, or a boxing taster – with the opportunity to take it further if you’re good at it. It sounds expensive, true, but something like this might be achievable if schools and other community organisations were supported to work together.

At the same time, some children are never going to be good at any competitive sport at all – so that variety of opportunities to exercise has to include them too. Losing is character-building (after all, the PM should know) – but your whole team losing, every week, and shouting at you because after three years you’re still under five feet tall and still don’t understand netball…not so much. I can now reluctantly acknowledge that all those years of enforced hockey were physically good for me at the time (not netball. I will never be reconciled to netball). But as yesterday’s Observer editorial pointed out, ‘for many, especially girls and young women, there is strong evidence that far from encouraging a lifetime participation in sport, compulsory, competitive school sport can often be deeply alienating.’ Word.

And you can scoff and say that school sport isn’t there to be enjoyed, if you’re one of those people who tends to view school as a sort of penal colony to which people are sent as punishment for being young, rather than as a place to learn. Public schools, of course, are the embodiment of the penal colony model of schooling, which suggests that Cameron’s insistence on competitive sport for primary school kids is another part of his government’s usual ‘make the prole schools more like public schools’ cargo cultism. Free schools and academies are, as ever, largely to be left alone, presumably on the understanding that privatised schools will automatically do better.

As the Observer also reminded us, any statement of Cameron’s on school sport rings somewhat hollow when funding for organising school sports under the School Sports Partnerships is being cut from £162m to just £9m next year. Extending the funding for Olympic sports is great, but what about the kids who have been inspired by the Olympics to take up a new sport, only to find it’s not possible? What about out of school sport? Labour wants a 10 year, cross-party national plan for school sport – this plan needs to ensure a variety of extracurricular exercise is accessible and affordable for all.

I’ll leave it there, because I’ve made several references to netball in this article and I really need to get to a therapist. In the spirit of the Olympics I might run some of the way there.