More like the ugly sisters…
The status of physical education in schools needs a “radical shake-up” and it should be valued in the same way as core academics subjects, a report says.
A study by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on a Fit and Healthy Childhood says PE has for too long been the “Cinderella subject” in UK schools.
The group recommends a personalised PE programme for each individual child.
It’s at moments such as this, I am content to no longer be a child. PE was hardly a Cinderella subject when I was at school. It was thrust in our faces for two periods twice a week. Those two periods were filled with dread – having to brave the freezing cold in shorts and lightweight shirt to chase about after a sodding ball. Which I didn’t.
The study says girls in particular can be put off by a focus on competitive sports and “run the risk of becoming disenfranchised from physical activity”.
And of course, that never happens to boys? Oh, that’s right, it did. I learned a lifelong loathing of competitive team sports due to having to endure them twice a week throughout my school years. That worked well… As for personalised activities, I had that sorted. Long cycle rides at the weekends and when on holiday along with riding to and from school. Not to mention Judo and Archery. I didn’t need the state to do that for me. My niece, incidentally, has taken up Judo of her own volition and she is doing rather well. She didn’t need the state to sort it out for her either. She simply advised her mother that she would like to do it and she had all the details from a poster – she’s seven and I have high hopes for her cussedness.
“This could be addressed by ensuring that PE lessons offer a wider type of physical activity, to cater for different tastes and abilities,” it says.
So if a child turns up with a recurve bow and quiver full of arrows, that will be welcomed will it? The best physical activities are those chosen by the individual and pursued by them in their own time. School should have nothing to do with it. There is nothing so utterly misery making than enforced games. It was, in part, why I detested school so much. It is very much why I revile with a vengeance the inanity that is football.
Oh you are preaching to the converted here LR. The polies come out with this kind of crap about every five years or so it seems. My solution would be to find out which politicians were in favour and to then subject the lot of them to the five years of this kind of crap that we had to endure.
Something that has entered my field of awareness only recently, is the piss poor standard of coaching that was provided at school. This has come to my attention due to my getting involved in doing triathlons and finding my swimming ability somewhat wanting. As a result I have had to get myself some proper coaching. I wasn’t aware just how technical swimming front crawl is. We had swimming lessons at school but at no time was I ever instructed on how to swim properly.
I know one thing which still goes on and was endemic in PE when I was at school fifty years ago – if your physique doesn’t fit you don’t matter. If you’re good at team games you’re IN.
It seems to be some kind of inbuilt personality trait that inclines people toward or away from team games. Both kinds of people exist but, in the world of school sports only one kind is ever catered for. I think that PE teachers could learn something from the way that the Saturday Parkruns are organised. It doesn’t matter how rubbish you are, your times are recorded and presented online with a documented history. You can follow your progress as you improve, achieving better times and working your way higher up the pecking order. Always last pick for team sports at school, at the age of 56 I got my 5K Parkrun down to 22 minutes and into the top 50 out of three hundred runners.
I remember my fiery little Welsh gym/games master saying to me over 50 years ago, “Treen, if you put half as much effort into gym as you put into trying to avoid it, you might stand a chance of being half decent.”
My thoughts were “Sod that! Why take the risk?”
Indeed.
You had it cushy LR. For Gym class we didn’t even have the thin shirt, just shorts and plimsolls, and a two flight descent from the changing room (bloody freezing!) Gym was boring mainly, all that target training and that, but I was good at sports. Basketball, volleyball etc and very good at climbing ropes. I used to wrap the rope around my thigh and lock it off with the other foot. It took no effort at all. I even took a book up with me one time and the PE master had a screaming fit. Tee Hee.
But like I said I was good at sports, we did Rugby in the winter and Cricket in the summer at Cathays High, until one Terry Yorath, a couple of years older than me, persuaded our headmaster that the weedy kids couldn’t really play Rugby, so why not get Soccer introduced to give them something to do. It was a cunning plan of course… he was Soccer crazy.
It’s just about keeping fit after all, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of competition. Show me a person who doesn’t want to win and I’ll show you an idiot.
As a Judoki I was aiming to beat my opponent, but with archery, I was only interested in improving my personal score. With cycling, it was always and still is, a pleasure pursuit. I have no interest in competition and winning and losing is irrelevant to me.
At risk of sounding like the ‘Old Yorkshire Men’ of Monty Python fame: You had plimsolls?
We had to change in temporary accommodation filled with builders’ dust and discarded milk bottles and their mouldy contents then run along a corridor open to the weather and whose floor was covered in the dirt of 700 pairs of outside shoes before reaching the gym.
Then we made the same trip back to be forced, Belsen style, through a one-way communal shower, often with cold water!
Apart from that I quite liked gymnastics and the tea after cold, wet, muddy Saturday Rugby was fantastic!
School hell would have been poetry and French, I think!
I have a love of poetry and French, but not from school
Ugh! School games lessons were the pits, weren’t they? I was quite good at some of them (cross-country running and long jump) but lousy at others (team games) and yet I still despised ALL of them. So much for “enjoying things you are good at.” Yeh, right. Although I regularly came in the top three in cross-country sessions for my year, once I left school I swore I’d never take part in any kind of running race (or organised running activity) ever again, because I hated it so much. And I haven’t. I’ve done plenty of different types of exercise since leaving school – but have studiously avoided any of the ones which were included in PE classes. So if I’m anything to go by, this daft initiative will simply put even more kids off even more types of sport!