Can we trust state schools to spend the money or time allocated to compulsory school sport properly?

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Competitive school sport should be compulsory, says David Cameron.  A lot of people agree with his post-Olympic glow sentiments. Who wouldn’t?

In the wake of British Olympic success just about everyone is leaping on this particular band wagon, from the former Sports Minister Richard Cayborn to Jessica Ennis’s old PE teacher.

Prof Laura McAllister, chair of Sport Wales, ex-Wales international footballer and a member of the UK Sport board, has asked for nothing less than five to six hours of sport a week to develop the next generation of Olympics performers.

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But none has been more eager than Boris Johnson and David Cameron to vie for gold in this new compulsory sport relay.

Team Cameron promises a billion to back their plan for competitive sports participation to become a compulsory national curriculum requirement.

Not to be outdone, Boris’s aspiration is for every one of the nation’s schoolchildren to get what he got – every afternoon out competing on the playing fields of Eton.

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How he’d replicate Eton’s timetable that allows for this across the State School system he has not said. The compulsory return to lessons for all boys from 4.30 to 6.30pm, and boys dutifully behind their desks every Saturday morning from 9am to 1pm, could prove a challenge with the teachers’ unions.

But unlike Dave, and indeed Michael Gove, Boris has not had to defend the gross ‘act of vandalism’, as Richard Cayborn described it on the BBC today, that the Coalition engaged in when they repealed Labour’s 2 hours a week of compulsory sport for each child.

It was, David Cameron said, a 'piece of pointless Whitehall box-ticking'.  Many schools were meeting the target, he went on, 'by doing things like Indian dance or whatever'.

Of course he was absolutely right. It was yet another example of the unintended consequences of central targets.

For what did Labour’s billions backing this edict add up to?

The lamentable outcome has been only 50% of school children participating in any sort of competitive sport at all.

Nick Wood revealed on this page just last week that it is even worse than this. The Education Department's own figures showed, he said, that: 'Even after Labour's extra £2 billion for all levels and kinds of sport, 8 million of our 10 million school-age children still played no competitive sport against other schools.'

But instead of sticking to his guns, remaining true to his convictions and facing his critics down, what has Mr Cameron done but the proverbial U-turn, shot from the hip and promised a new decree, placing his trust in the schools to co-operate properly?

As he knows full well, getting schools (and kids) to comply is neither about money nor edicts, whatever plaudits these may win him. It is about attitude, values, energy and commitment.

Team sports failure is not just about schools’ 'bureaucratic and anti-risk' culture, as he now says. Nor is it just about the selling off of playing fields. The bottom line is schools’ and teachers’ downright hostility to the very notion of competition. 

Eight million of our 10 million school-age children still play no competitive sport against other schools

Politically correct views about sport permeate the Department of Education downwards through to the teachers’ unions and, astonishingly, through to some of our leading sports heroes and ambassadors.

Even Sir Steve Redgrave – the handler of the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony no less – seemed to back track on competitive sport in an interview on Sunday. He volunteered his concern for the 'number of people who don’t like competitive sport'.

The liberal left establishment backlash had already begun, boding badly for the combined Cameron/Johnson aspiration. Times journalist Matthew Parris and Phil Collins (Tony Blair’s former speech writer) were quick to attack the notion.

Parris, like Redgrave, demanded we remember the millions of children who, like him, loathe team games and are made miserable by them.

Even Olympian Sir Steve Redgrave observed that some children 'don't like' competitive sport

But we have never forgotten them and that of course is the problem.

Collins attacked all team sport as exclusive. Playing competitive sport for a school was 'intrinsically exclusive', he declared. It was 'perfectly sensible to have lots of other physical activities for children who loathed PE', reflecting the depth of his ignorance of sport.

This, though, is exactly the cop out that has dominated school culture for the last 30 years and more. It is why only two days of primary school teachers’ training is dedicated to sport.

It is why we cannot rely on schools or teachers to step up to the plate. They will demand the ‘extra support’, the Youth Sport Trust chair Baroness Sue Campbell, already tells us they need. Really?

Money will always be the excuse.

Typically the National Association of Head Teachers has called for further investment in a wide range of school sports, yet says the Government should not seek to dictate the specific games that are played. The message of the Olympic Games, it said, should be diversity.

So the question remains: just how will the schools fill those compulsory hours, how will they spend their new resources?

We know that in the past the National Union of Teachers and the other main teaching union, NASUWT, sabotaged sport in school by instructing its members not to co-operate with extracurricular activities.

As Graham Hinds, a Conservative member of the education select committee, said after the Olympics: 'If everyone in Team GB worked to rule like the NASUWT we would have fewer medals than Australia.'

David Cameron should take note. He needs a better strategy than compulsion to shame the schools into cooperating with competition.