Young Healthwatch volunteer, George, shares his views on the national plan for sport, health and wellbeing…

In December last year, the National Plan for Sport and Recreation Committee, a House of Lords Select Committee, published a report on the “stagnating activity levels” that is observed across all demographics in our population. The report cites the Covid-19 pandemic as having a notable impact in activity levels, pointing out a visible decline since mid-March of 2020. One survey conducted considers people who do less than 30 minutes of exercise per week ‘inactive’.

The report covers a lot of issues in sport. Most relevant to young people, it looks specifically at physical education in schools. The committee theorised that how young people are introduced to sport is directly related to how ‘sporty’ they are in later life. Consequently, the report suggests that PE be promoted by the Department for Education to ‘core subject’ status, alongside English, Maths and Science. It is worth noting it is currently a ‘foundation subject’.

Reading this got me thinking about my experience of PE at school. At my school, there was a mandatory 5 hours per fortnight of it, and I strongly disliked all 5 of them. Though I am definitely not alone in this, there are equally as many who love the subject. I don’t deny that it’s a very important subject at school, but I think the report above missed the mark when diagnosing why PE lessons are ineffective.

I have always been confused about the focus of the subject—does it exist as an opportunity for exercise? If so, why is so much time spent messing around trying to kick, throw and catch things? For me, this is the first problem. There is no point forcing people to do more PE when there is something fundamentally wrong with the way the subject works in the first place. If people are so serious about exercise, then why is so much time wasted doing activities rooted in skill? For those who aren’t skilled (like me) the entire ‘lesson’ is pointless.

I wouldn’t mind this so much if the teachers tried to help me and others improve. Instead it appears that the lesson exists to benefit an elite few, while the rest of us are just tagging along meaninglessly. The teachers seemingly had no interest in helping us get better. I wouldn’t even describe it as teaching, it’s more of supervision.

As well as this, some people describe being humiliated in lessons for not being as good at PE as their classmates. Though I have not personally experienced this sort of thing, I can easily see why people are ashamed of their abilities.

So, in my experience, instead of making people do more PE, we need to change how the subject is taught. The lessons that I had convinced me not to exercise, and I think that these problems are the ones that should be addressed if people want to change how exercise is taught at school.