Having a nostalgic chat about school sports with some friends recently got me thinking: sports education and promotion for tweens and teens is crap.
In my opinion, I’ve always been outraged by the amount of compulsory hours per week of P.E. I had to do at Secondary school. Three hours of sport a week is irrelevant to the majority of pupils’ career aspirations and does not promote sports in their best light. Excessive compulsory hours of sport, (often in the rain with school bullies dominating) would no doubt put plenty of people off the whole sports shenanigans.
I think this is a shame. In light of the Olympics legacy, so far I haven't seen much in the way of promoting sports, except for Boris Johnson’s controversial outburst that school kids should do “2 compulsory hours a day” of P.E. Also the occasional BBC news reports on funding sports clubs. This is what we need more of– sports clubs! It generally makes sport feel more enjoyable than compulsory as you are choosing to take part in sports you like.
Although I did go to a “sports college” and there were quite a few after school clubs, I think considering this sports status, they definitely made an effort to ignore some sports, especially racket sports—my favourite. And this also applies to lessons; dominated by football, netball, and hockey. Considering we had 2 squash courts and I didn’t have a single squash lesson, this, in my opinion was very poor.
Sport should be about increasing confidence and I don’t think that can happen unless schools are more accepting of different sports. Making sport feel more about enjoyment rather than obligation would also make a huge difference to the way we view sports and most importantly, our bodies.
