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Sport and Physical Education

My Lords, like others, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Pendry on providing us with the opportunity to debate this important issue, in which he has taken a close interest and over which he has had a positive and powerful influence for many years. Much as I enjoy watching and celebrating the successes of our top teams and top sportsmen and sportswomen, my greater area of interest is in sport and participation in sport at the less exalted levels, where the money, the adulation and hero worshipping do not flow so readily but where the enthusiasm, commitment and dedication both of the participants and of those who coach and organise the activities, often in their own free time without financial reward, know no bounds. Such people need support and encouragement, including financial support, and I believe that the Government have done a great deal in this direction. Last year, I completed a parliamentary sports fellowship. The organisation with which I was particularly involved was Sport England. I was able to visit some of the projects in which it had played a major role with its partners in getting them up and running in different parts of the country. Sport England is concerned with the less glamorous side of the sporting scene—the grass-roots and community level of sports participation—although, through the support that it gives, a small number of highly talented individuals develop their skills to such a level that they come under the umbrella of UK Sport, the organisation geared to the needs of our top performers. Sport England is not just about financing investment in infrastructure and facilities, important though that is. It also plays a key role in ensuring that appropriately qualified staff, including coaches, are provided to enable and to encourage people of all ages and from all backgrounds to take up a physical or sporting activity. I want to mention some aspects of the work that Sport England is doing and has done with the younger generation. Sport England has been involved in the Government’s physical education and sport strategy for young people from its outset in April 2003. The Government provide funding. Sport England’s aim is to reduce the number of children dropping out of sport at age 16. One important way of doing that is through delivering the community and club element of the five-hour sport offer, to which my noble friend Lord Pendry referred. The original target in 2003 was to offer all five to 16 year-olds two hours of high-quality physical education and school sport a week within and beyond the school day. In the summer of last year, the Prime Minister announced that five to 16 year-olds would be offered up to five hours of sport a week, with 16 to 19 year-olds having three hours, because they do not do curriculum PE. He also announced an additional £100 million investment. Sport England’s investment increases from just over £8 million in 2007-08 to £23.1 million each year from 2008-09. Total government investment in school sport and the five-hour sport offer has been over £1 billion for the five years to March 2008. The take-up of the two-hour offer, which was the original objective in 2003, has risen from an estimated 25 per cent of five to 16 year-olds in 2002 to 86 per cent in 2007. The progress made has exceeded the target set in 2003, which was for 75 per cent of schoolchildren to be doing at least two hours of sport a week by 2006, rising to 85 per cent by 2008. That is not failure, as was suggested earlier, but success. As my noble friend Lord Pendry said, playing fields now have the best ever protection through government planning regulations and arrangements. Schools are not allowed to sell playing fields that they or their communities need for sport. More playing fields are now being created than lost. In its last annual review, which was for 2006-07, Sport England reported that the most recent 12-monthly figures then available showed that 62 brand-new playing fields had been created, a number that had grown for the second year running, and that only two had been completely lost. The percentage of children and young people participating in club sports has also risen, from 19 per cent in 2003-04 to 29 per cent in 2006-07, and the percentage of older pupils involved in sports volunteering, whether in mentoring, coaching or helping to organise activities, has risen from 9 per cent in 2003-04 to 17 per cent in 2006-07. As I saw, Sport England has been playing, and will continue to play, a leading role in creating more and stronger links between schools and sports clubs, a role that is vital if we are to reduce the figure of 25,000 16 year-olds who drop out of sport every year. Sport England also works to provide volunteering and leadership opportunities in sport by providing the training facilities to enable people, including young people, to take on that kind of role by developing their own skills and involvement in a range of activities and through that work to provide the encouragement and organisation to enable others to continue or begin their association with sport. Creating additional supply and demand within community sport and clubs is a further area of activity for Sport England. While providing the physical infrastructure is important, at least as important is providing resources for qualified staff to coach, train and manage so that existing facilities can be used and developed to maximum effect and benefit and so that activities can be extended. Sport England seeks to work through national sports governing bodies. I hope that the Government have stressed to all governing bodies that, working with Sport England, they have a responsibility for increasing participation rates in their sport within the community as a whole and that it will be unacceptable if they direct a disproportionate amount of their time, commitment and financial resources to the development and promotion of the top clubs and top sportsmen and sportswomen within their particular sport at the expense of increasing overall participation rates. I hope that financial and other resources from Sport England to national governing bodies will be conditional on their producing acceptable plans on how they intend to increase participation rates across the community, including among young people, women and black and minority ethnic groups. I hope that the Minister will feel able to say clearly and specifically that that is the Government’s position. Of course, some governing bodies are already doing good work in encouraging more involvement in their sport within the wider community. One such sport is cricket. ““Chance to Shine”” is the Cricket Foundation’s campaign to revive and develop competitive cricket in state schools and, in so doing, to achieve the wider community benefits that the impact on participants of involvement in team sports and well managed competition can bring. The campaign was launched three years ago with the objective of raising £25 million of private funding, which the National Sports Foundation, led by the Government and administered by Sport England, is committed to matching pound for pound. In 2005, Cricket Foundation research showed that less than 10 per cent of state schools offered pupils opportunities to take part in at least five organised matches per year. The aim is to establish, over 10 years, a sustainable cricket culture within at least one-third of all state schools in England and Wales and in the process to reach some 2 million young people, both boys and girls. I am sure that this is the kind of sports project that the Government are seeking to encourage and develop across a broad front. Of course, sport is not just about young people. Half the adult population—those of 16 years of age or older—do not participate in sport on a regular basis. The ambition of Sport England is to get 2 million people doing more sport by 2012. The target level of sports activity is 30 minutes at least three times a week. Twenty-one per cent of adults currently achieve that target and 28 per cent do sport between one and three times a week. When we break down the 21 per cent of adults who currently achieve the target, the figure is just over 19 per cent from black and minority ethnic groups, 9.5 per cent of those with a limiting disability, just over 15 per cent of those from lower socio-economic groups and 18.5 per cent of females. Improving those figures needs resources. In 2006-07, Sport England, financed by National Lottery and Exchequer funding, invested in a range of areas including: £64 million into the 38 national sports governing bodies; just over £4 million into school-club links to connect schools, sports clubs and children; some £38 million as part of a five-year programme to improve sports clubs’ organisation and facilities, including more coaching staff, to further raise the skills, particularly of those with identified potential, at those clubs; over £10 million on a programme launched in 2005 that has already exceeded its objective by training and providing over 3,300 community sport coaches working locally running after-school sessions and developing club sport; over £14 million capital investment in community club development projects; and £4 million in encouraging teenagers to play a variety of volunteering roles in sport, including managing events and facilities and running clubs, as well as taking on assistant coaching and refereeing roles. Also in 2006-07, nearly £17 million from National Lottery funding went into over 230 regional sports projects and over £9 million went into the 49 county sports partnerships to help the delivery of sport within counties. All these areas of activity, like the work being done to increase the involvement in sport of young people, receive very little publicity, with very little credit given for the many thousands of individuals, the organisations such as Sport England and local government that, with government and lottery funding, are enabling real progress to be made. Taking part in sport and physical activity not only offers a purposeful pursuit and keeps people healthy, but can help to develop leadership and teamwork skills, build confidence and provide participants with a real sense of achievement. I appreciate that a balance has to be drawn between, on the one hand, investing to meet the needs of our potential and actual top sportsmen and sportswomen and the stimulus and enjoyment that their achievements can provide to many others and, on the other, the benefits, not only to the millions of individuals concerned but also to the community as a whole, of investing to encourage and facilitate an increase in sporting and physical activity among the population as a whole. It is not an either/or situation. However, money spent on grass-roots community sport and physical activity is money well spent, as this Government have recognised through the resources that they have provided. I hope that the Minister will, as well as responding to the specific points that I have raised, be able to indicate how the Government intend to make still further progress in developing and facilitating involvement and participation at the less exalted and less publicised levels of the sports pyramid and in so doing provide further encouragement to those many thousands of individuals and organisations that work so hard and contribute so much in this field.