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Olympic Legacy

I will give way to my hon. Friends in a moment. We are providing just such an introduction. The steps taken to put school sport back on its feet have been mentioned; in the past decade, £4 billion has been invested in school, community and elite sport, and in the past five years more than £1.5 billion has gone to physical education and school sport alone. We are seeing the results. Let us look at the headline statistics from the school sport survey, published just two weeks ago. Some 90 per cent. of pupils now participate in at least two hours a week of high-quality PE and sport; only a quarter of pupils did so in 2002. Competitive sport is on the increase. Some 66 per cent. of pupils are involved in intra-school competitive activities, which is up from 58 per cent. last year. Some 41 per cent. of pupils are involved in inter-school competition—up from 35 per cent. last year. On average, each school offers 17.5 sports —up from 14.5 in 2003-04. To answer the previous point about school-club links, I should say that 32 per cent. of pupils participated in a local club linked to their school, up from 19 per cent. in 2004. Forget the exchanges that we have had—those are the facts. School sport is back on its feet, and I am incredibly proud of those statistics.