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Mr. Andy Reed (Loughborough) (Lab/Co-op): I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak, given that I managed to secure an Adjournment debate on the same subject only a few weeks ago, which shows how vital the issue is. Hon. Members wanted our élite athletes to do well in Athens and want them to do well in Beijing—and in London in 2012—but that will not happen unless we begin to generate support for the next group of athletes. Many of those who will compete in Beijing or in London in 2012 are still at school. We still need talent identification to ensure that we provide the right support for athletes at places such as Loughborough so that they are ready to win medals next time around.

However, mass participation is as crucial as picking the best to become élite athletes. For the majority of us, such participation is vital not only at school but throughout life. We have already heard many examples of the problems of obesity and antisocial behaviour. Sport can tackle that. It has enormous potential to do so much good in this country, yet, as hon. Members have said, we have missed the opportunity.

Sport has never spoken with a single voice. It has been pushed aside by the arts or other organisations. It is now time for hon. Members who are passionate about sport to convince others in Whitehall and our colleagues who are not present that sport has a vital role to play. We shall do that by building on our current position.

There is a mish-mash of initiatives and money is coming in. Although it is great that so much is going on, we have had to act in that way because of our starting point in 1997. We inherited a poor picture. I would not have designed the current position, but that is where we are. How can we make it succeed and how can we progress?

First, we must ensure that teachers have enough experience and time in their initial teacher training to do the basics at primary school. The school-club link is vital for the future. I still kick around—and sometimes catch—a rugby ball on a Saturday afternoon. I play at my local community college, where I have played since I was 18 and at school. I would never have gone away and joined another club. That is most people's experience. If they do not play school sport and do not have the club link, they drift away at 18. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey) highlighted a specific problem, especially among girls, of people who drift off much earlier. The drop-off rate at the age of 13 or 14 is significant.

As Professor Gratton stated in a recent article, if people stop participating by the age of 16, it is much harder to get them to return to the clubs later in life. They do not have the experience or the skills, and returning is a daunting prospect. We need to develop the club link, and that means support for the clubs.

My club struggles. We have a small committee of people and willing players, but giving up time to do the coaching is difficult. Modernisation and work with national governing bodies is vital to ensure that the coaches, who are fit for the purpose, are in the right place at the right time. It is harder now, because in our day we had cricket and athletics during the summer and football during the winter. Now, however, there is a much greater choice of sports, so the links need to be
 
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made not only with the traditional clubs; they need to go much wider. Girls, in particular, have a much greater requirement in this regard. Our talks with the Football Association earlier this year showed how many girls want to play football, for example, yet their chances of doing so at school are limited. The FA is doing a lot of work on this, but the Department for Education and Skills needs to work with it to ensure that girls get that choice.

I got myself into a bit of trouble following our last debate on these issues, when a local newspaper misquoted me. I had cited an example from the Youth Sport Trust's Nike report, which said that one of the reasons girls were put off sport was that they found it uncool and too sweaty. As hon. Members can imagine, the media had great fun with that, saying that I was accusing all girls of thinking that they were too sweaty. Unfortunately, my Tory opponent jumped on the bandwagon and made a complete fool of herself on the same issue, without even trying to get the facts. We have to recognise, however, that such barriers might exist.

Mr. Doug Henderson: My hon. Friend reminds me of an important point that I meant to make. A survey conducted by Sport England showed that about two thirds of young women would rather go dancing than participate in any other sport. Does my hon. Friend agree that dancing is a very valid activity that should be included in any fitness programme?

Mr. Reed: Yes, I was about to come to that. We need a wide variety of sports. A lot of girls want to play football, although many are still happy to play traditional sports such as netball or hockey. There is, however, a vast variety of sports out there competing for their attention—basketball, dance and aerobics, for example—and they should all be available.

With regard to facilities such as changing rooms, many people have now had experience of private clubs and find school facilities inadequate for many of the activities that have been mentioned. That brings me to one of my real bugbears. I really feel passionate about the use of school sports facilities and the idea that we should be able to use them 24/7. We have all stood here and agreed on that in numerous debates, and the Department knows that we all agree on it, yet when I go back to the school where I play rugby every Saturday afternoon, we are the only ones using the facilities there. There are 10 pitches, and there must be 12 or 13 tennis courts, yet we are the only group using the facilities every weekend. It cannot be rocket science for us to put in place a plan to ensure that this improves.

Sport England is looking at a multi-club approach to providing sport across the communities. Most communities have some form of educational facility. When we look across the water to France, we see the idea of the community stade—which I think most Members quite like—in which lots of clubs use the same facilities. They share the shower and changing facilities, and there are lots of athletics tracks, football pitches and other amenities available. We could do that in the schools that exist in almost every community here. We do not need to reinvent clubs up and down the country. In some cases, it would be difficult, but we just need to take the idea one step further. We need to ensure that
 
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there is someone responsible for the programme in each location, working not in isolation with the educational facility but with the county sports partnerships to ensure that facilities are available for all children as near as possible to their homes. We are not that far away from achieving that. Many of the facilities are there, but they are underused at the moment.

I want to refer briefly to the number of initiatives being undertaken. I recall that, when I became chair of East Midlands Sport, we were in charge of 57 initiatives relating to distributing lottery money, Sport England programmes and other things. Fortunately, that number has been reduced, and Sport England now takes a much more strategic approach. My fear, however, is that we are still generating more initiatives. I have a list of some of them here, which includes the sports colleges, the co-ordinators, the step into sport programme, and club links. Each of these is great on its own, but we have all been in head teachers' offices when they have shown us how much has come in from the Department that week. We need to consolidate many of those initiatives in order to get sport back into schools and get it going.

I take a slightly different view from that of my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Mr. Wyatt) on the role of the BBC. The coverage of the Olympics this year was a fine example of how good the BBC can be. That and other facilities such as its website and the sports coaching programmes in which it is involved offer a fine example of why we need to keep as much sport as possible on terrestrial television, so that as many people as possible get to see their sporting heroes. I have not been able to watch a premiership rugby game for several years, because coverage has been sidelined and tucked away on Sky. I am unwilling to pay the £40 a month extra it would cost me to watch a few games. I do not know how many other people are missing out on watching their sporting heroes in cricket, rugby, football and other sports. Without those national sporting heroes, our children do not have an incentive to get out and play sport. I urge those responsible to ensure that our sporting heroes are not seen only on television, but go around schools to encourage the sportspeople of the future.

I would say to my hon. Friend the Minister, "A lot done, a little way to go; three hours would be better; not 85 per cent., but 100 per cent.; and 2010. Get on with it."

5.50 pm

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills (Mr. Stephen Twigg): That is quite a challenge. We have had 11 contributions to the debate and I shall do my best to do justice to each of them. I will not be able to respond to every point raised, but I shall happily respond to specific points that I cannot cover now in writing to hon. Members.

I welcome the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson) to his new position on the Front Bench. We have had a constructive debate. I also wish to apologise to the House on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Minister for Sport and Tourism, who is away on Government business; otherwise, he would certainly have been with us here today.

Several hon. Members talked about how we can ensure that sport is at the heart of the mission to educate. That is a significant challenge and it sits well
 
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with the broader debate about schools policy. I shall return to that point when I answer the challenges posed by the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent.

My hon. Friends the Members for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Mr. Wyatt) and for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey) and the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) asked how we can recognise sport and physical activity as being on a par with some of the academic and other achievements of a school. We have consulted people in education and beyond about school profiles, whereby we would not simply define a school's achievement according to academic outcomes, tests and examination results but more broadly according to its performance in sport, the arts and citizenship. Some of the points raised today are relevant to that idea in general. They are also relevant to a consultation that is under way at the moment on how we can build on the successes of the active mark and the sports mark, perhaps through the development of a new sports partnership mark. I encourage hon. Members to participate in that consultation, which will run for another two and a half months, and to engage with schools, clubs and young people in their constituencies on the subject.

Almost all hon. Members made the point that two hours is a minimum. Some powerful points were made by Members on both sides of the House about the entitlement to much more than two hours. I would like to think of the two hours as a minimum. I have heard what has been said about an increase to three hours, but more important is a broader entitlement for those who want to do much more. That will be necessary if we are to achieve all the different aims we have.

My hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Mr. Reed) made the point that the extended—or 24/7, as he put it—school idea is one that has been around for some time. Its time has now come, not only for sport and physical activity, but more broadly. We have an incredible opportunity over the next 10 to 15 years in our secondary schools, through the building schools for the future programme, to provide the best possible facilities right across the curriculum. Facilities for sport and physical education must be a part of that.

I shall try to address the five points that the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent put to me, many of which were reinforced by points made in the rest of the debate. The hon. Gentleman referred to the decline in the teaching of rugby and cricket in schools. The survey that we both mentioned from earlier this year showed that 97 per cent. of schools provided football, unsurprisingly, but that 86 per cent. provided cricket, 67 per cent. provided rugby union and 12 per cent. provided rugby league. I am not saying that those figures are good enough, but they demonstrate what a majority of the state schools surveyed are doing and the difference that the school sport partnerships can make.

The hon. Gentleman asked about clubs and schools. The links between clubs and schools are vital. Through the school sport partnerships, about one in five young people participate in high-quality club activity, which is a big step in the right direction, although we clearly need to do much more. Other programmes are relevant to
 
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those links. I was interested in what my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey said about Charlton, as there are some extremely good examples in football, rugby and other sports of links that enhance not only sporting and physical achievement but academic achievement.

I referred to playing for success. Arsenal's Double Club makes a big difference in London, working with some of the most challenging inner-London schools in Islington and Tower Hamlets. It has a remarkable and proven record of enhancing literacy, numeracy and other basic skills. That is of great importance.

There has been contention about how much of the lottery money has actually been spent, so I am pleased to be able to assure the House that as of 5 October grants totalling £446 million have been awarded. That means that 2,000 new facilities have been given the green light; 127 are already completed and open, and a further 595 are on site. It is fair to say that the money was not spent quickly, but I would rather we spent it well than spent it quickly. I am confident that the programme is on course and that the vast majority of projects will be completed between this year and 2006, as was always envisaged.

Playing fields were mentioned several times during the debate. With the recent announcement to which I referred in my opening remarks, we seek to strengthen the available guidance and protection. In the last two years, 90 per cent. of the approved planning applications relating to playing fields have led to the provision of better sport facilities, or have left sport facilities unaffected. Over that two-year period, the approved planning applications for playing fields have led to an investment of almost £540 million in new sport facilities. We have allowed the loss of only 148 school playing field areas since 1997, 60 of which were at schools that were closing. In all cases, the proceeds were used to provide better sport or educational facilities for schools—most of them for sport. I shall come to the specific points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) in a moment.

Voluntary organisations, such as the National Playing Fields Association and the Central Council of Physical Recreation, raised serious concerns about the number of playing fields that were sold in the 1980s and early 1990s. That is why we legislated and, more recently, acted as I described to strengthen the follow-up from the legislation.

The fourth point made by the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent was about red tape, which poses a serious challenge. Work force reform is an opportunity for other professionals to go into the classroom and support good sport education. The implementation review unit is at the heart of the Department for Education and Skills to ensure that we minimise unnecessary bureaucracy and the burdens it can bring for schools. I shall write to the hon. Gentleman about his fifth point on legal protection.

In the remaining minute and a half, I shall pay tribute to the other speeches in the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Mr. Truswell) and the hon. Member for Colchester, who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, made powerful points about the importance of enjoyment as well as excellence in education. That is certainly reflected in developing policy, not simply on sport and physical education but more broadly.
 
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My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, North (Mr. Henderson) made an interesting suggestion about a deputy head having specific responsibility to lead on matters of sport. I shall discuss that further in the Department and with colleagues.

The hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) paid tribute to the two specialist schools in her constituency. I am happy to associate myself with her remarks.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw invited me to meet objectors to a proposal. I shall be happy to meet him and some of his constituents to discuss that, but for reasons of balance I shall then have to meet people who hold the opposing point of view.

The hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) made a thoughtful speech, with which everyone in the House could agree. I have already responded to several of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey.

My hon. Friends the Members for Leigh (Andy Burnham), for West Bromwich, West and for Loughborough are closely associated with the issue and raised significant points. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich, West asked how we can ensure that physical fitness is at the heart of what schools do. I would like—

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