Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
12 JUNE 2003
MR MIKE
ASH, MS
DANILA ARMSTRONG,
MS IMOGEN
SHARP, MS
PATRICIA HAYES,
MR ALEC
MCGIVAN
AND MS
MELA WATTS
Q100 Dr Naysmith: There is probably
even less that links it to the incidence of obesity.
Ms Watts: Yes, I would imagine
so.
Q101 John Austin: We have addressed
the issue of school playing fields, but what we have seen is a
tremendous loss of private playing fields which either were accessible
to the community or had the potential to be accessible to the
community. I suspect that is one for the Office of the Deputy
Prime Minister: what is being done to arrest the decline in the
availability of grass playing fields generally?
Mr Ash: Since 1998 we have had
a direction which requires local authorities to consult Sport
England on proposals for development of playing fields, and if
there is a maintained objection, those proposals are referred
to the Deputy Prime Minister for consideration for calling-in
for his own decision. So we have a mechanism which allows, in
the case of those contentious cases where Sport England maintains
its objection, for a public inquiry if necessary. The national
policy on planning for open space, sport and recreation, which
was put into place this time last year, has very strong statements
in it about local authorities. To quote, it says, "Existing
open space, sports and recreational buildings and land should
not be built on unless an assessment has been undertaken which
has clearly shown the open space, buildings or land as being surplus
to requirements." The guidance requires local authorities,
in producing their development plans, to do an assessment of need
and to do an audit of facilities, and to plan appropriately in
those circumstances.
Q102 John Austin: One issue is a
planning issue, but even if it is solved in that respect, there
is the resource issue of taking over these grounds. There is no
systematic availability of funding to save and rescue playing
fields which are under threat. That is left down to the voluntary
sector.
Mr Ash: And the local authority
under its various powers. It has the well-being power, which is
a pretty wide power. It can take action in support of its local
community. But there is clearly a funding issue for them. It will
be a very broad block of expenditure which this will form part
of. What priority will be given locally to that is a matter for
the local authority.
Q103 Sandra Gidley: I want to pick
up on some comments made by Andy Burnham. He quoted the statistic
of a third of children having over two hours of exercise. You
mentioned the National Curriculum being compulsory. I am a little
older than Andy, but I seem to recall a couple of years after
the National Curriculum was introduced that there was quite a
bit of fuss about the fact that on average children were receiving
less physical education because of the other demands of the National
Curriculum. Would you care to comment on that?
Ms Watts: You are obviously going
back to 1990 and the early Nineties, when the National Curriculum
was first introduced. There were general concerns when the National
Curriculum was introduced, very well documented, very well publicised,
that actually there was just too much in there. It was not only
physical education that was being squeezed, but quite a lot of
other things as well. That was exactly why there was a review
of the National Curriculum, and it was slimmed down in terms of
the statutory content quite dramatically.
Q104 Sandra Gidley: Has there been
a change over that time? Has that been monitored, the average
amount of exercise children have been having in the school setting,
before 1999, post introduction of the National Curriculum, and
now?
Ms Watts: The Department does
not collect specific data on the amount of time that each school
allocates to each individual subject. That would be quite an excessive
burden on the schools. But the sort of evidence that comes through
Ofsted—is that schools are increasingly able to offer a
genuinely broad and balanced curriculum, that gives youngsters
a rounded experience of all the subjects.
Q105 Sandra Gidley: There was clearly
a bit of a gender divide on the Committee when we were talking
about competitive sport. With competitive sport, people often
refer to team games, which is something I think girls in particular
may not like, but they may like the competitive aspect of racquet
sports, which are not really very often available in schools to
the extent that football, netball, hockey and other traditional
sports are. Are there any plans to increase the range of sports
available?
Ms Watts: You are absolutely right,
simply because racquet sports take up very much more space for
less pupils, and the aspiration in terms of the investment through
NOF and the emphasis on the School Sport Programme is actually
to encourage schools to offer a range of sports so that all young
people can find something that is right for them. It may be that
that is not always possible to do between the hours of 9 and 3.30,
but the added emphasis on after-school activities, lunchtime activities,
might be the place to start investigating those kinds of opportunities.
Schools may choose to use their physical education curriculum
time during the school day, rather than to play full competitive
sport, to focus on skills that are replicable and useable across
a range of sports.
Q106 Sandra Gidley: This is something
I feel quite strongly about. I am talking now about the child
who is overweight and how you get them to be enthusiastic about
sport. We can all recall that when teams were chosen, nobody wanted
the fat child, and on sports days the ritual humiliation; every
child was forced to do it, and it was the overweight children
who did not perform well, got upset, and that gives them a very
negative view of sport. It is something they then withdraw from,
and they are the very children we should be encouraging. Is the
Department addressing that problem in any way at all?
Ms Watts: Yes, it is, as part
of the School Sport Programme. Taking your point specifically
about sports days, the traditional sports days 10 or 20 years
ago were very much athletics-dominated, so very much personal
performance and participation, and you were out there to win.
What happens more and more now are festivals of sport, that certainly
have a competitive element to them, but are far more participative
in their nature: young people are encouraged to officiate and
to support some of their colleagues, and it is not always athletics-based;
perhaps it is a mini-football tournament, things like that, to
encourage children who might not want to run the 100 metres to
participate in that kind of activity. That is the real thrust
of the School Sport Co-ordinator Programme, to involve everybody
in the school, to get them interested, perhaps in officiating,
perhaps in running the team, so that they start to become interested
in what they are doing, hopefully with a view to them then participating.
Q107 Sandra Gidley: Is this part
of the education process of physical education teachers, or individual
school teachers? I am not quite sure how they have worked out
how to do this. What guidance is available, or is it just a trend?
Ms Watts: For physical education
teachers, in terms of curriculum time, there is a fundamental
element of the National Curriculum that is about inclusion, and
that means inclusion of children with special educational needs,
but it also means inclusion of children who are almost excluding
themselves, because they are not interested or they are embarrassed,
as you say. So part of the fundamental training of teachers is
how to take an inclusive approach, whatever subject they happen
to be teaching, to bring children in in a comfortable way. But
on top of that, a key feature of the School Sport Co-ordinator
programme is involving all children and yong people in some sort
of activity.
Q108 Sandra Gidley: If we could move
to the health education aspect, you said earlier that the key
approaches concerned education re choices and focus of activity
so that young people were given the information they needed. What
I am not clear about is how that is practically delivered in school.
Which teacher, for example, would be delivering that part of the
curriculum? I know you do not have information on how much time
is devoted to it, but it seems to me that it must be a very small
part of the curriculum.
Ms Watts: It is not a single teacher.
Health education is delivered in a variety of ways and through
a variety of subjects, if we think about secondary education.
Science certainly tackles some of the issues underpinning health
education and healthy eating, in terms of understanding the different
food products in your diet, understanding about metabolism, understanding
thet balance between intake and energy output. Food Technology
would be covered through the Design and Technology part of the
National Curriculum, and that would be about food hygiene, food
preparation, and a range of issues around there. On top of that,
we also have personal, social and health education, the non-statutory
framework, which covers the range of issues around food and healthy
eating but actually goes much broader than that, and also talks
about healthy living, healthy lifestyles, balanced diet, making
informed choices, and goes into that area. So it is not a question
of half an hour for your bit of health education a term. It is
actually something that is taken right across the curriculum,
and is often the focus, through the Healthy Schools Programme,
of a whole-school approach to these issues.
Q109 Sandra Gidley: What about body
shape, body image? Is that addressed in any way?
Ms Watts: It is. The relationship
between body image, self-esteem and diet is specifically covered
in the PSHE framework at Key Stage 4.
Q110 John Austin: What programmes
are there on what I would call basic life skills? Maybe things
are improving, but let me tell you a true story. Parents do the
shopping at the supermarket, stock the refrigerator, son in his
early 20s comes home, complains there is no food in the house,
is directed to the refrigerator and says, "That's not food;
that's ingredients." Do you think we perhaps lost something
in terms of basic cooking skills when we lost Home Economics?
Ms Watts: It is important to remember
that Home Economics is still a choice at GCSE level. It is still
quite possible to take Home Economics at that level. At the other
end of the spectrum, Food Technology is a compulsory part of the
primary curriculum, at both Key Stage 1 and 2, and Key Stage 3
pupils have the choice to take either Food Technology or Textiles,
but about 90% of schools offer both. So children and young people
have a reasonable exposure to Food Technology up to the age of
14. I would argue that the sorts of lessons that are learned through
healthy eating and through the PSHE framework, and health education
more generally, should help to enhance the ability and understanding
of the individual you talk about of what combination of ingredients
will make for both a pleasant and reasonably balanced meal.
Q111 John Austin: So you would not
share my view that most young people leave school without basic
cooking skills?
Ms Watts: Most young people certainly
do not leave school with a Home Economics GCSE. As I say, I think
there are a range of opportunities in schools to tackle that.
Q112 John Austin: Do you think in
health education and the healthy eating programme enough account
is taken of what I would say is a change in eating habits, from
a three meals a day to a grazing culture? Certainly most of the
young people I meet tend to graze all day, and that does seem
to be a change in lifestyle.
Ms Watts: I think that is a change
in lifestyle, but there are so many others, are there not? We
all live a very much more sedentary lifestyle than perhaps we
did 20 years ago, and probably a more stressful lifestyle than
we did 20 years ago. That whole range of issues is picked up through
the PSHE framework from 5-16.
Q113 John Austin: That makes it more
important, does it not, to increase the availability of exercise
and physical recreation in school, given that the exercise that
my generation had out of school, by walking to and from school,
which does not seem to happen now, and having a bomb site on every
street corner which was our own adventure playground, has been
replaced by the computer and the Gameboy? Does there not have
to be an even greater imperative on the schools to provide more
options for physical exercise and recreation?
Ms Watts: Yes, and I think that
is exactly what we are doing through the investment in the School
Sport Programme.
Q114 Chairman: Can I ask a question
of our health colleagues before we move on to marketing and wider
issues related to marketing? One of the surprises I got when talking
to head teachers recently was that I had assumed, perhaps wrongly,
that there was far more monitoring of the development and health
of young people and children than there actually is. One of the
issues I mentioned earlier on in respect of the head teacher I
quoted was anecdotal evidence and concern that the fitness of
teenagers, for example, is far worse than it was say 20 years
ago. Can our witness from the Department of Health describe what
you feel are the mechanisms for objectively monitoring whether
we are less fit? Obviously, up to a certain age we have clear
measurements of development. Has there been any thought given
to the possibility of extending that beyond the primary age group,
and looking at how we can, in a sensitive way, monitor the development
of youngsters in secondary education?
Ms Sharp: Our monitoring of physical
activity and diet are included in the Health Survey for England,
which is an annual survey which picks up and rotates different
topics according to need, and one of the things we are currently
looking at is a fitness component, and to build in exactly your
concern and our own ability to measure that. We also monitor that
through the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, which again takes
different age groups. There is a new one on adults shortly to
be published; there has been one on one-and-a-half to four-and-a-half
year olds, one on 4-18 year olds and one on older people. So we
do pick up both diet and activity through those two surveys, as
well as through, for example, the travel surveys.
Q115 Chairman: My recollection of
being in primary school, many years ago, is that there was a regular
visit by the school nurse. There were eyesight checks, dental
checks, height and weight checks. Why has this never been extended
to secondary education? Is there not an argument that perhaps
that ought to be done, in a sensitive way? I appreciate that at
that stage you may get youngsters resenting it, but there are
ways of addressing it.
Ms Sharp: We are currently developing,
as you may know, a Children's National Service Framework, and
these sorts of issues are being looked at in the context of that
development, but obviously that has not been finalised or published.
Q116 Chairman: So the NSF will may
well address this?
Ms Sharp: It may well. I cannot
promise anything.
Q117 Dr Naysmith: I do not think
it is true that there is monitoring even in primary schools in
the way there used to be, is there?
Ms Sharp: No, I understand that
is true. What we do at the Department of Health level is the national
surveys that pick up trends and patterns.
Chairman: I was saying in my time.
Q118 Dr Naysmith: You were asking
why it had not been extended, but it has gone the other way.
Ms Armstrong: Every school does
have access to a school nurse, and although there are only about
2,000-2,500 school nurses, every school does have access to a
school nurse, and the role of the school nurse and the school
health team is looking at general public health issues and health
improvement and prevention, but also at primary care level taking
height and weight measurements.
Dr Naysmith: What the Chairman and I
were talking about was when we were all lined up and everything
was tested. It does not happen any more.
Q119 Sandra Gidley: This is a question
for the Department of Health. Seventy per cent of the nation's
food is actually sold by five retailers. Can you outline what
discussions you have with them?
Ms Sharp: We are in fairly regular
contact with the retailers, and with the food industry as a whole
through, I suppose, different routes. In the development of the
5 A Day programme and indeed, in the development of the National
School Fruit Scheme we have been in discussion with them in particular
about fruit and vegetables in the context of that. We have also
had some discussions with them in the context of other nutrition
policies such as the Welfare Foods Scheme.
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