Education Committee - Minutes of EvidenceHC 164-II

Back to Report

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education Committee

on Tuesday 21 May 2013

Members present:

Pat Glass (in the Chair)

Neil Carmichael

Bill Esterson

Charlotte Leslie

Siobhain McDonagh

Chris Skidmore

Craig Whittaker

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Wayne Allsopp, Business Development Manager, New College Leicester, Denise Gladwell, Head, St Breock Primary School, Cornwall, Paul Harris, Head, Curwen School, Newham, London, and Trystan Williams, Head, the Springfields Academy, Wiltshire, gave evidence.

Q132 Chair: Good morning, and thank you for coming. This meeting is part of the Committee’s inquiry into school sports and legacy, and we have already carried out a number of visits. We visited Paul’s school in east London, and saw sport in action and the FA training session that was going on that day, which was excellent.

I will open the meeting by asking: what is the role of sport in school? What makes a good school? You all represent outstanding schools, so what makes it outstanding in your school?

Trystan Williams: From my perspective, one positive thing that we really enforce in our establishment is the development of social and emotional skills. I am all for competitive sport, and I am all for the School Games, which is fine, but that touches only 20% of elite performers.

I would like to think about what the Olympic legacy could do, and if we go back to a national framework-we have obviously moved away from that-one thing sport could most certainly do would be to develop the areas of social and emotional intelligence, especially among disaffected learners. That is one area that I would love to look back on in 10 years’ time and say, as a school leader, that the Olympic legacy dealt with these issues in schools-I don’t think that the academic curriculum obviously allows for that at the moment.

I am all for Project Ability, which I will touch on a bit later. One thing that our school most certainly does now is go much broader than the School Games and the competitive element. Development of sports leadership is absolutely crucial, but I am not sure whether the pockets of good practice that you see in schools of fellow colleagues are the picture nationally.

Wayne Allsopp: For us as a secondary school in Leicester city, and in one of the most deprived areas in Leicester city, we have embraced the ethos and principles of what sport can achieve in terms of the wider social agendas. Obviously, the school was in special measures many years ago. A senior leadership team was brought in to change that, and it has done so successfully. Sport played a major role in doing that and in moving the school to an Ofsted rating of good. We have actually rebranded the school. With the demise of specialisms and not wanting to call ourselves a specialist sports college, we have decided to call ourselves a learning and sports village. The village concept comes from the fact that we have a 42-acre site. We are pretty fortunate for an inner-city school to have that amount of land at our disposal, of which a fair proportion is earmarked for the development of sporting facilities. What sport clearly does for us is look at those social agendas around health and well-being, and divert young people away from the likes of antisocial behaviour. We are working with some very proactive community sports clubs that utilise our facilities. We subsidise their letting fees. In return, they provide us with some high-quality coaches that enhance the PE curriculum that we deliver. So we have that natural transition from the school environment into a community sport environment, which will hopefully encourage these youngsters into a lifelong participation in sport.

Denise Gladwell: From the primary perspective, sport in school, especially in primary schools, is a really good platform to start physical literacy. The notion that we are pushing through the school since London 2012 is one of personal best for every child-personal best not only in sport but in all areas of the curriculum. My children know what it is to try for one’s personal best and to achieve one’s personal best in whatever sphere it is. That will be a lasting legacy that we will wish to embrace. We have embraced it as a school and wish to talk to other colleagues about that notion. In addition to that, there is the children’s understanding of what it is to compete and also what it is to be a loser when you compete-all those skills and all that learning prepares people for life.

Paul Harris: For us, it has been an essential part of our curriculum-we have developed a specific bespoke curriculum for the needs of our children. Key skills in sports are essential in raising understanding not only of sport but of other areas of the curriculum that support what we do. It has been a key area to enhance children’s skills. We have created a sports curriculum that gives wide access to a variety of sports, not just the traditional sports, to engage children who are disengaged and to bring them back in. That is then supported by our extended schools programme, which enhances that. We also have the competitive side. Furthermore, competing and representing the school is a huge key area for us, as is making sure that that links to behaviour, trying your best and all those aspects; it is not a stand-alone thing in the school. It has been fundamental, with the other things that we have been doing, in the turnaround of the school from satisfactory in 2006 to outstanding now, with huge levels of attainment. That is not just down to sport, but sport, or PE, has played a key part in that. For us, it has been about developing those key skills and those ideals of sport across the curriculum.

Q133 Chair: There is consensus here that it is about promoting health, it is about building character-building the resilience that we all need, when we lose, because things will happen in our lives that will not be good and we need to know that we can win but we can also lose-and it is also about identifying the elite. Are there sufficient resources in schools to deliver that, and can all those things be delivered with one system?

Wayne Allsopp: I personally think they can be, if this is addressed at the very top. The country, for a number of years, has had quite a fragmented sports system, and never a unified one. If I am honest, I get sick of hearing that we need to have a world-leading school system, we need to have a world-leading community sports system and we need to be producing elite athletes. Why don’t we just have a unified world-leading sports system that embraces not only school sport but community sport and elite sport at the same time? While we have got the desert islands that are UK Sport, Sport England and the Youth Sport Trust that was, we are never going to have that unified approach. What is happening at a local level is exactly the duplication of that-that fragmentation. For me, this transitional period that we are in, and the delay that has happened since the Olympic Games, has created quite an issue locally and that fragmentation is clearly to be seen.

We are fortunate in Leicestershire, Rutland and Leicester city to have quite a strong county sports partnership that tries to make sense of that landscape for us. That is translated down to a local level in Leicester city, where we are still trying to work in a co-ordinated way. To be honest, at the school where I am based, New college in Leicester, we have become so frustrated by the fragmentation of the sporting landscape that we chose to write our own strategy, which combines all those areas that you alluded to. The heart of the strategy is physical education-physical literacy-of which we pass the experience on to the local primary schools. Secondary to that, we are engaging with a number of high-quality accredited community sports clubs, which are also producing Olympians. We are working with Leicester Ladies hockey club, who have four Olympians among their ranks.

I do not see any particular reason why in this country we should not have a single vision for a sports system. I think the opportunity is there now with Lord Coe to take the chairs of each of those organisations in the first instance, and their chief executives, to combine collectively and to start to consider what sport needs to do in this country moving forward. Richard Caborn had intentions of doing that, but unfortunately that never got followed through.

Q134 Chair: So is that the view of all of you: we have a silo system that needs bringing together?

Paul Harris: It is not just that it needs bringing together; it needs to understand the different challenges that children will face at different levels, and to understand their culture. We have had children whom we have identified as being gifted-I would not say elite, because some of them are not at the age to be elite-but culturally it is not seen as an important aspect for them to do that type of sport, or parents have become concerned that they are focusing too much on sport and not on the academic side. I think the elite side of it is really important, and the only way I can see that being developed is by developing community sport for us to have access.

The problem is that community sports are under the cosh as well, with the reduction in funding across the board. I work as a volunteer for a cricket club whose rent has just been increased from £1,000 to £9,000 because the subsidy has been reduced. They send people into schools, but they are having to withdraw some of that offer because they cannot afford to do it.

I think community sport is really important, but what is essential with elite sports-this is my own personal view; it might not be agreed with by anybody else-is that we have to get this sense of-yes, we need elite athletes, but they have to be role models and they have to be hard-working individuals. I am not saying that they are not, but all too often we get children looking at the elite in football, or whatever, and getting views of people who they think are above the law. For me, it is all about working hard, being part of the community and, yes, being elite, but in my school, to represent your school you have to behave.

Q135 Chair: I think that came through very strongly in the session that we saw in your school. Those young children were getting a very positive picture-role models-of premier football players.

Paul Harris: Unfortunately, there are times in some schools and organisations where behaviour and the children’s respect are not taken into account, yet they are always pushed forward because they are good at a sport. I think that causes a problem for us in society as a whole as well.

Q136 Chair: Can I finally ask about the inclusiveness of this, Trystan? It is not just about disabled children; it is about girls and young people who are not very sporty.

Trystan Williams: We are a specialist academy and we deal with complex children from across several local authorities. That includes young people with autism, challenging behaviour or the traditional emotional and behavioural difficulties. There are also those with fetal alcohol syndrome and children born prematurely. There is one thing: I think that the Project Ability concept has certainly produced a greater breadth of sporting opportunities for young people and that is great.

The only thing is what the School Games does not do. Level 1 is school, level 2 is inter-school, level 3 is county and level 4 is national. We have found it impossible to get any funding to support any competitive sport beyond the school competition for young people in pupil referral units and special schools, especially those with high-functioning autism and with challenging behaviours.

Alone now we have created our own special Olympics for 11 schools across several local authorities. More than 300 children participated, but we could not access any funding because we had not followed the protocol from level 1, 2 and 3 into 4. That, to me, is obviously not inclusive. Whether that is an issue in Wiltshire itself or nationally, young people with challenging behaviour and high-functioning autism are sometimes the forgotten souls of society.

Coming back to colleagues’ comments on the true meaning of inclusion, when I was drinking coffee on about the third day of the Olympics a concept came to me, or after the Paralympics, on where we have evolved. We do not use the word behaviour in school at all. Behaviour is not a very inclusive word to use. We use "engagement" in learning and "disengagement".

So we have developed a tool called the DICE model. That stands for determination, inspiration, courage and equality, which are the Paralympic values. Now our young people talk about levels of independence in learning based on the Paralympic values as much as they talk about levels of engagement in maths and English.

Q137 Chair: So there is a route through the Paralympic system for children who are disabled, but that is effectively closed to young people who have challenging behaviour.

Trystan Williams: Unfortunately, yes. The Youth Sport Trust has been fabulous and has always supported me, but I feel again that we are the forgotten people of the education system.

Q138 Chair: I should have said at the beginning that one of the purposes of the Committee is to write a report including recommendations. So, if you have any recommendations please let us have them and then we can get them out and into our report.

Trystan Williams: That is one recommendation, please. Thank you.

Q139 Chris Skidmore: I want to talk about the primary school premium and the £150 million that has been allocated for the next two years. We have had oral and written evidence in previous sessions that some primary schools are going to find that slightly bewildering; it has just been foisted on them to have £9,400 per school. I have two questions. Do you welcome that money? Do you know what you are going to do with it?

Denise Gladwell: Yes, of course we welcome the money but we do not welcome the lack of time we have to think about the wise spending of it. I fear that schools may be forced into thinking, "Ah, £8,000, I need to use this effectively, but I am already paying for my teaching assistants to take children out for extra activities." The money might, because of pressures of time, be misdirected. Breathing time is needed to think about the spending and to build in some sort of exit strategy. If we are going to have the money for only two years, which is a fairly short time to build impact and have a vision of what is going to happen when the funding ends, clusters of schools need to get together to see what economies of scale could bring.

There is the old adage, give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, but teach a man to fish-schools need to think very carefully about their exit strategy and about working together to get some high-quality CPD and to ensure that the pupil premium has a legacy. That has happened with the extended schools moneys-it has been used very effectively where clusters of schools have worked together and said, "We want to achieve this for children and families, particularly in sport and engagement in sport." That is now continuing, because we built in self-sustaining options. There is also going to be pressure because in 2014, which seems to be tomorrow in educational terms, Ofsted are going to say, "What have you done with your pupil premium money? What is the impact?"-2014 is around the corner.

Q140 Chris Skidmore: It is a question that is particularly important: what do you intend to do with the money? Have you got any plans set out yet?

Paul Harris: As has already been said, it has been foisted upon us with very little consideration as to how effectively it can be used. We have to acknowledge that it is being introduced after we got rid of schools sports partnerships, which were a form of network that we could work with. We are now working in a very fragmented system. I have received, and I know that other colleagues have, constant phone calls from coaches wanting to offer services. Now that we have this mass of money all of a sudden, which in respect of the number of children in my schools is actually quite little if you reduce it down to every single child, you are inundated with calls saying, "We can send in a coach." But, as we have discussed, the quality of coaches is hugely variable. Some of them might be apprentices who do not even have coach badges.

On top of that there have been discussions about services that we were receiving-money had been taken and we were still paying in, because as a school we still pay into our school sports partnership-and all of a sudden the cost of those is increasing because the money has been moved from secondaries. It is not going to add to a service that we have paid a lot of money out of the school budget to continue, because costs are now going up.

We employ our own sports development officer. I am employing an extra trainee with a degree in sports to support the teaching. Those are plans that we have had for many years, and they are not because of the pupil premium. It is going to be quite difficult for schools to find good-quality work and to be held accountable through Ofsted for this amount of work. It needs time to embed so that we can work out how we are going to use it effectively to, hopefully, re-engage the successful networks that have been destroyed across every authority. That destruction has made delivery of sports so patchy that people do not know where to go.

Q141 Chris Skidmore: On that patchiness, Wayne, in your written evidence you talked about the issue with the money going directly to schools and bypassing organisations such as the Youth Sport Trust. Does that lead to a lack of co-ordination?

Wayne Allsopp: I think that there are a number of issues. Inevitably, you are going to assess the current way of working against the old way. There have been a couple of examples from primary colleagues that clearly demonstrate the issues that have been created. We are experiencing that in Leicester city as well. It has clearly put people in unknown territory. Primary school head teachers and staff are being given this money without any real guidance or direction as to how potentially to utilise it.

As a secondary school, we took it upon ourselves to play an active role in working with our partner primary schools to try to lighten of some of the burden for them. We are fortunate to have the expertise in our PE faculty. We have suggested to our surrounding primary schools that if they want us to employ an additional physical education teacher, we will do that on behalf of a number of the schools that will then go in. They will not be held directly responsible for delivering the schools’ physical education, but they will assist in mentoring and upskilling their teaching staff.

As colleagues suggested, this is a short-term solution. If we are ever going to see cultural change in the delivery of physical education in this country, we need long-term, cross-party commitment to a consistent policy. Like colleagues, I agree that we virtually had that with the school sports partnership system that was in place. Granted, I do not think it was perfect, but it could have been tweaked to evolve into something that could deliver the Government’s agenda. The resource is now where it is needed-the primary sector is very much where the resource is needed-but bypassing all the expertise that is clearly in place is a little bit criminal, because you are creating situations such as this.

Q142 Chair: One of the issues that has been put to us is that, if this was a primary maths premium or a primary English premium, the money would be spent within schools on teaching; it would not be spent on coaches coming from outside. Why is sport different?

Paul Harris: I think we have to accept that teachers are not trained to a level to deliver some of the sports programmes, unless they have done a specific sports degree. I did six weeks of sports in a year, and I was on a four-year course. If you are doing a PGCE or a GTP programme, you could be lucky to get a day. People are not trained to that level, and it is important that we develop the skills of teachers to do that. Also, I think it is important to have the competitive side that is requested at the moment as part of the Government drive. You cannot have that run by teachers who are teaching in class all day and then having to arrange all of these different competitions.

Q143 Chair: So, Paul, is it that teachers in primary should be trained to that level, or is it that teachers in secondary are trained to that level and the money is going into the wrong place?

Paul Harris: No, I think that we need to train teachers in primary schools to that level, or to support them through the use of coaches. It is for schools to decide how they do that in partnership. You could bring in people from the secondary sector. The problem we face is that, yes, some school sports partnerships work very well and some have not worked very well. There is also the fact that money is put in for PE professionals to be sent into primary schools, yet primary schools did not see any of that. So it is about accountability. If the money goes in there, we need to make sure that it is good enough. Half a day in a primary from a secondary school PE expert is not going to suit a school that has 500 children.

Wayne Allsopp: To pick up on that point, I think there need to be some very clear parameters on the difference between physical education and school sport. For me, the whole emphasis of coaches in schools should be seen as a support mechanism, as the gentleman here alluded to. First and foremost, every young person is entitled to physical education and to be physically literate, just as they are obviously entitled to maths and English. I am actually living that a little bit, as I have twin daughters of three-and-a-half. I am scrutinising it a little bit more in terms of what they are getting on physical literacy even at pre-school. It needs to start earlier than the primary school sector. We really need to be looking at early years, too. The national child measurement programme at this moment in time leads you to believe that, at reception year and in year 6, we have an obesity problem in this country. No matter which system you look at, either the school sports partnership system or this new way of working, none of the systems has actually addressed the obesity issue.

Q144 Craig Whittaker: Isn’t Ofsted the one that is going to make people accountable for that? To play devil’s advocate, are you saying-particularly Wayne, because I was following your thread-that primary teachers are not capable of delivering the programme? Isn’t it just sour grapes from secondary schools because they do not have the funding?

Wayne Allsopp: I certainly do not think it is sour grapes. To be honest with you, we have put things in place that have been needs-led. We have consulted very strongly with our primary schools on that, so we are basically putting mechanisms in place to support them and to utilise their money effectively. "Capable" is perhaps not the wrong word, because when you take into account what colleagues are suggesting in terms of the CPD that primary school teaching staff have had on the delivery of physical education, it is quite clearly not enough. I know there are pilots in place at the moment looking at the initial teacher training and how that might be delivered in future to upskill primary teaching staff, moving forward. I said earlier that that is where I think the money was needed in the primary sector, because that will create long-term, sustainable change. But in terms of accountability, am I convinced that Ofsted will be that strict on it?

If I use some data from Leicester city-and perhaps I shouldn’t-49% of our primary schools do not offer school swimming. Now, school swimming is a statutory requirement of physical education at this moment in time-key stage 2 students should be able to swim 25 metres-but we have 49% of primary schools that do not even offer it. Fundamentally, there is something wrong with the systems that are in place. I hope that Ofsted will police how the money is used and make them accountable. Again, being critical of the previous systems, yes, we had PESSCL surveys, PESSYP surveys and things, but what licence did the likes of partnership development managers and school sports co-ordinators have to be critical of schools that were not delivering the two hours of PE and school sport?

Denise Gladwell: I really feel I ought to speak up for primary colleagues and their capability to deliver. Don’t let us underestimate the passion and encouragement that primary colleagues give to our very youngest children, even up to the age of nine. We have our own sports coach, as well, and the passion and expertise of our school sports coach means that our elite children get that additional specialist training; but please don’t underestimate how passionate and encouraging our primary colleagues are.

Trystan Williams: Obviously, we are a special school but we were a specialist sports college and we used to work in the same way as any secondary school. What fellow primary heads in our cluster feel is that previously we could stand shoulder to shoulder, and almost hold each other to account. We run able, gifted and talented days for PE, maths, English-everything. What is interesting is that we do not really say, "Look, as a sports college in this area, you are not utilising our funding." We have had interesting conversations saying that, when it is maths and English, all the primary schools participate, but now because it has been free around PE, the levels and numbers have massively dropped off.

A lot of primary colleagues also say that we drove the vision together within the town. We brought the town together, from the clubs to the schools to the parents, because there was a collective voice around school sport and community sport. Now the primary heads feel it is fragmented and I feel it is fragmented. There is an increase in coaches coming in but we don’t have a clue what their qualifications are, and they are promising the world to children in primary schools. That is a concern of mine.

So again, coming back to the previous point, it is fragmented-there is no framework there-and I am concerned. Colleagues here are massively passionate about it, but I am concerned that the legacy in two years’ time will be that we are saying, "There are isolated pockets of outstanding work, but guess what? There are some primary schools that are not participating, or participating less." That is my biggest concern. Having two boys in local primary schools, I am massively passionate about it.

Chair: I am going to bring Charlotte in, but first I am just going to make the point that, in large constituencies such as mine, some schools cannot deliver swimming because there is not a swimming pool within travelling distance.

Q145 Charlotte Leslie: I am sorry for being late. I have a very quick question. To what extent do you think that the things that you, I think, have been discussing before I arrived, and certainly the role of sport in training for teachers, are all a symptom of the fact that we have not appreciated the role that sport can play in helping the more traditionally academic and other recognised parts of school life?

For example, I do quite a lot of work on boxing. One of the interesting things is how much enabling young people who want it to do boxing training actually impacts on their academic performance. Do you think we are facing a cultural problem, where there is too much of a divide between the sporting world and the academic world? Do you think that is a priority to tackle?

Paul Harris: I personally think it is something that needs to be tackled. It needs to be tackled by looking at the curriculum that we are delivering. For some schools we have developed curriculums to engage children in sports as well as academia.

There is a huge emphasis on academia, and I understand it, but sport is pushed out. What you get is not only the view in society and culture towards sport in the whole; you also get schools that are under so much pressure to perform in English and maths at primary level that sometimes everything focuses on those subjects and not on sport. PE will get pushed out, because the curriculum just won’t allow the time for it to be developed.

We need to look at educating the whole child-not doing it in separate, individual pockets. The curriculum needs to be brought together to meet a whole-child curriculum and not just in separate subjects, because I think that is how it has been seen over a long period.

Denise Gladwell: I echo Paul’s comments, in the fact that head teachers-some head teachers-are under a blanket of fear from forthcoming Ofsteds and inspection. They do take their eye off the ball, so to speak, and it does get focused on maths and English, to the detriment of PE. It is really difficult, and I do appreciate it is different in so many schools, but my school has been granted the freedom-because we were granted a judgment of good-so we have been able to explore those options. But the pressure of Ofsted inspection is huge.

Q146 Charlotte Leslie: The irony is that a lot of the schools that parents may pay an awful lot of money to go to actually put sport and competitive sport very much at the centre of what they do-particularly boarding schools, with teenage boys running around.

Wayne Allsopp: Absolutely. I think if you look at the data of our medal haul from 2012-if you broke down where those Olympians were educated, are not a high percentage of them exactly from that environment? Clearly those links are there to be seen.

I think for us at New College the vehicle of sport has raised academic achievement considerably, to where, now, in terms of five A to Cs, including English and maths, it’s raised by 525%, which most people agree is a quite impressive figure. So in terms of sport for us, and raising academic achievement, it’s a key vehicle for us.

Q147 Charlotte Leslie: So it is not either sport or academic; it is actually sport contributes to academic.

Denise Gladwell: It is sport for academia, really-definitely.

Q148 Chris Skidmore: Paul mentioned, obviously, this deluge of being contacted by people after the funding was announced, and I was just interested to get your wider views about what the actual market, there, is. You have talked about things like untrained coaches, and I was interested in what you said about getting secondary schools involved. In terms of the money that is there and of the services that you can buy, do they match up, or is there going to be a problem?

Paul Harris: As I said before, it is fragmented, and it is knowing the quality and who you can go to. The other side of losing the school sports partnership was that local authorities used to have sports development officers, who were employed, who were co-ordinating a lot of this, but, again, with the economic climate, the budget cuts, they were one department that went very quickly.

I was very lucky that my sports development officer was one of those people who had all the contacts with all the different organisations, which has kept us as a school in the loop; but there is no structure. You will get hundreds of e-mails coming across, offering different things, and you have to make a decision of where you are going to take or possibly move that money.

Going back to the idea of resources, for example with swimming pools and the fact that you have got London authorities: I live in an authority where there is one public swimming pool in the whole authority. It is just a disgrace. Yet we have been told we are going to be measured on everybody swimming, when there is no resource for it. There was an e-mail floating round saying that we could have a mobile swimming pool in our playground, which we have applied for and are trying to get the funding for. For example, our children go to a swimming pool. The population in Newham is huge-there is no space in which to get the children to actually swim 25 metres, never mind start learning; so we have found it and we have brought it in.

To do that I have had to have somebody who has got the links, who has got the time to do it. That is why, for us, a sports development coach, who is coaching wide areas and also has time to do all the competitions and the research; because there is no one doing it for us. So you either, in a school, have somebody doing it for you or it’s just going to get missed. So the opportunities are all over the place, and I think that is because of the fragmentation of the networks.

Wayne Allsopp: I think there is the market there. The primary schools we are working with have, likewise, been bombarded with a number of offers from a number of commercial coaching organisations, and even from the professional sport club sector, who are sending in their offers of support under this new school sport premium.

The thing that concerns me most, and probably concerns colleagues along the table, is the quality of the delivery. If these things are utilised in an effective way-I do not want to do an injustice to some excellent coaches out there-and as long as they are seen as a support mechanism for enhancing what should be core curriculum in terms of physical education, this could possibly work, but, again, it is about having the expertise to recognise that and to support primary schools to make the right decisions. For me, this way of working, as I said in the evidence that I submitted, is fundamentally bypassing all those organisations that clearly have the expertise to work with primary schools so they make those informed decisions.

Trystan Williams: I am just going to make one point, Charlotte. We also work in partnership with the independent sector. One of the most exclusive independent schools backs on to our grounds. If I look at our primary mainstream partners-I know comparisons are not politically correct these days, but I will make one-the biggest difference with the independent school we work with is that it has outstanding facilities; it has a swimming pool on site, and it has the finances to appoint a high-quality, full-time PE teacher.

The children-I am not being critical of primary colleagues; I am just stating facts-are taught by a PE specialist, where, obviously, every other subject is taught by the traditional primary route. The young people get a grounding at a primary level around the fundamental skills-I know this character, and if I could afford him, I would appoint him in my school, too.

Based on our local needs and on my local analysis, the biggest two differences between the primary mainstream and the primary independent school are this high-quality, highly paid character-he probably gets as much as my assistant heads-and top-quality, state-of-the-art facilities, most of which are paid for by the parents. It is not by luck that a lot of children coming through that system at the moment go on to be Olympians, while the children we support mostly do not have those life opportunities.

Denise Gladwell: May I add something about facilities on behalf of small rural schools? Often those schools do not have access to a hall for gymnastics, and that is really critical. So it is even more important that the networks established with schools work to the benefit of all the pupils, and that we consider the needs of the pupils in that network to see how best we can provide for each other.

Q149 Chair: We are due to finish this panel at 10.30 am, and we do not have a lot of time, so I would ask people to keep their responses sharp. We had a witness last week who said they were grateful for the funding but that it needed a longer period to become fully effective. What period would be needed for it to become sustainable?

Denise Gladwell: May I suggest until Rio? Then we have a significant impact.

Q150 Chair: So that would be 2016.

Denise Gladwell: Yes. We could then see from one Olympic Games to the other whether there really is a legacy that has had an impact.

Wayne Allsopp: If you look at the so-called golden era of school sports partnerships, which have been funded for 10 years-plus, and you break down the success of those, you would have to suggest that they have been very successful in terms of what they were set up to achieve. In Leicester city, for example, prior to school sports partnerships, 36% of school children were doing two hours of physical education. Granted, we did not get to 100%.

Q151 Chair: So 10 years.

Wayne Allsopp: Yes, 10 years. We moved that figure on to 76%. Again, you can question the value for money, in terms of the amount that was ploughed into school sports partnerships, but, for me, that is a considerable shift in the number of young people who are physically active and involved in physical education. That is the sort of period we need to be looking at. As I said earlier, we need that commitment to a cohesive and consistent policy, because, at the end of the day, this is about children’s lives.

Q152 Bill Esterson: You have talked a bit about the preparedness of primary teachers for the new sports premium. We were reminded last week that the average amount of initial teacher training for primary schools is just six hours. There is obviously a gap there. How would you square that circle or close that gap-whichever metaphor you want to use?

Denise Gladwell: A range of high-quality professional development opportunities for primary school teachers are provided by august bodies such as the Youth Sports Trust, which is delivering the Sainsbury’s School Games and BUPA’s Start to Move campaign. Those opportunities, with a co-ordinated approach and a national framework of expectations for teachers’ qualifications, would mean that we could upskill our teachers.

Wayne Allsopp: I think the short answer to your question is that you don’t in two years.

Q153 Bill Esterson: So having a longer-

Denise Gladwell: Period. Yes.

Paul Harris: Also, part of that training has to involve working with children. Much of the training comprises a group of people of the same age or ability training in a room. They are not training with children. They actually go on the course with other adults. Merging that with training with children and seeing good practice in action is a key thing that needs to be part of the process.

Denise Gladwell: But peer coaching is a well-established method for good professional development.

Q154 Bill Esterson: One of the comments in an earlier session was that the last thing that many, if not most, primary teachers go into primary to do is PE or sport. How do you address the issue of teachers who perhaps really are not interested in sport? Is it something for working with secondaries? Wayne, you talked about the model you use.

Wayne Allsopp: That is obviously one option and it is the one that we are putting place for our partner primary schools. There obviously is the expertise. We have not only sustained the sort of school sport co-ordinator role that was in place previously, but we have also enhanced that by recruiting a physical education teacher to support the primary schools.

What we do not want to be seen to be doing is going in and doing all the delivery on behalf of the primary school, because that is just not sustainable. It is about utilising that individual through mentoring and looking at the CPD opportunities that are on offer from a number of providers and ensuring that there is some long-term commitment from the primary schools, because there is a need for primary schools to take some ownership and responsibility.

There are some clear key advocates around the table and what a great vision it would be if all primary schools across the country had heads that thought that way. Obviously, at the other end of the spectrum, how great would it be if every primary school had a fully qualified full-time physical education teacher? That is the ultimate solution.

Q155 Bill Esterson: But it takes time.

Wayne Allsopp: It takes time. Absolutely.

Denise Gladwell: Do not underestimate the ability of significant leadership in a primary school to effect the vision and to infect others with the drive-

Q156 Bill Esterson: So the heads are absolutely crucial.

Denise Gladwell: It sounds rather big-headed, but leadership, wherever it comes from, is crucial. Largely, it should be the head, but it could come from other key personnel-assistant or deputy heads or sports coaches. There has to be a general urgency to do this for children.

Paul Harris: We can get PE experts to come in with degrees and we do have those people becoming teachers. It is just that there isn’t yet the quantity that you would need across the school. As a head, you can appoint people to that role and enhance that with good-quality coaches to support the work that is going on in the school.

Q157 Bill Esterson: Can I ask you to comment on the effectiveness of the teacher release scheme?

Wayne Allsopp: From a secondary perspective, teacher release is, to be honest, just another way of saying that they are a schools sports co-ordinator. The SSCo concept was about releasing a secondary PE teacher to support primary schools. The remit was a lot wider previously and was about physical education and not just competitive sport. Obviously, the remit now is more about encouraging primary schools to engage more within the School Games. As a support mechanism and for us, selfishly, as a secondary school, that role enables us to encourage more young people to come to our secondary school, so that is one reason why we have fundamentally sustained that post moving forward and have already issued a contract. Despite the withdrawal of the teacher release funding, we will continue with that post because it serves such a big purpose for us.

Trystan Williams: We do the same, but my aim is to make sure that the young people in our area do not come to my school. If they come to my school, we have obviously failed them. Our aim is to make sure that we develop social and emotional skills through sports so that they do not go into a specialist environment, especially those who are turned off by the traditional academic route.

Paul Harris: Some of us in primary schools have not seen any impact from the teacher release programme. It is patchy.

Denise Gladwell: I echo that.

Paul Harris: I know that primary schools have not seen anybody.

Wayne Allsopp: One of the main issues behind that was the autonomy. There was a lack of criteria given around teacher release funding. It actually came into the secondary school, and again it was left with heads and leadership to decide fundamentally how the money was used.

Q158 Bill Esterson: You have talked about the evidence and schools sports partnerships. What about the alternative models to keeping the school sports partnerships or county sports partnerships going? How effective are they in your experience and elsewhere?

Wayne Allsopp: We are fortunate that we still have a robust system. We have a strong county sports partnership. Andy Reed, Chair of Leicestershire and Rutland Sport, was on the panel last week. It is clearly a well led county sports partnership that supports all the local authority areas in delivering an effective school sports system. We are also fortunate that, in Leicester city as well, we still have two recognised school sports partnerships. Obviously, after the announcement about the disbanding of the school sports partnerships, we started actively plotting and planning our week, and have sustained that mechanism. If anything, we grew a third partnership because we recognised that we were perhaps not supporting our special schools as effectively as we could.

We grew a third special school sports partnership headed up by a specialist sports college, which is also a special school. We believe strongly in the ethos and principles of working collectively together through a network of individuals. Unfortunately, the way in which the Government are working, they seem to be forcing an element of fragmentation, but we are still fighting against that to provide a cohesive offer to all children and young people, because that is fundamentally what it should be about.

Denise Gladwell: We also saw the benefits of the partnership and, because of its demise, we are now driving it from a primary school, as a different lead. We want to replicate the success. We have all pitched in, and now it is led by the sports coach, James Ross, at my school.

Paul Harris: We have done the same.

Trystan Williams: In our area, we have carried on and increased provision. When we became a specialist sports college in 2005, that transformed my school from an under-performing school to an outstanding school. I am not going to let that bit go. We have a moral obligation. If we can drive the agenda in our town and across the area, this simply would not happen. Things have not changed; provision has actually increased. However, I don’t get the funding to do it, so my governors challenge me, and the FA tells me off all the time. So I say I am sorry. I have a moral obligation to deliver.

Q159 Siobhain McDonagh: Ofsted has been mentioned but, looking at accountability, how do you suggest that schools should be held accountable for their PE and sports provision? Are current accountability measures sufficient?

Wayne Allsopp: I do not think so. Previously, we had a national indicator 57. That, again, was more of a recommendation than a directive, in that schools need at least to offer two hours of physical education. I think that the five-hour offer that was being driven nationally through the Youth Sport Trust is the direction that we need to be moving towards. There are clear directives out there from a health benefit perspective. If we were to speak to health colleagues, they would clearly demonstrate how active young people need to be for their health benefit. Some quantifiable measures need to be put in place in primary schools and others accountable for the amount of physical education, physical activity and school sports that are delivered.

Denise Gladwell: It is really important that there is a collective understanding of what is deemed regular physical activity, and what is high quality and high impact. Unless we have a shared vision and a shared understanding of those things, we will not be able to do any worthy measurement.

Paul Harris: The accountability needs to link directly to an understanding of what it is that we are being asked to provide. It also has to be measured by how accountable schools are in all the other areas in which they are trying to provide different things. We have different accountability measures for every single subject, virtually, and this just feels like another accountability measure on top. We need to look at the whole system of accountability.

It is important that we are accountable, but it has to be driven looking at the whole child, not just separate entities, because you end up being answerable to several different authorities for different things. Under sports, we had to fill out the PESSCL return-whatever it was. For the school sports programme at the moment we have the bronze award. We are constantly having to go and update the website. Then there is Ofsted. We need to look at accountability on the whole and make it effective rather than a tick box exercise, which sometimes I think we end up doing.

Q160 Craig Whittaker: Before I come to my questions, it is quite interesting listening to you all talk about the school sport partnerships, yet you are getting on and doing them anyway. Has anything really changed? We have heard time and again that what was in place is being expanded in several cases. The only difference is where the funding is coming from.

Wayne Allsopp: There is an element of that and an element of reshuffling clientele within those systems. What previously were deemed partnership event managers, are now deemed School Games organisers. Their actual drive, because of where they are funded from, is very much competitive-based. Locally, we have tried to hold on to much more than that because we recognise that competition will not turn all young people on to PE and school sport. Unfortunately, that seems to be the national direction that is being given at the moment. Certainly, it has a part to play. Let’s not try to take the competitive element totally out of sport, because it has a part to play. But it should certainly not be at the expense of good-quality physical education and physical literacy.

Q161 Craig Whittaker: Can I just go on to legacy events? Do you believe that there has been an Olympic legacy? If there is, great. If not, what should it be, and do you think the moment has passed?

Wayne Allsopp: I personally think the Olympic legacy at the moment is fundamentally on a life support machine. I think a lifeline has been thrown through this opportunity now to make this-

Q162 Craig Whittaker: Just quantify that. Where I come from-west Yorkshire-is a long way from London, but there has been a 49% extra take up in cycling, for example. All the local clubs are over-subscribed. Talk to me about the lifeline, because that is not the picture I am getting up in west Yorkshire, which is a million miles away from where the Olympics took place.

Wayne Allsopp: If you look at, whether you recognise it or not, the Smith Institute report that has been produced-I am bringing this back to a school sport perspective-granted, it was not a large survey, but it was robust enough to make the data meaningful. If you look at the information that is contained within that, you will see that the uptake of physical education and school sport has started to decrease with those people who took part in that survey. To be honest, we would echo that to some degree within the small partnership that we work in.

Q163 Craig Whittaker: Can I ask you to clarify the decrease? Even under school sports partnerships, for girls in particular, when they got to 16, the results were horrendous for that group of young people. So give me some more specifics.

Wayne Allsopp: Absolutely. Clearly, women’s and girls’ participation in PE and sport in general is one of the most difficult areas to tackle. There are a number of programmes out there that clearly try to do that. For example, bringing it back locally to Leicester city, we run a programme called WISPA-women in sport and physical activity-that is very well supported by the likes of the Youth Sport Trust. It targets that 14-plus drop-off.

Q164 Craig Whittaker: Let’s go back to my question on legacy, because you said it was on life support. Just explain the evidence you have that says that it is on life support. From what you were saying, you would suggest that in the last year it has gone horrendously backwards. I have not seen the evidence for that, so I want you to supply the Committee with the evidence that suggests that that is the case.

Wayne Allsopp: Again, I can only bring it locally, because that is the area that I know best. If we were to look across Leicester city in terms of participation within PE and school sport, that has started to decrease because of the exact situations that have been suggested around the table. The delay in any sort of announcement post-Olympic Games-for me, we should have had a robust PE and schools sport strategy.

Q165 Craig Whittaker: Can you write to us with the evidence that you have to suggest that there has been a decrease? That in particular is what we are interested in.

Wayne Allsopp: Yes, absolutely.

Denise Gladwell: Cornwall is also a very long way from London, but our uptake of school sport has been maintained and we have 95% of our children engaged in after-school sports and physical activity. The legacy is in the hands of the very specific people who have the passion to drive it for the next four years; whether that is head teachers, sports coaches or the Youth Sport Trust, it gets down to the passionate people who are going to make this legacy last.

Paul Harris: It is understanding what we mean by Olympic legacy. Yes, we are all doing this, and we have done this over a number of years. For my children who are engaged in sports very highly, a lot of them would say that the physical Olympic legacy in Newham is a shopping centre, because that is all that they see. We have not been invited-

Q166 Craig Whittaker: That is not what the Committee saw a couple of weeks ago when we went to several schools in Newham. It was quite the opposite.

Paul Harris: No, we have done the sports part of it, but the local view is that the Olympic park itself is an inaccessible place to go at the moment, and, as an authority that is actually sat there, no one has come to us and said, "This is going to be your opportunity to improve and enhance even further the sports."

We have talked about resources, and in Newham I have a school that has one little strip of grass-that is it. We do not have resource for all of these areas. We saw the Olympic legacy as part of having access to this wonderful park, but none of us understands how we can get into it. I think that we have got an Olympic legacy in that there is more popularity at the moment, but as for the sustainability of that, I am concerned about how long it will last.

Q167 Craig Whittaker: So facilities is a big issue.

Paul Harris: Yes.

Q168 Chair: Presumably not being able to get access to the park is a temporary issue, though.

Paul Harris: You would think so, but we are still not aware of anything. Quickly, as an example, the school won a national competition for the velodrome. We went to the velodrome once: we went to the opening. As soon as the ODA gave over to LOCOG, we phoned up and said that we were supposed to do some work with Olympic legacy, but we were told that we were not wanted anymore and that we were not involved. Yet the competition was Olympic legacy.

Somebody needs to communicate with us how these facilities are going to be accessed by the local communities. I know that this is pertinent because I am in Newham, but how are we going to have access? Nobody knows anything.

Trystan Williams: To me, if the Olympic legacy really unpicks the issues that are forcing some schools down the academic route, I would like to think that, in years to come, we, as school leaders can say that the Olympic legacy has had the biggest impact on exclusion and disaffected learners in our society-that, to me, is the kind of message. Until the school system changes and school leaders are allowed to show and celebrate innovative practices around inclusion and the development of social and emotional skills, we are truly missing a trick.

From my perspective, the social and emotional aspect is crucial. If I can use Jessica Ennis as an example, how many people did she have supporting her to win that Olympic gold? You have analysts in mathematics and you have literacy experts. Until schools are allowed to innovate and teach in thematic ways and develop their own initiatives, and not be beaten by Ofsted, on elements of maths and English, I feel that we will be failing the next generation of disaffected youngsters.

Q169 Chair: So an Olympic legacy for some, but not for all, at the moment.

Trystan Williams: Absolutely.

Chair: Thank you very much for your evidence. If there is anything else that you want to send to us, please put it in writing.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Baroness Campbell, Chair, Youth Sport Trust, Baroness Grey-Thompson and Dame Tessa Jowell MP, gave evidence.

Q170 Chair: Thank you all for coming along this morning. I will plough straight in and ask about the vision of the Olympic legacy. What was in mind at the time, and how far have we moved from that vision?

Dame Tessa Jowell: Let me start with that, although I have two women on either side of me who are more than capable of answering that question too, so perhaps we will share it out. As Secretary of State at the time, we had two primary legacy promises in submitting and then implementing our Olympic bid. They were, first of all, to inspire a generation of young people through sport, and, secondly, the regeneration of east London. Your focus is, obviously, on the first.

The Singapore promise, as it became defined, applied not just to young people in this country but to young people around the world. I want to refer briefly to that and pay great tribute to Sue Campbell, in this respect and many others, because she was one of the driving forces behind International Inspiration, as the international sport and development programme for young people came to be known. By the time we got to the Olympics, International Inspiration was-it still is-in 20 countries reaching 12 million children, in each country linking development objectives with sport as the medium for delivery in order to improve the lives of young people.

To turn to the legacy at home, that was to be realised principally through the mechanism of our school sport partnerships, and it was driven by a very simple aim. We wanted sport to become part of the life of every child from primary school through to secondary school-sport for its own sake, but recognising the other instrumental values that sport can bring.

Those instrumental values are very well demonstrated by the remarkable achievements of the school sports colleges: improved academic performance, improved behaviour, less truancy and so forth. Those are the benefits of sport, but our aim in the spirit of the Olympics was to raise a generation of young people who love sport for its own sake and who found their own ability to excel both through taking part and through competing.

Baroness Campbell: Tessa has outlined the vision really well. We wanted very passionately the Olympics to light this inspirational moment for young people, and I think it did. I think the challenge is whether we can transform that inspiration into sustainable participation. That is the real challenge. When the school sport partnerships went, they removed a very critical capacity to respond to that.

Although, as you probably heard from the previous evidence, I think there are examples of great practice on the ground-there always have been and there always will be-it is now much more of a patchwork quilt than perhaps it was when the school sport partnerships were there, however imperfect they may have been.

If you have got a national strategy, there are bound to be areas that are not as strong as others. Nevertheless, it was an attempt to create a universal offer-to give every youngster high-quality physical education and an opportunity to take part in after-school competition if they wished to and, equally importantly, to provide a wide range of opportunities for those who did not want to compete to remain active and stay healthy.

It was really a sports strategy, but it was also a very strong education strategy and it was a health strategy. The infrastructure was there to create a universal offer, and when that was removed, I think we lost that. That does not mean that there is not some good practice; there is.

Baroness Grey-Thompson: My view of legacy was very specific in terms of looking at what we could do for disabled children. If we look at the time that the bid was started for the Games, 2012 was the first city that absolutely had to have a Paralympics as well. Until then, the Olympics was won, and then there was a negotiation about having a Paralympics. Lottery funding was only just starting to bed in at élite level, and funding for disability sport below élite level was incredibly patchwork and very poor.

For me, winning the Olympics meant that we would have the Paralympics, and we could actually do an awful lot to focus, top-down and bottom-up, in terms of what we could do for disabled children. Certainly towards the end of my career, and even now, we are seeing fewer disabled children competing than when I was 12, before the word "Paralympics" was invented. My sport, wheelchair racing, very few girls compete in.

Part of the challenge with that is the changing pattern of impairments. We know how many children will be coming through schools, but we do not know about disabled children. Certainly, things such as folic acid, early termination and the seat belt law have radically changed the number of disabled people, as well as Iran and Afghanistan, which have changed, not radically, the number of disabled people, but it is not a set pattern.

For me, having the Games meant that we could really force much better PE within schools. Mainstream education is fantastic for education, but it has made it really hard for disabled people to find competition opportunities, to compete on a level playing field and be included. There is amazing good practice out there. Probably the people who write to me are the ones who are not having a great time. An awful lot of disabled children are still sent to the library, because teachers do not feel equipped or able, in many cases, to integrate them properly into lessons.

For me, it was about trying to do that because we actually need disabled people to be fitter and healthier. All the figures we know about women-80% of women are not fit enough to be healthy-are probably worse for disabled people.

Q171 Chair: That is interesting. With all the benefits of inclusion, mainstream schools have just not got it right for disabled sport.

Baroness Grey-Thompson: It has been very challenging for, say, a disabled child who has gone through primary school and has limited access to physical activity with teachers who are not trained.

Parents are also much more likely to wrap their children in cotton wool. If you have a child with a congenital impairment, the first thing you are told is, "I’m sorry, but…" Then you start this huge fight for everything-for health care, for benefits and support, and for education. In a statement of special educational need, physical activity is not part of that, which is a massively missed opportunity.

If there is one thing I would like to see in education plans going forward, it is something that links a real promise about physical activity-physical activity is cheaper than therapy, and is much cheaper than either taking kids out of schools and sending them to physios, or bringing them in-and I think that there is an awful lot we can do in that way.

Chair: There is a whole new Education Committee inquiry in that, I feel.

Q172 Neil Carmichael: It is worth noting that people with a mental health issue also benefit from sport and physical activity. Some very interesting work was recently done by Rethink, demonstrating just how important it is to encourage people with mental health issues to engage in all sorts of sport and physical exercise. Does the panel agree with that?

Baroness Grey-Thompson: Yes.

Baroness Campbell: Yes, particularly for emotional well-being. There is no question about that not just for people with severe issues, but people with day-to-day issues of emotional stress or pressure. All the evidence is that if you packaged exercise as a pill, everybody would say that it was a miracle cure, because it actually alleviates emotional stress.

To pick up what Tanni is saying, one of the challenges is that in our primary schools-I am sure you have heard this repeatedly-we have teachers who get a very limited amount of training in physical education. It is almost too much for them to deliver competently and confidently to mainstream youngsters, so to ask them to be inclusive in that practice, is asking them to step too far away and they are scared of it-they are afraid of it. I do not think that it is an unwillingness to be inclusive; I think that it is a fear of being inclusive.

Because of the new Government announcement, I am just doing a round of head teacher briefings. I have now done 25 head teacher briefings in the last two months, with another 20 to go. I have been in front of well over 3,500 primary head teachers, and the issue that Tanni is raising is a very real and significant one for them-their teachers are afraid of physical education per se, but certainly of physical education that is inclusive of young people with a range of disabilities.

Q173 Craig Whittaker: How does that compare with what you have just said about disabled sports in schools? How does that compare in special schools? Are they much better at delivering sport and physical education for young people who are disabled?

Baroness Grey-Thompson: Yes, partly because of the training that the teachers have, and the facilities are probably more suitable. Generally, if you look at children in special schools, they tend to have much higher levels of impairment, so that is more physical activity linked to therapy, as opposed to competitive sport.

I have visited a number of special schools in the past year or so, and when you have someone with very high support needs-cerebral palsy, maybe with a tracheotomy-sports are not possible, but physical activity is. It is about the outcome you want. For me, what we need is a much broader base of disabled young people doing physical activity, and then you can talk about sport-if the school-club links are right and if the governing bodies could do an awful lot more work in terms of their coach training, awareness and better support to clubs. At the moment, we have a step ladder; we do not have a participation triangle, which we have in mainstream sport.

Baroness Campbell: Just to say, the Youth Sport Trust has established 50 Project Ability schools, which are predominantly special needs schools, and they are acting as a hub in each county to provide inclusive professional development and support. We are supporting them and, under the new Government announcement, there is more investment going into them to tackle some of these issues. In a way, however, that is part of the solution; it is not the baseline solution that Tanni is referring to, but at least it has made a considerable difference to inclusion.

Dame Tessa Jowell: May I pick up and underline? The Olympic bid saw equivalence-one vision-between the summer Games and the Paralympic Games and, as Tanni said, that was the first time ever. In every aspect of the legacy, we sought that equivalence, but Tanni and Sue are sort of right in what they are saying, directly and indirectly: you have to assume that, with disabled children, it is always more difficult, and that implementation, however generous the strategy, is not as effective for disabled children as it is for able-bodied children. That is why I certainly welcome, for instance, the involvement of Ofsted in monitoring the effectiveness of implementation. The policy or political will to see equivalence was absolutely unqualified, but both Tanni and Sue have identified some of the practical problems.

Q174 Charlotte Leslie: Picking up on that, I wonder whether you think that the Paralympic legacy should be seen in the same package as the Olympic legacy, or as something slightly different in terms of legacy mission and legacy targets?

Baroness Campbell: I will let Tanni reflect on that, but in terms of the legacy inside education, it should be a fully integrated and fully equitable legacy. If we are talking about every child accessing high-quality physical education, that should mean every child. If we are offering every child the opportunity to step into competitive sport, if they so wish, it should be every child getting that opportunity. If it is about health and well-being, then Tanni has already identified that those issues are probably more important if you have a disability.

Certainly my view would be that the education legacy-the thing we are talking about today-must be available to every child, but that requires better teacher training, better teaching of sport, better coach education and a fundamental shift in people’s thinking about the importance of this within the education sector. This is not a "nice to do", this is a "need to do"-this is every child’s right to do. That is the bit that gets lost. It kind of comes after the serious business of education, but it is the serious business of education.

Unhealthy children do not learn as well and they do not concentrate as well. They are not as good at so many things inside school, things as simple as manipulating a pen; early skills help kids to hold a pen properly-look at how many kids cannot write properly. We have such basic issues that we should be tackling, but getting that across inside the education system is challenging.

Baroness Grey-Thompson: One of my frustrations is that we have a wealth of data linking physical activity to attainment, attendance and everything Sue mentioned, and we still don’t seem to tackle it. In the previous session, you talked about physical literacy, which is incredibly important for disabled and non-disabled children, and that has to come through early years and primary level if we really want to tackle the issues of girls competing.

We know the drop-out rate is 14, but they don’t start dropping out at 14. All those problems start much earlier. Looking at the legacy, Sue is absolutely right that in education most children don’t care whether it was the Olympics or Paralympics. What the Paralympics did was to allow disabled people to be sporty and valued for being good at sport, which probably hadn’t happened before.

We also need to translate that into girls being valued for being sporty. At the moment, a sporty boy in a school is lauded and applauded, but a sporty girl is treated as a bit odd. There is a massive cultural shift, and I think a lot of it comes down to teaching. Schools cannot sort out every problem and if I had a magic wand I would make sport and physical activity compulsory every day. Schools have a massive opportunity to pick up on the legacy. There will be a spike in participation, and that is wonderful, but we could do so much more if we focused on what children do in schools.

Q175 Charlotte Leslie: May I ask everyone more about the available data? One of the challenges you come up against when talking about the impact of sport on other attainments and it being a hook for other things, is that people are very good at anecdotes in the sporting world particularly, but those who are making decisions about what they incorporate into their services, whether education or justice and rehabilitation, which are also important, don’t think the data is out there to commission sport as a service to make a difference. Is there anything you can submit to the Committee in terms of-

Dame Tessa Jowell: On that, I refer you to the DFE 2008 school sport survey data which analysed GCSE attainment. It showed that between 2007 and 2010, on the measure of the percentage of students attaining five A to C grades at GCSE, the average performance at sports colleges improved by 7.8%. In the same period, the national group improved by 4%, so the rate at which sports colleges improved was faster than the national average, closing the gap on the national average.

Q176 Charlotte Leslie: Devil’s advocate-how specifically were various factors able to be isolated? Would a statistician say, "Yes, we can isolate sport as a definite factor in that" or was it because there was perhaps a change of leadership or extra funding? A myriad of factors could have affected that change. How robust is it?

Dame Tessa Jowell: You may want to ask to see a copy of the report, and perhaps get a memorandum from any remaining officials from DFE who worked on this about the rigour of the methodology, but certainly we were very determined that we would measure the impact of this substantial investment committed over many years. That is one part of the evidence, but you are absolutely right that you could go into sports colleges and furnish a book of anecdotes about the levels of achievement that sport seemed to motivate.

Q177 Chair: You said clearly that the political will was there for the legacy at the time when the bid went in. Are the political will and resources there now to deliver the legacy?

Dame Tessa Jowell: That is much more questionable. My view is that if you had Ministers here in front of you they would say that yes certainly the will is there. The decision to dismantle what was in place in 2010 and was delivering remarkable results from a system that was admired by other countries around the world-the Australians were copying it, as were the Canadians, and the Brazilians wanted to emulate it as they prepared for Rio-was incomprehensible. One day, I would love to see the advice and hear who advised the Secretary of State to remove the ring fence from the money and dismantle school sport partnerships, because we have seen over the last three years the gradual re-creation, in a rather piecemeal, initiative-driven way, of what was in place in 2010, which was a long-term national strategy. The reason this was a strategy conceived for the long term is that it marked an end of the day when the good-natured chemistry teacher or music teacher was prepared to do a couple of sessions of football after school. It recognised all the evidence that, if children are going to learn physical co-ordination, motor skills and so forth, they have to be taught by trained PE teachers. If they are going to learn to love a range of sports, they need to be exposed to a range of choice, but taught by people who are properly skilled to teach sport.

That was the strategy. It was a strategy that was working and any aspects of it that were not working could have been fixed administratively, because there is no ideology in implementation. We were absolutely passionate about realising an Olympic legacy in this way.

Q178 Neil Carmichael: Last week we were discussing what is happening in primary schools and there was widespread agreement in support of that, as necessary and right, because, obviously, the younger children get access to sport, the better. But there are two problems. One is that a lot of primary schools are just too small to have the right kind of facilities. Allied to that, the range of teachers simply may not be big enough to cover the right kind of sports. You have just said how important it is to have access to a lot of different sports. The question is, how do we formulate a policy where primary schools, in particular, are encouraged to co-operate more? That is a way of countering those two difficulties.

Dame Tessa Jowell: What you do is create what was called a family of schools, so you have a group of primary schools working with secondary schools and specialist schools, to get precisely that volume that enables you to deliver the range and choice. I think that Sue, who was the architect of that model, will want to say a bit more about that.

Baroness Campbell: The school sports partnership model was designed against the issues that were of concern to us. One of the biggest issues, which still is here, is this lack of expertise in primary physical education at primary school level. During the school sports partnership, we appointed in every primary school a primary link teacher, who was a generalist teacher who was released 12 days a year to get professional development in physical education. That did make a shift change. It has slipped back.

On my tour of Britain, which I am calling my concert tour, going round talking to all these primary head teachers, their biggest issue is a lack of expertise in school to deliver this. It is not that they do not see it or understand the importance of health-they do understand the importance of the educational impact of this subject-but they just do not have expertise in the schools. So you could start to create a peripatetic physical education specialist that works around a number of schools in a cluster, which takes us back to the concept we had, but maybe moves it on a bit in terms of it being a primary specialist as opposed to the school sport co-ordinator who was a secondary specialist released off-timetable to help primary colleagues. So we could move this forward.

There is no way that every primary school-all 18,000 of them-can afford, or indeed occupy, a full-time PE specialist, but they do need specialist support and mentoring. I am hearing-the schools say very clearly to me-that they are going to use some of the money they have got at the moment to begin to create this peripatetic role of someone who can provide mentoring in sport to a number of primary schools and raise professional standards across those schools.

Baroness Grey-Thompson: One of the issues outside the sector is where we interchange the words, "sport", "physical activity" and "physical education". We are probably guilty of doing that within the sector slightly, as well, because we all think we know what we mean by it. But within a small primary school, actually what you can do-we think about sport and they might not have the facilities. If they start thinking about physical activity and have the skills and ability to be creative with what they do with the children, they are then able to link in to other primary schools. I think we could actually do something quite exciting. In a small community, if you are thinking, "How do we play football and hockey when we just have a small hall and a bit of grass outside?", then obviously it seems too big and too challenging.

Q179 Bill Esterson: You have all described, in various different ways, the value and benefits of sport, physical activity or a combination of both, in health, learning and improving the life chances of children, including disabled and excluded children. We have had strong comments on that. I just wonder how strong the evidence and evaluation of that are. I completely accept it, from my own background, but how strong is the evidence? I just wondered whether Ministers fully accept it or not, given the discussion that we have had here and the way that you, Tessa, described how it has had to be re-created after school sports partnerships were disbanded. I just wonder whether Ministers fully appreciate the evidence and what the real evaluation is.

Baroness Campbell: I think we have plenty of evidence, but I guess it sometimes comes down to a sort of philosophical view about how education should be carried out. There is plenty of evidence, whether it is the evidence that Tessa outlined for specialist sports colleges in terms of academic achievement, or the evidence we have from an extensive programme funded by BSkyB called "Living for Sport", which is targeted at small cohorts of disadvantaged youngsters who are about to disengage from education. We can demonstrate that we are recovering nearly 70% of those youngsters back into the mainstream. These are kids on the verge of exclusion.

It is too simplistic to think that this is just sports somehow doing it. This is not going and doing five-a-side with these kids; this is using sports, its values and its context, and understanding it as a vehicle to change. I know you know its impact in terms of boxing and so on. You can transform kids’ lives with this thing.

It is important-Tanni made this point-that we use the words "physical education". It is a national curriculum subject; it is not a nice-to-do extra, but is at the heart of the curriculum. We have not helped our teachers or head teachers maximise the use of that, except through our specialist sports colleges. We were beginning to cascade that out, and I think we have lost that a little bit. We need to get that back. Physical education as a national curriculum subject can be a powerful force for good. Then you add sport provision as a supplement and complement to that, and you add and engage health and activity for those who take part in physical education, but we want to get them into a daily active lifestyle.

There is plenty of evidence to show the impact of healthy children on academic achievement. We have plenty of initiatives that show the impact on behaviour, attendance and truancy. We have the evidence; it is whether people want to believe it.

Dame Tessa Jowell: There is also a good body of evidence that shows that if you do not ring-fence money that you want spent on sport, it will not be spent on sport.

Baroness Campbell: That would be true of teacher release. Where we had teacher release, it was very hard to track it because we were not allowed to track it. However, we know-again, I am afraid that it is anecdotal in its nature-that only 60% to 70% of schools used that money for the purpose it was intended, and 30% did not. Again, I think that that is indicative of head teachers’ understanding of the power of this subject. That is partly because we have just not embedded it in that way.

Q180 Bill Esterson: If the evidence is there, why aren’t Ministers accepting it?

Baroness Campbell: You would have to ask them that. I can’t answer that.

Bill Esterson: I am sure we will.

Dame Tessa Jowell: Can I add to that? I think that the policy has suffered to some degree through fragmentation across Government. That was a struggle that we had when we were in government-to achieve proper lockstep between DCMS and DFE. Also, as you rightly said, there is an important role for the Department of Health. That template really needs to be set within Government. This decision was led by the Secretary of State for Education, who had some pretty bad advice.

Q181 Charlotte Leslie: Where would you put sport in departmental arrangements? Where should it be?

Baroness Campbell: School sport or sport?

Q182 Charlotte Leslie: Sport as a whole, because I am not sure that we understand the culture of sport and use it to its maximum. Where would you put it? At the moment, it is the last letter of DCMS, and that does not seem to reflect the importance that it has.

Baroness Campbell: Having been the chair of UK Sport and been responsible for elite sport, it most certainly suitably fitted, as did community sport, into DCMS and the wider local authority cultural strategies and so on. My instinct around school sport is that unless it is embedded in education; unless head teachers see this as value; and unless Ofsted is seen to be inspecting it and valuing it, it is always going to be an add-on. I agree with Tessa. There are three huge Departments here, and I do not know that we have ever found the real answer to this. I remember, in the early days, trying to put a strategy together. I used to run from DCMS to DFES and then dash into DOH. It was trying to pull together those three agendas. For me, school sport must be embedded in education.

Q183 Chair: Is it so important that we should have a sports Department?

Baroness Campbell: I’ll let you take that, Tessa.

Dame Tessa Jowell: To take Ms Leslie’s point, I think that, increasingly, modern Government will have to adapt and be more flexible and move beyond delivery in established Departments. I think that that creates rigidities. It means that every pound is not as effectively spent. The structure of delivery in modern Government will need to be more thematic, rather than departmental. The point is, you are probably talking to the three most partisan people, or three of the most partisan people in the world, who would say, "Yes, there should be a Secretary of State for Sport, because of the intrinsic benefits and all the consequential benefits." For all we know, there could be a parallel inquiry into childhood obesity being undertaken by the Health Committee. There is no point in wringing your hands about the intractability of childhood obesity and seeing children doing less sport and less physical activity in school, because that is the way you stop it.

Q184 Neil Carmichael: The question of the location of sport is an interesting one. Everyone remembers Denis Howell as Minister of Sport. He doubled up as Minister of snow and then drought. It underlines the slightly awkward positioning that sport has had.

I want to go back to the question about primary schools. What you were saying before, Baroness Campbell, about the need for proper training and so forth in primary schools applies to other subjects as well. You could sketch an argument for more co-operation between schools, certainly primary schools, on more than just sport. I just put that on the table. The real question that needs to be asked, and we did probe it last week with other experts, is about the role of Ofsted in judging the performance of schools and whether Ofsted itself has the right expertise to make a judgment about sport and the way in which sport is being promoted in schools.

Dame Tessa Jowell: A quick point about the first part of your question. Certainly our Government ran creative partnerships, an analogous model to school sports partnerships, for children to be able to engage in creative activity, linked to big and, for the most part, prestigious institutions as well. Yes, you can see this as a very effective way of ensuring that all children have these enrichment activities.

On the second question, on the competence of Ofsted, I am sure the Committee has seen and you have read their most recent report, which I think was a very thorough and authoritative report, which must presume that they have the competence to make these judgments.

Q185 Bill Esterson: Tanni, you were in the running to be the chair of Sport England. Perhaps you can say what your priorities would be if you had become chair.

Baroness Grey-Thompson: I am not sure that my priorities would have changed. We have to take PE and physical activity much more seriously in schools, from primary school onwards. We have to look seriously at teacher training. We are missing a massive opportunity if we do not do that for the health of future generations. We have to be slightly smarter. We could put pressure on some of our governing bodies to do better work-certainly around linking disabled children into sports opportunities, as opposed to physical activity.

It comes back to the previous question about whether sport is taken seriously enough. I do not think that it is. It is always seen as something lovely, and when we have a successful Olympics and Paralympics the athletes get turned out, but because it is hard to do, it sometimes gets ignored in the years in between. It is a big challenge, but if we want to do something that is radically different for our young people, it means sensible investment.

Q186 Bill Esterson: So the legacy in schools could be for sport to be taken seriously.

Baroness Grey-Thompson: That would be a pretty good legacy.

Q187 Chair: Do you think that sport is taken seriously by the two big beasts, the Department of Health and the Department for Education?

Baroness Grey-Thompson: No.

Q188 Chair: Do you think that that is one of the recommendations this Committee should be making strongly?

Baroness Grey-Thompson: It all links together, doesn’t it? I can imagine the difficulty of just getting the three Ministers in a room together, let alone their special advisers. I do not think that sport’s impact is taken as seriously as it should be. We are trying to save money because of the tough economic times, but the obesity bill will keep rising and welfare benefits will keep rising. Actually, sport and physical activity can do an awful lot to challenge and help those things.

Q189 Craig Whittaker: I want to ask about the School Games. In particular, we have heard from a lot of witnesses how effective they have been at aiding disabled sports, and I wondered whether you agreed with that.

Baroness Grey-Thompson: The School Games are useful and it is important to have a focus. In disability sport, we have a plethora of organisations and different championships. If you added up how many national championships there are, there would be loads. I could not even begin to guess how many there are among wheelchair sports championships, sports-specific championships and deaf sports. The priority placed on UK School Games should be higher in terms of channelling young people into that route, but there is a massive challenge in terms of finding enough young people to fill the sports. I know that there has been a lot of debate and discussion about the right sports to have there.

In my sport of wheelchair racing, you sometimes struggle to get eight girls competing. That is a massive worry for the sport in terms of its future Paralympic potential. It is a wake-up call. It is not down to the UK School Games to change the number of people participating, but it is down to schools and governing bodies to focus on what they are doing. Personally, I do not think that there is enough focus in some governing bodies on what they are doing at that age group. There is definitely a move towards minimal impairment and lower level disability as opposed to looking across all the different impairment groups to find enough people to compete in those sports.

Baroness Campbell: The School Games are still a relatively new initiative. I guess one of the problems when you keep changing strategy is that things get bedded down, then they disappear and then you bed them down. Overall, more than 17,000 schools are now registered to take part in the School Games.

You probably know by now that there are four levels of competition. From the very outset, the Secretary of State from DCMS-now at the Department of Health-was very clear that he wanted inclusion at the top of the agenda. The very framework was built around it being inclusive in practice. The 50 Project Ability schools that sit across the country are particularly responsible for ensuring that the School Games are inclusive. They do that by helping to train and support teachers and coaches to ensure that we can have a fully inclusive programme. Tanni is right that that does not mean that it has solved the problem, but it means that it has got the right approach. I think we are making real headway with the School Games, but my view is that if you are going to create a real transformational change in school sport we have to have some sort of cross-party agenda-a bit like we did for the Olympics-that allows us to have some sustainable strands of investment that allow us to really transform things. You are not going to transform things in a window of two or three years-it just isn’t doable. You can change a few things and you can make a few things better, but you don’t make that step change. If we are going to make a step change with competition in schools, using the School Games as a vehicle, it needs to have long-term, sustainable support.

Q190 Craig Whittaker: Judging on what you have just said, Baroness Campbell, would it be unfair to say that this is actually part of the legacy and not just a branding as part of the legacy of what was already happening anyway?

Baroness Campbell: Things were happening. We had a level four school games for six years before we had the School Games, called the UK School Games, which was funded by the Legacy Trust. We had some competition managers on the ground, who were part of the school sports partnership framework and were improving competition. The difference here is that we have a national model now. That is allowing us to work with governing bodies to create a very clear framework that sits alongside their other governing body framework, so we have not got a schools framework and a club framework, we have a framework for young people. That is a big step forward, but it is going to take time to bed in and really deliver what everybody wants of it. I would just say, to finish, that competition is one part of the legacy. It cannot be viewed as the legacy; it is a part of what we are trying to do here for young people.

Dame Tessa Jowell: The final point that I wanted to add about the School Games is that it was quite easy that they be prestigious in the Olympic year, but maintaining their prestige, and the idea that this is a big thing to be part of for young people competing, is incredibly important. That comes through a number of things: not just the level of financial support but also the athletes who are the associated faces, and so forth. So it is not just going to happen: a lot of investment and effort is going to have to be made, particularly post the Olympics, when the risk is that there is a bit of a dip in public concentration on this.

Q191 Chris Skidmore: I want to turn to school sports partnerships. I know we have mentioned them throughout our discussion. Can you sum up what the loss of school partnerships means empirically on the ground, from what you have seen? We have received some evidence, but we would be very grateful for your thoughts about their removal and what the impact of that will mean for schools.

Baroness Campbell: What I said right at the beginning is that it is the unified offer that has gone. There are still some good areas where, through effort on behalf of the old partnership, they have sustained themselves, but there are also now patches where there is very limited good practice. So we have gone from universality of offer to a patchwork quilt. Probably the three biggest things we lost were, first, capacity-a consistency of capacity; some of it has been retained by people managing to self-sustain, but we have lost that consistent capacity to effect change. The biggest losers were primary, because the school sport co-ordinator person released out of the secondary school-a PE specialist released off timetable, working with that family of primary schools-was having a real impact on primary provision. Where that has not been retained, primary have been the big losers.

Q192 Chris Skidmore: When you say that has a real impact on primary provision, what would that relate to for the offer for the pupil, aside from the money given to a PE teacher or specialist?

Baroness Campbell: Because we had an ambition through the school sports partnerships to ensure that all young people got a minimum of two hours of PE and sport a week-I know you cannot make that statutory, but it was an implied minimum standard-what we got was more time for PE in our primary curriculum, for a start. That has slipped back: there is no question but that in those schools where we haven’t got any presence, it has slipped back. It was about providing support for the classroom teachers who are not specialists in physical education, 50% of whom have less than 10 hours’ training in PE before they are out in front of the class. Just to pick up the point that has been made, it is a different context for teaching physical education from virtually all other subjects, which happen in a classroom, where the management of the environment is very similar. The moment they are outside, they are moving. That environment is quite scary and very challenging. We have classroom teachers who, when surveyed in Ofsted reports or ones that we have done, are lacking in confidence and competence to teach the subject well. The words Ofsted used were that they "lacked the specialist knowledge needed to teach PE well".

What those people were doing was providing that much needed mentoring, support and, in a way, hand holding to help those teachers to begin to deliver more effectively. In some places, we have retained that but in some places that has now gone. The new money-the new £150 million-that is going directly to every primary head teacher, some will use really effectively but I fear many may not.

Dame Tessa Jowell: In addition to the structural outline that Sue has clearly given, we have lost the sheer range and choice of sports. Having that range and choice is important to maximise the participation by boys and girls.

In all the sports colleges and school sports partnerships I visited I was very struck by the absolutely relentless focus on engaging girls particularly. I think some very uninformed and stupid comments have been made about, for instance, aerobic exercise, dance, street dance and that kind of thing. The specialists would say that for young girls the important thing is good cardiac exercise, raising the heart rate. Of course, the thing is that once you are exposed to that, and you have young girls who feel fitter and healthier, the evidence is that they go on to choose other sports.

So one thing is exposing young people to a range of individual and team sports. The other we have not yet addressed. It is the question of participation and competition. School sports partnerships were designed to do both, while at the same time recognising that a young swimmer might start off splashing around in the primary class but show real aptitude. That young person, as they go through school, is likely to need a lot of help with organising themselves, the balance between their school work and training time, in order to realise their potential in school and in their chosen sport.

It really aggrieved me when I saw a lot of school sports partnership staff described as bureaucrats. You can’t get into school competition unless you have somebody who is going to book the buses, tell the parents that the kids are going to be home late, arrange packed lunches. There is a lot of organisation in getting maybe 300 or 400 children from a secondary school over a weekend taking part in competition. That is what school sports partnerships were able to do, by having designated people who had jobs to ensure that happened.

Baroness Grey-Thompson: They might not have been perfect everywhere, but they delivered a huge amount of opportunity for young people. What Tessa said is so important. So many women of my age and younger had an horrific experience of physical education in school, being forced to do competitive sport in gym knickers and aertex blouses. They don’t do that any more, thank goodness.

We need to be really creative about how we engage with young women, and everybody, not just the sporty boys who are valued. One thing I find really difficult about political decisions is, how much money did we spend scrapping the school sports partnerships, as opposed to the funding that is now going back into primary schools? In sport, we recreate the wheel so many different times. If you look at the structure of Sport England, it has been centralised and regionalised and centralised again. I would be fascinated to know how much money we spend on restructuring as opposed to project spend. We need to focus our money on a long-term strategy that is passionate about physical activity and sport, not worry too much about who does what. I get very frustrated about the amount of money we spend.

Q193 Chris Skidmore: On the issue of money, I know that Michael Gove is reported in The Times Educational Supplement as saying there is an issue with the financial sustainability of school sports partnerships. Would you agree with those comments? Written evidence has been submitted to us saying that spending did not ensure sustainability and created a culture of dependency on continued funding.

Dame Tessa Jowell: School sports partnerships were very good value for money. As Tanni said, not all of them were perfect, so you have Ofsted as an instrument to ensure inspections, just as Ofsted is charged with responsibility for quality in schools. That goes back to my point that there is no point in talking about the number of kids who cause trouble by not being in school or who become overweight or prone to various forms of diabetes and other obesity-related conditions and then saying, "But we cannot afford to sustain spending on sport." Sport is the way in which you begin to turn that around, to turn around the epidemic of childhood obesity and the disengagement of disaffected young children-those young people who have no sense of pride in themselves.

Talk to the girls who go boxing about what they discover in themselves. These are girls who, before they took up boxing, in many cases did not have very much going for them. If the three of us sound frustrated, it is because it is so simple, but you have to will the end, you have to decide that you are going to do it and you have to carry on doing it. That was why, in the summer, I said, "The Opposition are prepared to engage in a long-term commitment to school sports partnerships, or if somebody has a better alternative, but it has to be sustained for the long term, and then we’ll see in 10 years’ time a generation of children who are fitter, healthier and more motivated and who will populate our future generation of gold medal winners, and so forth."

Bill Esterson: I was just going to ask whether getting rid of school sports partnerships will reduce our medal haul in the Olympics and Paralympics, but you might have just answered that question.

Q194 Charlotte Leslie: Boxing for young women who have suffered sexual abuse is extremely efficient and good at getting back pride and confidence in their bodies. I have two very quick things. First, do you think there is any merit in what is often said to me, which is that because we have a lot of civil servants who may have been happier in the library than on the sports field, there is a general culture in politics that does not understand what sport can do?

Dame Tessa Jowell: You have two antidotes to that here.

Q195 Charlotte Leslie: Secondly, on links to amateur sports clubs, you gave the example of a swimmer. In my swimming experience, if you want to progress, you need to be linked up with an amateur sports club. For middle-class kids, it is great because their parent will take them, but for children who come from less organised and more chaotic backgrounds, that is often not the case. Is that something school sports partnerships did, and is it something we should be working on more in our organisations and schools?

Baroness Campbell: It did make a significant inroad into that. Just to answer the slightly frivolous first part of your question, I think it is an issue. I look back as a physical education teacher and think, "I wonder how many people I put off this subject in my life," because I seem to meet them every day in Government. I obviously did a pretty bad job as a physical education teacher, but if physical education is taught well, it should be something that people remember as being relevant, purposeful and enjoyable, and it should give them a platform. Whether that platform takes them on to sport or on to just being healthy and having an active lifestyle, the platform is critical.

On the second part of your question, I think it is very important that schools have links to communities and clubs. Quite often, when people talk about drop out, what they are looking at is the drop out between schools and clubs. That tends to be for those who want to do sport. It doesn’t look at those youngsters who want to go from activity to a more leisure-based activity programme, a recreation programme or just a physical activity programme. So when we talk about the massive drop off of girls, for example, if you are looking at those who register to play hockey, netball and so on, it would look like a significant drop off. If you look at those girls who are joining the local dance, yoga or fitness group, it probably would not be as bad. We sometimes get this school club link in our minds, which says that everyone has got to go to a club. Clubs cater for people who want to do sport, but we want to provide a wider range. We are trying to connect schools to a much wider provision in the community, beyond just the NGB clubs.

Q196 Chris Skidmore: Between April and May this year, the Committee commissioned its own online survey of teachers to find out the impact of the abolition of school sports partnerships. We had 258 respondents, of which 60% said that they were still involved in their own informal SSPs, but 95% stated that they were still actively involved in competitive sport. Do you feel that, even though we have had the abolition of SSPs, in a way the focus on competitive sports will continue, in which case, can we truly justify the fact that-even with removing the money for SSPs-competitive sports will continue?

Baroness Campbell: Again, we must keep the balance that competitive sport is one area of legacy-it cannot be the only one, or you would exclude nearly 70% of the young people we are talking about. On competitive sport, remember that we replaced the 450 partnership development managers we made redundant with 450 school games organisers a month later. So we made 450 full-time partnership development managers redundant, and replaced them with 450 three-days-a-week school games organisers. The reason people are still experiencing competition is that those school games organisers are still doing a very good job-they cost a little less, they have a little less time, but they are entirely focused on competition. If you were to ask the question, what we have probably lost is that wider provision that Tessa is talking about, rather than the competition framework, which through the School Games organisers and the work we do with the governing bodies is actually slowly getting stronger-and, I have to say, probably would have done under the previous system. We are making that a little stronger, but it is that wider provision that matters.

Dame Tessa Jowell: I also draw the Committee’s attention to the report by the Smith Institute, which was published last week and had some quite extensive media coverage. It shows the level of reduction: an estimated third of schools reporting a decrease in sports since the end of ring-fencing; for 68% of school sports staff, a decrease of participation in their area; and 86% of staff saying that they preferred the school sports partnership model. So it would be worth putting that together with the other evidence that the Committee has had a chance to consider.

Baroness Grey-Thompson: I do not know the figures for London, in terms of where our Olympic medallists came from, but for Beijing 37% of our Olympic medallists came from the independent sector. We do not have that data for the Paralympics. In terms of what we spend on health, prevention or the criminal justice system, £150 million is a drop in the ocean. A pressure sore for a disabled person can cost £200,000; actually being physically active can prevent some of those things happening. If we invested in the state sector in the way that the independent sector does, just think how good we could be at the Olympics and Paralympics; we could actually be amazingly good, as opposed to just being pretty good, as we are now. That tends to be the focus for a lot of the time that we look at medals. If the independent sector stopped concentrating on physical activity, and then it affected our Olympic and Paralympic medallists, there might be more of a concentration and focus on what we do across the board. To declare an interest, my daughter is at an independent school because it takes PE seriously-there is someone to book the bus, to organise the competitions and to make sure that they can do that at the end of every school day. That is where school sports partnerships were absolutely amazing, in terms of really making a big difference.

Chair: Okay. Thank you. We have come to the end of our questions. Thank you again for coming along to see us this morning. If there is anything else that you think of-something that is burning which you think you should have said-please write to us. Thank you.