I was very interested in the recent article published in The Telegraph regarding the Education Secretary’s comments about ‘banning children’ from playing sport. You can read the article here.

Nicky Morgan states that playing games and participating in sport can help to develop children’s character traits that they need to succeed in life. She accuses schools of wrapping the children in ‘cotton wool’ instead, fearing children might injure themselves or get upset. The article cited many examples of activities such as running and skipping, and games such as Tag and British Bulldog that were being banned. In my youth (a long time ago), we used to play games in our primary school playground that would make teachers today tremble with the fear of litigation! My personal favourite was Wall Ball, where one boy threw the hardest ball (or object) he could find at his friends standing against a wall only a few metres away, aiming to hit anyone not nimble enough to evade. Yes, we did get hurt on occasion (my mum used to despair at the almost daily hole in my trousers around the knees) but we were all active and developing physical skills that later transferred to the various sports we went on to play. The article also refers to children getting upset and squabbles erupting over playground disputes. Looking back, these were how we developed our social skills and coping mechanisms. Maybe I am just being overly nostalgic..?

To be honest, I’m not sure how children and young people are supposed to meet the guidelines of at least 1 hour of vigorous-intensity physical activity every day when children sit down all day in the classroom to do work, and then go home to sit down and do their homework. PE in many schools I have been involved with often seems to be an afterthought, and insufficient to develop health, tackle obesity and develop the “character, resilience and grit” Nicky Morgan refers to. I used to get my physical activity quota through break-time and lunchtime play, and as this now seems to be undermined, a solution needs to be found to prevent the disturbing numbers of overweight and obese children.

One such solution is described in an article from the Daily Mail here in which they write about a Scottish primary school, St Ninians, which several years ago introduced a scheme in which the children run a mile every day. They assert this has resulted in the school having no overweight children and an improvement in behaviour. This great scheme has reportedly been replicated in over 500 other primary schools across the UK, and a campaign has been launched to spread it even further. It just seems a shame that we now have to programme running into the school timetable, when playing games during breaks would do this naturally.