North leaders mount campaign to save school sports

Nov 11 2010 The Journal

SCHOOL sport leaders in the North East are mounting a campaign to survive funding cuts they claim will create a generation of less healthy children.

Last month the Department for Education announced it would axe cash for 450 School Sport Partnerships across the country as part of the Government’s sweeping spending review.

Funding for SSPs, which support schools in delivering physical education lessons and activities, amounts to around £161m annually.

The bodies were set up to raise levels of sports participation in English schools, and have introduced over a million more young people to competitive sport in the last three years.

Partnerships across the North East are now in talks to form an alliance to overcome a funding black hole, which will come into force next August.

Supporters have set up a Facebook group called Save School Sport Partnerships, and petitions are being set up.

And the partnerships are exploring new funding streams, including the private sector and lobbying governors for increased portions of existing school budgets.

Joyce Matthews, development manager for Newcastle SSP, which receives £336,000 per year from the Department for Education, has warned that pupils’ health and academic performance will suffer if the partnerships disappear.

Newcastle SSP has co-ordinators who are based in every secondary school to promote PE, and support teachers in meeting curriculum requirements and delivering imaginative sports lessons.

Mrs Matthews said: “What politicians don’t seem to appreciate is that sport in schools helps academic achievement.

“It teaches leadership, organisation, and concentration, as well as health and well-being.

“We’re unlikely to reverse the Government’s decision so we’re thinking of other ways to make sure we survive beyond August 2011. We may not continue in our current form, but we’re determined to stick around and will be asking headteachers and governors to set aside more of their school budgets to support the fantastic work we do.”

Newcastle SSP has been has been hailed a huge success since it was launched six years ago, and schools already supplement the Government’s funding from their own budgets.

In 2003, 43% of city pupils participated in two hours per week of PE and school sport. By 2009 that percentage had risen to 91%.

But as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review, Education Secretary Michael Gove announced that the network of SSPs was “neither affordable nor likely to be the best way to help schools achieve their potential in improving competitive sport”.

Mr Gove said the Government would instead encourage more competitive sport through the creation of an annual Olympic-style sport competition.

He later insisted he was not “closing down” SSPs but that, instead, they were being “entrusted to schools” to decide how to use them in the future.