Today, the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee published the final report from its Game On inquiry into community and school sport.
The report draws on input and expertise from across the sport sector, including Women in Sport’s knowledge and insight. We provided written evidence to the inquiry as well as being asked to speak at one of the inquiry’s in-person sessions in Parliament last year. Our research, policy and solutions are well represented throughout the report, particularly on school sport and teenage girls.
Game On was a wide-ranging inquiry that covered the majority of issues related to grassroots sport in England. The report’s recommendations reflect this scope. Some key recommendations include calling on the Government to:
- Develop a new cross-departmental strategy for sport, physical activity and health.
- Double the proportion of Government spending that is allocated to sport and physical activity, investing in proven projects to increase activity levels – including Big Sister.
- Transform PE and school sport by improving teacher training in PE, introducing kit and uniform policies that empower girls instead of making them feel self-conscious, making PE a core subject with a guarantee of two hours of high-quality lessons per week, broadening the range of sports and activities available, maintaining competition in schools and enabling children to be more active throughout the school day.
- Encourage, enable and fund programmes to take full advantage of the link between physical activity and health, and the subsequent benefits for the NHS this could have.
- Better protect local sport and leisure centres by making providing sporting and leisure facilities a statutory requirement for local authorities, accompanied by funding to allow them to do so.
Women in Sport welcomes the vision and ambition shown in this report. If taken up in full, these recommendations could have a huge impact on sport and physical activity in England, especially for women and girls.
We are thrilled to see the Committee recognise the value of Big Sister, our partnership with Places Leisure which supports teenage girls to stay active at a time in their lives when so many fall out of love with sport. We know that Big Sister works and the recommendation in the report that the Government should provide funding and support for it is a vindication of that. Our door is always open should the Government wish to have that conversation.
More money for sport and physical activity would of course be welcome. And whilst we recognise that this is unlikely to happen in the immediate future, the report is correct to make the point that more money spent on sport now would leave to a cost saving for the wider Government budget, and especially the NHS, in the future. Support for local authorities would also be a positive step. We know that women and girls are disproportionately likely to make use of their local leisure centres and that any closures or reduction in services thus affect them more. We welcome the recommendation to require local authorities to provide sport and leisure, but this cannot happen without proper support from central government.
We also support the recommendations the report makes around school sport, particularly the recognition that more must be done to train the teachers who are delivering PE and school sport. For us, this must mean more focus on better training and ongoing support to enable teachers, and all those involved in the delivery of school sport, to fully understand the impacts of gender stereotyping and female physiology. The recommendation to deliver a wider range of sport in schools is also welcome, though any moves in this direction must focus on choice and allowing girls access to find the sport they love. We appreciate that the Government is currently undertaking a significant amount of work on school sport, including a new PE curriculum, and we hope that the recommendations in this report will be factored into that work.
We have long argued that there must be much better cross-department cooperation in Westminster to maximise the potential benefits of sport to women and girls – and indeed the whole of society. We have seen good examples of this in practice having a real impact in specific policy areas; for example, the cooperative work between the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Education on school sport. But it must go further than this and in particular, given the huge potential benefits to the NHS, the Department for Health and Social Care should be more involved in sport and physical activity policy. It is noteworthy that the Government doesn’t currently have an overall strategy for sport and physical activity. We agree that they should.
The Government will have to respond to the Committee’s report in the coming weeks. We look forward to this, and to working with both Government and the Committee to deliver the recommendations.
