SPORTS ANALYSIS
Tasks for the new government
John Goodbody gives his views on
W
e may be in difficult times financially and the new gov- ernment may have to cut costs, but much of British
sport should be able to survive the next few years because of firm commitments that have been made until the 2012 Olympic Games and because the Nation- al Lottery has been and will be such a constant and valuable source of revenue. There’s no doubt that the last three
Labour governments have transformed the financial structure of British sport, at both elite level, with almost £600m going towards the athletes’ preparation for the 2012 Games, and at the grass roots. Many new facilities have been built and there have been new resourc- es for schools and local clubs. The explosion in funding in British
sport began in 1990 with John Major reducing the betting tax on all-seater football stadiums following the T
aylor
Report. Would he have done the same thing one wonders, if he had known about the money from Sky TV that would gush into the game from 1992? Then in 1994, Major created the Na-
tional Lottery. It was this innovation that brought the framework for Labour to begin its work in sport three years later. In the last 13 years, £3.2bn has flowed
from the Lottery into sport. The money that has attracted most of the head- lines has been the government support for the 2012 Olympics – both the facili- ties for the Games and the Exchequer finance for the athletes’ preparation – amounts of cash that would have been unthinkable even 20 years ago. But, in addition, those Labour
governments have poured money into schools’ sport, £2.4bn since 2003, as Gerry Sutcliffe, the Minister for Sport in Gordon Brown’s last government, re- peatedly pointed out in the run-up to the election. As he proudly said, fewer than a quarter of all state schoolchildren
Issue 2 2010 © cybertrek 2010
The next Minister for Sport must make it an absolute priority to get more people active in the run-up to London 2012
were doing two hours of PE in 1997 and this figure has risen to 93 percent in 2010. Even his opposite number, Hugh Robertson, accepted that the Tories had allowed community sport to wither in the 1980s and credited successive Labour governments with increasing Exchequer funding. So, apart from actually hosting the
Olympics – and it’s difficult to over- estimate its impact in the sporting landscape – what are the main challeng- es facing our new government? One is clearly what Robertson summed up before the election as
“the lack of a viable mass participa- tion sports legacy”. There needs to be far better co-ordination and direction to ensure that this objective, which was promoted at the time London got the Games in 2005, is amply fulfilled. As Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on sport, said in April: ”The next Minister for Sport must make it an absolute priority to get more people ac- tive in the run-up to the Olympics and beyond, by targeting resources at grass- roots, community and school sports.”
The last Labour government certainly
took a step in the right direction by un- derwriting free swimming for over 60s and under 16s. However, this would be more valuable if greater provision could be made for coaches to oversee some of those taking advantage of this initiative. Perhaps the greatest task for the new
government is to look at the need for better PE teaching in primary schools. This is a subject on which Professor Margaret Talbot, the chief executive of the Associa- tion for Physical Education, waxes lyrical. She accepts that some primary teachers do get adequate training at some colleges before taking up their posts. However, she adds: ”Our estimate is that nearly 40 per cent of newly-qualified teachers go into primary schools, who have had six hours or less initial teacher training for PE, which is just scandalous.” It is here, perhaps, where the new
government has most work to do. A high standard of PE in childhood will establish the necessary basic qualities for whatever sport is later carried out as a youth and adult. It’s time that this is- sue was properly addressed. ●
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