By claiming that the 450 school sports programmes fail to encourage high-level competition, the education secretary is ignoring both the facts and the scheme's wider benefits
Here are two things you can do with £162m. First, you could pay off most – although not quite all – of the cost overrun on the London 2012 swimming pool, commissioned from the celebrity architect Zaha Hadid at an estimated cost of £75m and recently revealed to be costing £268m. Or you could wholly fund a nationwide school sports programme in which primary and secondary schools are linked to provide the sort of opportunities hitherto only dreamt about by those who believe that sport can play a constructive role in the education and upbringing of young people.
Today the House of Commons will debate the decision of Michael Gove, the education secretary, to toss the school sports programme on to the bonfire, replacing it with a "Schools Olympics", funded to the tune of £10m, of which no details have been supplied (and you can just see that one flying, can't you?). By claiming that the 450 SSPs operating across the country fail to encourage high-level competition between schools, Gove is ignoring both the facts and the scheme's wider benefits.
When I cast aspersions on his decision in this column last week, the response was immediate and passionate. What it suggests is that Gove is destroying not an expensive quango with ideas that go beyond its capacity to perform but something that actually works.
Mark Kenny is a retired games master who now does voluntary lunchtime coaching at a school in south London. "Even with a poor, small playing field, the school football team got to the final of the Premier League schools tournament, held at Ewood Park [Blackburn Rovers' ground]," he writes. "To get to the final the team won three tournaments and played 23 very competitive matches. Without the help of the Merton school sports partnership, we wouldn't have been able to go to Blackburn. It has organised numerous tournaments, run coaching courses, gone into schools and generally transformed state school sports in Merton. All Gove's criticisms are wrong."
At the other end of the country, Robin King is a governor of an inner‑city primary in Newcastle. "Primary schools tend to be small (one- or two‑form entry) so that specialist teachers in subjects such as PE, music, art, drama, etc are a luxury," he writes. Such teaching, he points out, can best be done through specialist teams shared between schools, with the aid of local sports clubs.
"In the part of Newcastle where I am a governor we have an initiative – Lean East – to combat obesity," he continues. "This aims at instilling healthy eating and regular exercise as a way of life. The SSPs ... have done marvellous work in promoting and facilitating different forms of exercise.
"At our school not only do children participate in the usual football, but have also been exposed to other activities such as golf, badminton, basketball, rugby, athletics, gymnastics, cricket, tennis and dance, all of which would be beyond the scope of a normal primary school budget."
Such an approach not only exposes the words used by David Cameron to deceive Parliament when he claimed last week that the number of schools offering rugby, hockey, netball and gymnastics had actually fallen, without mentioning the increased participation in 30 other sports. It also, as Mr King points out, encourages the inclusion of children who have been made to feel inadequate if they fail to shine at football.
"Results from a higher degree of exercise have included healthier, more focused children, and an awareness of co-operation and leadership skills – this especially so at secondary level," he says. "SSPs are not about organising competitions for the elite sportsmen, as Mr Gove seems to want. What SSPs are about is encouraging children to exercise regularly to some extent and to find an activity that suits them, and which can be done 'for pleasure'; if they excel at it then this is a bonus. This cannot be done by schools acting alone within ever tighter budgetary constraints."
There must be plenty of Conservative and Liberal MPs capable of understanding the implications of Gove's disgraceful proposal. Today they have the chance to do something about it.
No fun and Games for the ordinary citizens
Be careful what you hope for when the votes for the host of the 2018 World Cup are announced on Thursday. Success for England would provoke the biggest splurge of euphoria since London won the 2012 Olympics. Last week, though, the capital's millions of commuters were officially informed that, while the Games are in progress, they should not use the city's underground system. Walk to work, or cycle, or work from home, they were told. Avoid the tube.
A trawl through the first-hand experience of the past five Olympics does not throw up the memory of the ordinary citizens of Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Athens and Beijing being subjected to such inconvenience. However wonderful the London Games may turn out to be, and whatever regenerative effect it may have on a neglected corner of north-east London, the organisers have no right to disrupt the daily lives of those who are simply going about their lawful business. In cases such as this it becomes very hard indeed to defend the hubris of big-time sport against those who see it as a complete waste of time.
A downhill trend
Michael Walchhofer, the 35-year-old Austrian skier, became the oldest ever winner of a World Cup downhill race in Lake Louise on Saturday. This is not an anomaly; the average age of downhill winners has been rising for some time. A simple reason presents itself: the enthusiasm of young winter sports enthusiasts for snowboarding rather than the more traditional method of sliding down a slope. A worrying trend, perhaps, for the sport of Killy and Klammer.
Insightful – and scary
They were not shortlisted for the William Hill sports book of the year award, whose winner will be announced in London today, but Michael Barry's Le Métier (Rouleur, £35) and Bradley Wiggins's On Tour (Orion, £14.99) provide outstanding insights, accompanied by fine photography, into the world of the top-class bike racer from two men who happen to be Team Sky colleagues. Barry offers the more profound self-analysis, and the more elegant presentation, but Wiggins is unsparing in examining his failure in this year's Tour de France, and delivers en route a terrific pen portrait of Mark Cavendish. "Intelligent – scarily intelligent in a nonacademic way – honest, courageous, intuitive, fiery and very sensitive – too sensitive sometimes, perhaps" is how it starts. Read on.