PRESS RELEASE : The Department comments on school sport target [August 2012]

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 8 August 2012.

The Department for Education has issued the following statement on the removal of the duty on schools to report whether they met the two-hour-a-week school sports target.

A Department for Education spokesperson said:

This was not a target – it was an unenforceable aspiration. No more than two in five pupils took part in competitive sport when we told schools they no longer had to inform us of how much sport pupils were doing.

We believe in freeing schools from unnecessary paperwork and form-filling. It used to take up far too much of teachers’ time which could have been better used in the classroom or at the running track.

The Secretary of State made clear in his letter to Baroness Campbell in October 2010 that he would expect every school to want to maintain as a minimum the current levels of PE and sport each week for every pupil.

Private schools never had to provide information on levels of participation. But that has not got in the way of encouraging sport in those schools – as the number of pupils from independent schools in Team GB shows.