Seema Malhotra – 2023 Speech on Sport in Schools and Communities
The speech made by Seema Malhotra, the Labour MP for Feltham and Heston, in the House of Commons on 10 January 2023.
It is a great pleasure to speak in the debate and to follow the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) and other colleagues. I think there will be a fair amount of consensus in this debate. Sport in our communities and in schools has had a renewed focus through the pandemic and after it, with sport and physical activity being so important for mental and physical wellbeing, which is critical to all of us and to our communities. I emphasise the point made in an intervention about the importance of health and of the Department of Health and Social Care team being actively and prominently part of the debate and strategy. It is disappointing that a Minister from the DHSC is not in the Chamber.
I thank organisations from my constituency, where there are a lot of grassroots sports and football clubs, including Bedfont Sports, the Eagles, CB Hounslow United and Hanworth Villa FC. I also thank our PE teachers. We do not always talk about the interface of confidence in physical activity in school building confidence to take part in physical activity outside school. Indeed, it can also work the other way around.
My own story is that when I was growing up I had friends at school involved in the local athletics club. Athletics and sport were not a big thing in my family; I suspect that is common in families who have not had a tradition of sport. However, I started going to Feltham athletics club, the same place where Mo Farah trained—I was there a number of years before him. The first time that I went to an athletics meeting, I did not realise that people were going to play sport and have a competition—I went to the first athletics meeting thinking that it would be a meeting and that we would all be sitting around. As it was, because nobody else had really turned up, I had to take part in everything for Hounslow. That was probably the only time in my life when I would have ever won—I did win—medals and trophies for taking part in javelin and shot put. It was one of those things where you do not know what you do not know until you have the confidence to take part and somebody walks through that journey with you.
Kim Leadbeater
My hon. Friend makes a really valid point, and I think that other hon. Members have said likewise. Can we all take this opportunity to pay tribute to key people within society, including the PE teachers and sports coaches who are working day in and day out? They can often be the only person a young person feels comfortable working with and speaking to, and they are often the inspiration that gets them through some difficult times.
Seema Malhotra
I thank my hon. Friend for that point. She has reminded me of the story of a young boy who was pretty much suicidal after the impact that the lockdown had had on his mental health, and of the support and camaraderie that his local football club gave him, including the coaches, who became in loco parentis. I also acknowledge the point made by the hon. Member for Worcester about the link between physical activity and wellbeing and educational attainment. That area really needs to be highlighted as well as the purpose for having a sports strategy at all.
I want to talk about the Schools Active Movement and its role in effectively utilising PE and sport to enhance the lives and development of young people. I thank the hon. Member for the meeting that we had today with Alan Watkinson, who was a co-founder of the Schools Active Movement and who also runs Sport Impact in Hounslow. There are a number of serious challenges that affect young people for which physical activity is part of the solution: childhood obesity, deteriorating mental health, deteriorating physical literacy—not a term we use enough—and the growing gap in children’s physical and mental wellbeing between affluent and deprived areas.
The Schools Active Movement, through school sports partnerships and their equivalents, has had huge success in supporting schools, but it faces significant challenges. It talks about the sector having different pots of funding. That is helpful and important, but the lack of an overall coherent strategy is having a significant impact on effectiveness in achieving the best outcomes for young people. Local organisations have to spend too much time and resource fighting to access funding, and ensuring it is spent strategically and effectively. Schools, and particularly those without an active school sports partnership, are struggling to know what, strategically, to spend the funding on.
The lack of a coherent strategy on infrastructure and the year-to-year funding announcement is seriously affecting the ability to attract trained staff and to plan ahead. I heard one example of somebody who was trained and playing a really important part in local school sports. They could not, with the cost of living crisis, cope with the lack of certainty and left their role to become a postman—a really sad result. On the impact that can be achieved locally, Sport Impact supports schools to take a strategic approach. Its training has built teachers’ confidence to teach sport. From almost 50% of teachers lacking the confidence to teach PE, more than 50% are now highly confident and none are lacking confidence.
Finally, to mention the asks that have been shared with me, one is the urgent need to maintain present infrastructure to protect the value of games organisers and the national network, and with confidence about funding. The second is to work together on planning for the future, consulting on the updated school sport and activity action plan, and a central role for a national network, like the Schools Active Movement, to play its part within an updated school sports strategy.
