Tessa Jowell Speech To Sports College Conference
Thank you very much Sue (Campbell) for that kind introduction
There are some speeches that ministers have to make and there are others we do because we want to.
This is very much one of the latter.
The work done by the people in this room, and the army out there that you represent, is the practical way in which this Government's vision for sport are translated into reality.
And what you do can make a massive difference to the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people.
Because the benefits of our policy for sport don't stop with sport. It can help them do well at school, raise their self-esteem, make and keep them healthy. It can help them to use their time beneficially, so that they don't fall into crime.
And more than that, you are giving them the opportunity to realise their ambitions, helping them become healthier and happier throughout life because of the work you've done.
Sue mentioned that this is the 6th Sports Colleges Conference.
6 years ago there were only 60 delegates – today there are 1,200. That is a fantastic indication of just how far we've come.
You are at the centre of what it is we're trying to do.
You are the foundation, the very bedrock, of what we are trying to build in sport in this country.
This Government is committed to sport. Why?
Sport is good in itself. But it also has many other benefits.
It has the potential to bring a whole country together. I was lucky enough to be in Trafalgar Square in November to celebrate England's Rugby World Cup success to witness this first-hand.
Our last Manifesto said that a good sport policy is a good health policy, a good crime reduction policy, a good way of building communities.
It is just that.
You will understand, and none of us can escape it - we face an epidemic of obesity, especially in young people.
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So we are putting in place with you, piece by piece, the most extensive, well-funded sport policy that this country has ever had.
First, getting it right in schools, and I will count on your work and your successes to help us to achieve that.
Then there is linking schools with the community. For example by the £910m on school/community facilities.
And by the work with sport clubs and their governing bodies to make them more open and more inclusive.
Giving them the incentives to work with schools and youth clubs to improve their facilities and open their doors.
So we have the £168m on capital investment in club sport. We have delivered mandatory rate relief on community amateur sports clubs, and made it easier for them to become charities, getting tax relief there too.
We have the new relationship with the big sports – I'd especially like to thank cricket, rugby union, football and tennis – all of whom are represented here today - to enable their extensive networks of clubs and coaches to be more widely used, and to help funnel some of their huge TV revenues to the grass roots.
For example, the Football Foundation brings together money from Government, from the Premier League TV rights and from the FA, which means £60m is available a year for investment in grassroots.
And not just for football, increasingly football is letting itself be used a gateway, with investment going into facilities that can be used for a whole variety of activities. The kids can kick a ball around, while parents do their own thing, if that's what they want.
We have taken action on playing fields, making sure that they cannot be developed without taking into account the needs of local sport – I'll return to that theme too.
We recognise that getting people involved in sport is about more than facilities, important though they are.
We need to make people feel welcome too. So coaching gets important. That's why we're investing £28 million to transform the education, recruitment, employment and deployment of coaches in England.
We are also committed to identifying talent and developing pathways which lift talented young peope to the highest levels they can reach.
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Joined up Government
DCMS cannot do all this on its own. That's why we are working closely with DfES – including a joint stand here today – and with the Department of Health.
Yesterday John Reid began the consultation on the White Paper on Public Health .
And we have already established joint working with DoH through the Activity
Co-ordination Team.
I passionately believe that young people need to develop good sporting and physical activity habits early on.
Only last week, the Wanless Report on Health Inequality made it clear that obesity is one of the conditions where preventative action needs to be pursued, and soon.
Getting the active habit is a key prevention strategy and needs to begin in school.
The Activity Coordination Team – bringing together Heath, Education, DCMS, Transport, DEFRA and ODPM – is taking forward the Game Plan recommendation to produce a national physical activity strategy for England.
The first three-year phase of ACT's national strategy will be published in Spring this year, and And don't yawn at the thought of another strategy. This will be a route map for how we increase participation between now and 2010, and then beyond that to 2020. I'm sure I'm giving nothing away when I say that your work in schools will feature in that strategy.
School Sport – The Evidence
Let me say a little more about how we've got here.
Nearly 18 months ago, Tony Blair, Estelle Morris and I announced an investment of more than £450 million to transform PE and school sport.
Evidence is mounting to show how right we were to make that investment. Evidence that sports colleges and school sport partnerships really do make a difference.
Since 1997, sports colleges have been playing a crucial part in raising sporting and academic standards for all their pupils, establishing successful partnerships with the private sector and developing ways of working with the wider community.
There are, as you know, now 232 sports colleges – including 3 academies specialising in sport – benefiting a quarter of a million pupils.
We aim to have 400 by September 2005, at which point the sports college movement will have embraced 1 in 9 secondary schools.
The most recent survey conducted on specialist schools shows that sports colleges turn in a whole school performance that is 1% above the average for mainstream maintained secondary schools.
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This is an impressive achievement given that a large proportion of schools that become sports colleges are in areas of social disadvantage.
And the overwhelming majority of sports colleges have maintained or improved their performance at GCSE, not just in PE and sport but right across the curriculum.
The wider school sport partnerships are also working well.
The first 31 partnerships were established in September 2000. There are now 222 – the majority led by sports colleges – and we are on track for 400, giving national coverage, by September 2006.
Data collected last autumn from phase 1 schools – over 1,800 schools, three-quarters of which responded - are very encouraging.
Particularly as many of these pioneers are operating in challenging areas of urban or rural deprivation.
The headline survey results are being published by DfES and DCMS today. We will publish the results of the full survey of all 222 partnerships in April.
For the first time, we have figures about the take up of high-quality PE and school sport by young people, as distinct from what they are being offered.
In Phase 1 schools, over 60% of pupils participate for at least 2 hrs in a typical week. In years 7, 8 and 9 that figure is over 80%.
And the difference between schools that have been in the partnership for 3 years and those that had been in for a matter of weeks after its expansion is marked: 68% as opposed to 52%.
All that compelling evidence of the difference the school sport partnership programme is making.
And it goes to show that the target I share with Charles Clarke to ensure 75% of schoolchildren year olds participate in 2 hrs of high quality PE and school sport each week by 2006 is within our reach.
And that the school sport partnerships based around sports colleges can enable us to achieve it.
Encouraging take-up means providing a balance – team and other competitive sports of course, but also alternatives to those traditional games-based sports that may be a turn-off for some. We want all pupils to benefit – whatever their circumstances and preferences.
Phase 1 partnership schools each offer an average of more than 14 different sports: over 40 different sports are offered across the whole phase. Yes, the traditional sports are there, but there's also dance, orienteering, volleyball, golf, archery and boccia to name but a few.
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And you are making real progress in linking school sport with sport in the community.
20% of young people in original phase 1 partnership schools participate in clubs with a link to their school.
That figure is lower - at 15% - in the case of expansion partnership schools, again indicating that being in a partnership widens opportunities for young people.
Being in a partnership also has a positive impact on the take-up of leadership and volunteering opportunities – as we saw in that wonderful video.
The first schools into the partnership have now got 16% of 14-19 year olds involved in volunteering and leadership, much higher than the 6% the survey found in schools joining later.
Building bridges between sport in education and sport in the community benefits young people. But these bridges also benefit sport generally.
Clubs can nurture the talented athletes of the future from an increasingly wider pool. And they can refresh and add to their volunteer workforce with young people who have gained valuable leadership and volunteering experience.
Both are building up human capital in sport for the future.
This is why my Department is providing nearly £20 million over three years to increase the number of young people guided from school-based to community-based sport and to increase the number of young people who take up sports leadership and volunteering in school and the community.
I just want to add that, contrary to some perceptions, competitive school sport is not in decline.
The overwhelming majority—95%—of those first phase partnership schools held a sports day or equivalent last year. And over a third of pupils from years 4-11 was involved in some form of inter-school competition.
That figure was closer to 40% in schools that had been in a partnership for 3 years.
I am firmly in favour of competitive sport.
It teaches teamwork, discipline, self respect and how to cope with winning and losing.
These are all important life skills of benefit to all pupils and all schools and I am pleased to see that competition is doing well.
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Playing Fields
Getting people active means making it easy to get involved.
Some people have a nostalgic view of a supposedly healthier past, when we all walked or cycled everywhere and children played in the park or street until sunset.
And in that context I'd like to say a few words about the role of playing fields in our plans for a more active population.
They are important. That's why this government has taken unprecedented steps to protect them.
But don't think that the prospect of standing in a cold, bleak, mudpile with the prospect of no warm showers or decent changing area is the irresistible lure that will get the sport-shy adolescent – or indeed the plump 50-year-old - off their sofas.
There is a great deal of misty-eyed sentimentalism about playing fields. That's well-intentioned, but useless for a government dedicated to providing high quality facilities for people that suit the lives they live now, and not how they might have lived them in the 1950s.
People today want good playing surfaces, often all-weather so that facilities can be used all year round. They want floodlighting so they can play in the evening.
They want good changing areas, giving them privacy and comfort.
They want to try a range of sports and individual exercise activities and not be constrained just to team sports, important though they are.
They often want to play indoors in well-equipped sports halls.
This is not heresy, it's modern life. We're not living in some Spartan 19th century minor public school.
So not only do we protect playing fields but we use the planning system to try to get them improved as well.
Since 1998 planning rules have been tightened to restrict playing fields sales and impose tight conditions that aim to generate major sporting gains from development.
The 2002/03 figures I am releasing today show 1297 playing field applications of which:
- 807 were approved;
- 148 were rejected or withdrawn after Sport England intervened;
- 342 are still going through the stringent planning process.
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Within those approvals there are huge gains for sport - planned development of 489 new facilities leading to proposed investment of £268 million.
These are modern and accessible sports facilities for communities – both indoor and outdoor.
The 2002/03 figures also show that in 90% of the approved cases sport benefited or remained unaffected
Let's just look at a few of these:
There's Brownlow Primary School in Leicestershire - a local hospital extension meant taking a corner off a playing field. However, the deal will lead to an additional 2000sq m of scrubland being turned into a new playing field to replace it.
And the full £100,000 the Local Education Authority received for the part of the playing field they lost is being invested in new changing facilities beside the new pitch.
To quote the School's head, Paul Hammond - "The community will benefit enormously from this development…and the school will now have some great new sports facilities. It is a 'win-win' situation for us".
Or Cliffdale Primary School in Portsmouth for children with learning difficulties. A new multi-use sports pitch built on part of the existing school playing field has allowed for a more intensive sporting use at the school. The headmistress has said "that the children can safely have some physical activity each and every day of the year."
Or Prudhoe High School in Northumberland where a new floodlit Synthetic Turf Pitch with changing rooms was provided, with no loss of pitches.
We are now also seeing some of the benefits of playing field applications made a year earlier.
Stanney County High School in Ellesmere Port. They developed on part of their playing fields a fantastic new athletics area with full floodlit running track - used not just by the school but the local athletics club too.
Or how about the national cricket academy at Loughborough? Where England's main coaching centre has been built on a slope between cricket pitches. In theory that counts as a lost playing field, in practice - as you'll all recognise - it is no loss at all, but a major sporting gain.
This investment means that many more people can get active than was the case before.
Our playing field strategy means more people playing more sport. Better facilities, more choice, more suited to the way we live now.
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Finish
So this is a very exciting time for PE and school sport. We are beginning to see the impact of the government's investment on young people's lives. It's also an exciting time for sport generally, culminating this year in Euro 2004 and the Athens Olympics.
Both offer significant opportunities for our athletes, to build on the success of our world-cup-winning rugby team, and to inspire the next generation.
And, of course, next year we hope to succeed in our bid to host the 2012 Olympics in London.
Barbara Cassani, the bid leader, will have more to say on the bid tomorrow. But I would like to leave you with this thought.
I began by saying that high quality PE and school sport was all about people. There could be no more impressive tribute to the legacy you are creating than to see your pupils participating in the 2012 Olympics.
As medal winners, as sports administrators, as coaches, as officials and as volunteers.
And, we hope, in London.
Thank you
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