Schools Sports Partnerships: Heartbreaking

“It is heartbreaking to see a country do this to its children”*

(* Quote from Andy Marchant, SSP co-ordinator for Brighton and Hove, in the Guardian, Saturday 20th November)

You may have heard that Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove made the decision, without consultation, to scrap Labour’s Schools Sports Partnerships.

This decision will affect every state school in Brighton and Hove. The city’s School Sports Partnership (SSP), co-ordinated from Dorothy Stringer School, involved all 72 schools in the city including schools for children with special needs. All £320,000 of funding for the scheme will be stopped.

Ten thousand children participate in the 64 additional activities added to the core PE curriculum by the SSP. The nationally acclaimed “sport for all” programme runs after-school clubs, inter-schools competitions and dance and sports festivals. Nineteen thousand children and young people took part in this year’s Brighton and Hove School Sports Festival.

In 1997, just one in four school children were doing two hours per week of PE. In 2010, 95% of children are participating in healthy sporting activities. The Government is pulling the plug on a highly successful scheme which works to reduce growing levels of childhood obesity and enhances children’s engagement with education.

Once again, the budget deficit is used as an excuse to make ideologically-motivated cuts.  The deficit was caused by failures in the financial system triggering a recession. It’s not fair, or necessary, for children to pay for these failures. Savings can be made without jeopardising the health and wellbeing of young people.

However you look at it, it’s a poor decision.

It was Labour which introduced Schools Sports Partnerships, and Labour will fight it in Brighton and Hove. Gove was forced to back down and return some of the funding he took away from Labour’s children’s playground refurbishment programme. We can do the same again for sport in schools. Our online petition attracted hundreds of signatures in just a few days. Add your signature by visiting tinyurl.com/37k89kx.

Read more about the work done by the SSP in Brighton and Hove, and what we will lose, at guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/20/schools-sports-funding-cuts-gove. And join the national Facebook group Save School Sport Partnerships.

Today, headteachers are launching a campaign of opposition to the move, as featured in the Observer: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/28/school-sport-partnerships-abolition-gove. Opposition really is growing, and there is a good chance with your support that we can get Gove to back down.