A basis for fitness or sloth?
Youth sport and PE in France and UK
( A4, 57 pages )
Michael F Collins
Institute of Sport and Leisure Policy, Loughborough University
Franco–British Council, London
April 2003
1
Contents
Page
1. INTRODUCTION
1
Structures for PE and sport in the two countries
2
2. PE AND YOUTH SPORT: CONTEXTUAL FACTORS
Demographics
8
Income, poverty and participation
9
Social class and opportunity
10
Youth in society
120
Health and exercise
11
Sport for all or sport for good?
12
Plurality of provision
13
Global influences of individualisation, professionalisation and elite sport
14
3 PE AND YOUTH SPORT: IN AND OUT OF
SCHOOL
The development of PE and school sport in the UK
17
PE and school sport in France
22
The current state of PE in Western Europe
26
PE, physical activity and PE for sport
PE, school sport and lifelong participation
Government intervention in school sport
School sport policy in France
27
89
89
37
PART 4 YOUTH SPORT FOR SOCIAL GOOD
40
Sport for health
41
Sport and social inclusion
41
Sport and education
42
Employment in sport
43
Sport increasing community safety/ reducing crime, especially among youth
443
PART 5 CONCLUSIONS
47
Franco-British similarities and contrasts
References
51
2
Page
LIST OF FIGURES
1. The sports system in England
4
2. Sports Structures in France
6
3. Individualisation of British sports activity 1987-96
15
4. The sports development continuum
30
5. Participation in sport and physical activity by gender
32
6. Sports participation increasing or decreasing 1987-96?
32
7. Sports club membership in England
36
8. Activity typology of English schoolchildren, 2002
49
LIST OF TABLES
1. Public expenditure on sport
8
2. France and UK: demographic projections 2000-2050
8
3. Child poverty in Europe
9
4. Facets of PE in Western Europe
26
5. Youth Sport Trust programmes
31
6. Sports participation by English young people in school years 2-11 in and
outside school 2002
33
7. The government’s PE, School Sport, and Club Links Strategy
35
8. Sports participation amongst 15-24 year olds in France, 2000
37
9. Most popular sports among 15-24 year olds in France, 2000
37
10. Key features of Positive Futures
45
11. Franco-British similarities and differences in context
47
12. Franco-British similarities and differences in school PE and sport
49
13. Franco-British similarities and differences in sport for good
50
3
1. INTRODUCTION
This section looks at
 the importance of sport in the economies of England and France
 national and local structures for delivering sport
 government spending on sport
Physical Education or PE is concerned with learning the basics of movement: running,
jumping, throwing, catching, and kicking. Sport is the application of these skills in rulebound and often competitive disciplines. Ancient cultures trained their male youth for
combat and war, but the concept of PE was first coined by Locke in the late 17 th
century. This paper undertakes a brief comparative review, within the limitations of
available data and studies, which, as we shall see, are not inconsiderable. No chapter on
France, for example, exists in the compendium Worldwide trends in youth sport 1or the
Worldwide survey of the state and status of school PE 2. We shall draw on official
documents – in UK from two ministries in particular - the Department for Culture
Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), and the
main agency, Sport England (SE); in France the equivalents are the Ministère des Sports
(MS) - (formerly MJS - Ministère de Jeunesse et du Sport) and the Ministère de
l’Éducation Nationale (MEN). International sports matters (representation on
international bodies, supporting elite squads, attracting major events and handling drug
abuse) are the responsibility in Britain of UK Sport; in France these are part of the
sports ministry’s remit.
The MJS began in 1921 as the department responsible for physical education and (apart
from a short period as part of a Ministry of Free Time) has been allied with youth or
Education under 81 governments; by contrast, in England sport was the responsibility of
the Department for Education until 1966 and from 1990 to 92, but otherwise has been
linked first to local government ministries and then to culture. Indeed from 1966 to the
mid 1990s links with education were not close, a situation rare across the world.
It should be said that there are sports councils and overseeing ministries for Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland; it is not that these are not important, but the historic
complexity, now increased by devolution, defies adequate treatment in this short report,
and many policies are similar; therefore I confine discussion to England.
4
Sport is now big business; in 2000 in England it generated €14.6bn, 1.5% of the total
valued-added to production (on which VAT is levied), just over 1% of household
income and nearly 2% of employment3; this is larger than the motor industry or
furniture or breadmaking and half as big again as agriculture. In France, sport is of a
similar scale and importance, in 2001 providing 1.7% of GDP (€25.4 bn), and rather
more – 1.6% - of household consumption4,5. Like most European states, both countries
had a net import balance of sports goods.
Structures for Sport and PE in the two countries
Both countries have well-developed amateur sporting systems, Britain’s having started
life slightly earlier. The British scene is particularly complex, because there are
governing bodies for UK, GB, England, Wales, Scotland, northern Ireland individually,
and all-Ireland; devolution is, if anything likely to see new non-English bodies forming.
In England alone there are over 470 bodies for over 100 sports; these affiliate about
150,000 small single-sport clubs; a 2003 estimate puts membership at 5.3m in England
(perhaps 6.25 million in the UK or 8.5% of the population). In France things are a little
simpler, with eighty National Sports Organisations; 10 million people (22.7% of the
population) are members of clubs associated with National Sports Organisations, and
12.5% say they compete. The confederation for sport in England is the Central Council
for Physical Recreation (CCPR), founded in 1935 and covering outdoor, noncompetitive sports and dance.
The French equivalent is the Comité Nationale
Olympique et Sportive Française (CNOSF). The British Olympic Association was
formed prior to the London Games of 1908 and its French equivalent soon afterwards,
in 1911. The commercial sector in both countries is growing; there are some large
conglomerate companies, hotel and retail and fitness chains but, overwhelmingly,
private establishments are small and medium-sized enterprises (with a maximum 250
workers), with many micro-enterprises (fewer than 10 employees) especially in sports
retailing, services and outdoor activities – see Collins, 19936 and Viallon et al 20037.
Local authorities in England operate at two levels, county and district, though a new
regional level may be emerging; in France there are three levels – régions, départments
and municipalities/communes. The last five UK governments have taken increasingly
tight control of local spending and direction of local policies, even though sport and
5
leisure are permissive rather than mandatory services, and so standards and quality vary
widely. In contrast, in 1982 local governments in France were given powers to promote
sport and tourism and, have taken these up with varying degrees of vigour: 80% of them
provide sports facilities and 49% sports development programmes.
In the UK nationally sport now falls (with a clutch of leisure-related functions each with
a junior minister) under the aegis of the Department for Culture Media and Sport
(DCMS - founded in 1990 as the Department of National Heritage). PE is still the
responsibility of the Department for Education and Skills, but with the DCMS
becoming very active in school sport, the two Departments are having to work closer
together. Almost every UK government, most recently Tony Blair’s in Game Plan8 has
tried to simplify the labyrinth, depicted in its current form in Figure 1. When first
formed in 1966 the Sports Council was intended as an independent advisor 'at arms
length ' from politics, but under four conservative governments from 1979 to 1997 and
Labour since the arm has shortened, through control of budgets and increasing numbers
of directions and overarching strategies, so that now Sport England and UK Sport are
agencies of Her Majesty’s Government, clearly not intended to question, much less
resist its will 9. There are no laws mandating and regulating sport like those in France
and many other countries.
The Sports Council for the bulk of its existence privileged 'Sport for All' (through
promoting and grant-aiding local facilities and programmes) with around two-thirds of
its budget9, the rest going to elite sport and international events; a proportion and sums
that the National Governing Bodies and Olympic interests complained were toosmall. In
the 1980s sports science coaching and medicine programmes were promoted with
professional bodies, and then in 1993 the international functions were separated and
given to UK Sport, leaving Sport England with domestic responsibilities, but still 90%
of the sporting population and budget. As a result of co-sponsoring a National Fitness
Survey in 199210, the Sports Council had started working with health interests. But John
Major’s Minister for Sport radically changed the priorities and remit in 1995, removing
fitness
6
Figure 1: The sports system in England
insert from Game Plan
and health issues as ‘someone else’s business’ and leaving Sport for All (which it saw
as a costly and inchoate task) by implication to local authorities (despite their reduced
budgets).
The priorities set out in the 1995 report Sport: Raising the Game11 were: school and
youth sport, supporting and developing talent, and ensuring that the riches of the new
National Lottery (which quadrupled the Sport Council’s budget by adding £200m a
year) were spent well on these programmes. The new Labour government from 1997
increased and elaborated on the school programmes (see below), introduced a English
7
Institute of Sport for supporting elite athletes, modelled on that in Australia, by means
of regional centres established at universities, sought to strengthen volunteering12 and
sought to use sport as a lever to fight crime, help regeneration, and combat social
exclusion13. A further review Game Plan8 (2002) sought to use mass sport as a tool for
improving health, for evolving a more effective system for identifying and developing
sporting talent, and as a credible means of selecting major events for public support. It
also sought to rationalise the structures, and the nearest and easiest means of doing that
was to remodel Sport England, which in becoming a more strategic distributor of
resources will have its staff halved.
In France the system is more straightforward, and clearly hierarchical (Figure 2).
Certainly since they have the power to recognise and certificate coaching, teaching,
lecturing, animation, and fitness instruction staff, to licence practioners, and to approve
programmes for grant aid, the French ministries are more ‘hands-on’ than thier English
counterparts. Sport has been twinned with education and youth for most of its life,
sometimes as a sub-department, (though for a short time in the 1970s itwas part of a
short-lived Ministry of Leisure and Free Time). In 2002, however, the two functions
were separated. Both Ministries (Sport and Education) will now have inspectors and
staff in regions and departments, paralleled by Sports Federation and Olympic
structures. The voluntary bodies in France have traditionally less autonomy, since, at
least until 1985, in selecting French teams and organising events they were acting as
agencies of the Government. After that date they were given more direct responsibility.
In 1992 issues around football riots, violence on the pitch and drug abuse led to a new
Sports Act which empowered the Minister of National Education to supervise
professional clubs, oversee health and safety issues at venues, and support athletes’
health. The 80 national sports bodies affiliate some 165,000 clubs, which, as in
England, are mainly single–sport and small, but with a few more multi-sport clubs. The
MS licences participants –some 13.8 million, of whom 14% are soccer players, 10%
tennis players and 7% skiers.
8
Figure 2: Sports Structures in France (scan and modify from Hardman, 1996)14
Influenced by practice in Scandinavia, Sport for All activities in France only developed
after 1972, through programmes delivered regionally. The target areas were health,
senior citizens, handicapped people and workers, and the training of sports teachers in
these new programmes (1,000 were certified by 1999). National Plans Four to Six,
ending in 1975, promoted the building of local indoor, outdoor and open country
facilities, including sport tourism resorts. Recent programmes have extended to women
and young people at risk, whereas in England these have been the responsibility of the
Home Office . The MS contributed some € 2m to events annually.
9
Table 1: Public expenditure on sport
England 2000
level
(€bn)
Central Government
(€bn)
France 1999
2.83
1.0*
Local authorities
MEN
2.08
MJS
0.50
Other Ministries
0.05
Emplois-jeunes SPORT
1.10**
23.3
TOTAL
7.82
Régions
0.27
Départements
0.52
Communes
7.01
Emplois-jeunes SPORT
0.10**
24.3
* not including spending on school sport
64.5
** shared
sources: 3,4
Even if educational spendingwere included, Table 1 would show substantially higher
public spending on sport in France. The French MEN spending figure includes sport
and swimming in primary schools (€0.35bn), secondary schools (€1.58bn) and of the
STAPs degrees in Higher Education (€0.21bn). The MS’s budget in 2003, up by 1.3%
from 2002, included:

€60m for health and safety in sport including anti-doping measures and an
epidemiological study of sport and health

€200m for realigning the role of sport in social cohesion, including new local
contracts with communes to reduce youth crime (€2.36m), and efforts to
increase employment in NSOs (€0.75m)

funds for promoting the quality and international ranking of French sport, and

funds for modernisation of MS’ sports facilities and increasing the numbers and
expertise of sports professors and inspectors
(MS Dossier des Mois
Nov 2002).
The rest of this report is in three main sections: the first looks at the demographic and
social issues affecting PE and sport; the second at participation in and out of school and
the policies and practices that affect it – this is ‘sport for sport’s sake’; and the third at
youth sport ‘for social good’ – that is, any evidence that sport contributes to health,
education, social inclusion, regeneration and safer and more cohesive communities.
10
2 . PE AND YOUTH SPORT: CONTEXTUAL FACTORS
This section covers:
* the influence of demographics- shrinking of youth populations
* income and poverty, which limits participation among large numbers of children
* the abiding influence of social class and differences in opportunities to participate
* increasing interest in health and exercise
* increasing distinctions between sport for all/its own sake ands sport for social good
* global influences of professional sport
* the growing plurality of sports provision and complications for governance
* the role of youth in society
Demographics
It is a truism that the populations of western societies are ageing: the median ages in
France and the UK were 34.5 and 34.6 years in 1950, 37.4 and 37.5 in 2000 and are
projected to rise to 45.1 and 43.8 years in 2050. In the EU as a whole the the number of
people under 20 will fall from the present 90 million to 80 million by 2010, while the
number of over-60s will grow from 77 million to 92 million. although school-age
populations will grow for a few years, over the next half century the dependency ratio
(the relative proportion of children and (especially) old people not in work and being
supported by taxes) will grow, as Table 2 shows. The pensions and welfare burdens will
affect all other public services including education, especially in a traditionally lower
tax, lower benefit economy like the UK. Other European countries, mainly Eastern and
Southern, will experience population decline
Table 2: France and UK: demographic projections 2000-2050
2000
%by age
2050
Under 15
15-59
Over 60
Under 15
15-59
Over 60
18.8
60.7
20.5
15.9
51.8
32.3
19.1
61.2
20.7
16.1
54.3
29.6
FRANCE
Age groups
UK
Age groups
source: UN, 2002 medium variant projection15
over this period, but immigrant minorities with higher birth rates are likely to influence
France and the UK, though both may still look to further immigrants to supply labour,
especially for low-paid services.
Income, poverty and participation
11
In recent decades all OECD countries have witnessed a widening of income gaps to the
extent that the those in lowest income group have been left in real poverty and
disadvantage –often with precarious or no employment, increasingly dependent on state
benefits, with poorer health, educational attainment, higher crime rates, and poor
housing. They are also increasingly less likely to register or exercise a vote – they are,
in Commins’ words16,b excluded from the four main domains of society, including sport
and leisure. In the UK one third of children – 3.9million – and a quarter of adults are
officially classified as living in poverty. Despite anti-poverty efforts by the Blair
government, the figure is still three times higher than in 1979, when the Conservatives
came to power. In a survey of 25 developed countries, Bradbury and Jantti17 showed
that the UK had a relatively high child poverty rate, France was near average, and the
Nordic countries lowest in the distribution (see Table 3).
Table 3: Child poverty in Europe
Poverty rates using different poverty lines
50% of overall median
50% of child median
US poverty line (2
children)
Year
Rate
Rank of 25
Rate
Rank of 25
Rate
Rank of 25
Russia
1995
26.6
1
25.4
1
98.0
1
USA
1994
26.3
2
18.6
2
18.5
12
UK
1995
21.3
3
11.0
5
28.6
10
France
1989
9.8
13
6.8
12
17.3
13
source: 17
It has been suggested that if the gap between the best and worst off in a society grows to
more than six fold, there is danger of instability. Riots in poor and ethnicised areas
happened in France in 1980, and in the UK in 1987 and 2001. An official comment on
the latter was that fragmentation and segregation had developed to the point where
‘many communities operate on the basis of parallel lives [that] do not seem to touch at
any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges’ 20. Despite little
evidence, a parallel parliamentary report asserted ‘sporting and cultural opportunities
can play an important part in re-engaging disaffected sections of the community,
building shared social capital and grass roots leadership through improved crosscultural interaction’21. In both countries a strong strain of opinion believes and wishes
this was so, despite lack of conclusive evidence. In neither country could sport be said
to be seen as an unquestioned right of citizenship and part of the welfare state22, 23.
12
Social class and opportunity
Although there is little hard evidence about class and school PE and sport (but see the
Nottingham case study below), Sugden and Tomlinson31 (among others) claim that it is
showing up strongly in adult sport:
sport acts as a kind of badge of social exclusivity and cultural distinctiveness
for the dominant classes; it operates as a means of control or containment
of the working or popular classes; it is represented as a source of escape
and mobility for talented working class performers…: it articulates the
fractional status distinctions that exist within the ranks of larger class
grouping.
There is evidence of this happening both at recreational level in the UK32, 33 and in the
Netherlands34, and also in elite squads in the UK35 and Germany36. The importance of
this issue is for the transmission of values and practices from parents to children in the
formation of social capital (see below). In France Waser and Passevant37 found it to be
so in their sample of 728 young people in Caen. Meanwhile, Scheerder et al 38 showed
how social stratification has been maintained in Flanders over three decades to 1999. In
a study of 282 British young athletes aged 8-16 training for elite development, markedly
more were in non-manual households – 50% in football, 58% in gymnastics, 68% in
swimming, and 84% in tennis, reproducing the pattern among their adult counterparts39.
Income and class are correlated strongly with health: in the UK this was claimed in the
1980 Black report on Inequalities in Health40 but was substantially rejected by
conservative politicians (who argued that good health was primarily the task of
individual citizens to assure), but was confirmed by the independent Acheson inquiry
report in 1997-841 and the Social Exclusions Unit’s 1998 report on the 3,000 most
deprived neighbourhoods, Bringing Britain Together42. Recent evidence in the UK
showed also that poor households were more likely to be found in areas with high levels
of air pollution from factories, high traffic accident risk, and greater risks of flooding
(www.environment-agency.gov.uk accessed 14.1.04).
Youth in society
Young people in contemporary urban societies have an upbringing radically different
from that of their parents. Traffic and 'stranger danger' mean that until the mid-teenage
many are chauffeured to activities or made to go in groups; pressures of tests and exam
13
coursework made homework timetables are crowded; time is further squeezed for the
sizeable number of teenagers (about half?) who choose to work part time so as to afford
some of the consumer goods advertised so liberally in print and on radio and television;
finally those very audiovisual media, the internet (accessible to over 80% of British
children) and computer games occupy large slices of time and help to turn teenagers
into ‘couch potatoes.’
Health and exercise
The western world has been mechanised and roboticised in almost all aspects of life, so
that physical effort has been taken out of travelling, most forms of paid and household
work, shopping, and even cleaning one’s teeth! As for vigorous exercise (defined as that
which makes one sweat and breathe heavily, and protects against CHD and stroke if
done 3 x 20 minutes a week), only about a tenth of UK residents do enough to be
protected; and from the 1992 National Fitness Survey data43 the author has calculated
that 70% of vigorous activity now comes from leisure-time sport and exercise. Obesity
(which according to the World Health Organisation is now an epidemic in the
developed world) has been growing in most countries and is attributed to both richer
diets and lack of exercise. An estimated one in five children are overweight 44 and more
than 60% of these have at least one other risk factor for CHD45.
Prentice and Jebb46 were strongly convinced that it was much more a matter of sloth
than of gluttony, as was Olds47, who found a yearly decline of 0.43% in shuttle run tests
done by 129,000 children in 1981-2000; increases in Body Mass index, but a 20-30%
decrease in energy intake of British 14-15 year-olds between 1930 and 1980; a decline
of 20% in the distance walked and 25% in that cycled by under 15s between 1985 and
1993. He concluded (2002:24):
Children are fat and getting fatter, unfit and getting less fit…the main
contributors to inactivity –television and motor cars – are so inextricably
woven into the fabric of production and consumption that it is difficult
to imagine life without them. Technologies designed to do things for us
will inevitably reduce our own activity levels. The accelerating fragmentation
of social life driven by the demands of modern economic life, the increasing
lability[ease of change] of communities, the atrophy of the home as a focus of
activity, the shattering of extended and nuclear families –all augur very badly
for the future of children’s physical activity. It is little wonder that interventions designed to increase physical activity have been so singularly
unsuccessful. Advertising campaigns have high recall rates, but do little to
14
change behaviour. The effects of interventions have rapid decay times.
On the basis of three days’ telemetry of 266 Devon schoolchildren, Armstrong et al48
concluded that they were physically active, in and out of school, to help their heart and
lung functions for only short periods – for boys for 6% of the time on weekdays and
weekends, and for girls for 4% and 3% respectively!
A new report by Wanless49 suggested that only 70% of boys and 61% of girls do
enough exercise – five sessions of half an hour’s moderate exercise a week – to avoid
becoming overweight, and that one fifth of boys and a third of girls will be not just
overweight but obese by 2020. The British Medical Association50 concurred:
adolescents in the UK are not eating optimal diets, often exercise too little and are
increasingly likely to be overweight or obese……by the age of 15, only 36% of girls
undertook 30 minutes if physical activity on most days, compared to 71% of boys. It
called many youth environments ‘obesogenic.’ As shown below, the Department for
Education is involved in several youth sport initiatives, though as yet there are no
national targets for reducing obesity, though the government is consulting at the time of
writing. Sport England pointed out to a committee of Members of Parliament that
government currently spent €32 a year per head on sport compared to €1,691on health
(evidence to Select Committee on Obesity, April 2003).
Thus there is widespread concern that even school sport and PE offer relatively little
vigorous activity. So, in both countries, poor health, poor diet and lack of physical
activity outside school tend to go hand in hand, reinforcing and sustaining a lifestyle
gap later in life.
Sport for All or sport for social good?
Sport was seen for many years as a social good in terms of enjoyment, involvement,
well-being and personal achievement. The Sport for All slogan, spurred by a Council of
Europe charter commitment, became a world-wide broadly inclusive51 movement, But
uUnder the conservatives in Britain after 1979 focus narrowed, mass participation was
left for local authorities to worry about, and there was a return to an original 1972 Royal
Charter commitment, highlighting elite and youth sport, for the Sports Council; then
after 1995 the spending of lottery money became significant. While continuing these
15
themes, the Blair government gave strong priority and cash to initiatives on school and
youth sport (see below). In 2001 it sought a strategic review of sports policy from the
Cabinet Office’s Strategy Unit and Game Plan8 anounced a return to promoting mass
participation as benefitting the nation's health and saving on medical costs .The target
was to increase the proportion of those who took 30 minutes of moderate exercise five
times a week (which can be shown to have major benefits in combating obesity,
hypertension, mild depression, late-onset diabetes, pulmonary problems and asthma,
back and other joint pains, and osteoporosis) from 30% to 70% of the population in
barely a decade.
As I have said elsewhere this is a huge and probably unachievable task, requiring
increases in participation 4 times greater than what was achieved in the ‘good times’ of
the 1970s; moreover, Game Plan failed to indicate how the necessary physical facilities
and human resources to sustain the growth were going to be found, or how those
unaccustomed and indifferent or hostile to exercise were to be enrolled53. This emphasis
on sport as a servant of other policies, 'sport for good' in the words of the sports
minister, Richard Caborn, had become a mantra of the Labour government,.
In France the Ministry of Sport, newly independent in 2002, had undertaken a major
public debate and consultation. Having had programmes for at-risk youth, youth
employment and other purposes, it too announced in 2003 that aiding social cohesion
was a major aim of sports policy (see below).
Plurality of provision
After early provision of open spaces and swimming baths by British municipalities in
the late 19th century, and then school playing fields, professional soccer came along, as
did ice rinks linked to ice making plants and dance halls before World War 1. The area
dedicated to public and school playing fields grew in the 1930s, partly as a palliative to
the unemployment of the worldwide depression. In the 1970s, public sports provision
grew in France, and then, after the formation of the Sports Council, in the UK.
Throughout the 20th century the larger and multi-sport clubs (a small minority in both
countries) also provided pitches, courts, and halls. Private provision for those able to
pay was made in sailing, golf, tennis and squash, and then on a large scale in the 1990s
with a resurgence of concerns for fitness, health and body image through individual
16
operators and chains of fitness centres, which have become increasingly elaborate with
health, diet, and stress treatment and counselling18.
In France, since the 1980s, communes have become the largest sports providers, and
schools and many groups rely on them. In both countries the cost of public provision
has come under scrutiny; services have been contracted out to commercial or voluntary
organisations to reduce costs and improve marketing and income, which in the UK has
tended to increase prices and reduce usage by poorer people and children. In the UK tax
benefits have recently been gained by forming delivery agencies into trusts (non-profitmaking companies ). Whether these will be able to get closer to poor communities and
deliver their needs better it is far too soon to tell 54.
Global influences: individualisation, elite and professional sport
Throughout the world, individual/small team spots are growing, while team games,
more difficult to organise in a time-scarce society with longer commuting journeys, are
declining55. Figure 3 shows this for the UK.
World wide, governments are realising the costs and difficulty of making major inroads
into non-participation and moving towards sport for all, and in both developed and
developing worlds are concentrating on the more affordable and often more swiftly
rewarding act of supporting elite sport56. Elite sport in England is a prime responsibility
of UK Sport working with the four domestic sports councils; Sport England, responsible
for over 80% of the population, now recognises ten core sports as targets for investment
17
20
15
% playing once
a month or more
14.8
15.4
14.8
13.1
11.6
10
12.1 12.3
8.6
8.4
9.3
10.2
11.0
4.5 4.8
5
5.5 5.6
0
Swimming +13%
Keepfit +43%
Cycling +21%
Weights +24%
source : General Household Survey, 1987-96
Figure 3: Individualisation of British sports activity 1987-96
to gain medals, and another 10? that are chosen by UK Sport for all parts of the
Kingdom57 . The four sports councils run 11 multi-sport national training centres but the
introduction of Institutes of Sport based on those in Australia and Canada has added 19
more sites, and individual sports federations run more. Elite athletes are supported
through a world Class programme funded by the Lottery, and from sponsorship. In a
1996 report on sports scholarships for Higher Education students, Sir Roger Bannister
predicted that one third of all elite athletes would come from that source by 2005, but it
likely that that share has already been surpassed with the Institute developments58.
The production of performers from universities has been bolstered by a growing number
of graduates (with a BEd and the Post-Graduate Certificate in PE in the UK, or
CAPEPS in France) branching out way beyond PE into sports sciences, coaching, sports
development, sports journalism, sports tourism, sports economics and sports law. In the
UK these are popular subjects, with 13,000 students in 2002, far more than the direct
labour market could absorb; in France the STAPS graduates (Sciences and Technology
of PE and Sports Activities) numbered XXX,000. A competitive recruitment diploma
‘Professorat de Sport’ for entering the civil service is available, and one in six highlevel athletes prepares for a professional diploma or certificate to work in clubs as
trainer or coach.
18
In France, elite sport is regulated under Acts of 1984, 2000, and 2002; In 2003, 55
federations (including 30 Olympic sports) involved some 6,158 registered athletes , who
can prepare at 420 specialist centres. These are Pôles Espoires for promising athletes
aged 12 or over, and Pôles France for established competitors. The MS recognises four
categories of elite athletes:
-
young: already competing internationally and likely to do so for 3-4 years,
some 2,800, mainly under 23 years of age
-
senior: playing in world events in the short term, about 2,300
-
elite: seniors who have obtained good results; they may stay in this group for
2 years, fewer than 1,000, and
-
career after sport: athletes who were seniors for 4 years or elite for 1,
seeking integration into a profession- about 50.
The MS signs agreements with employers to allow athletes flexible working conditions
around competitions (400 in 2001). Tthere has also been central state support to help
athletes cope with studies or a job, a system only just being investigated in England
24
.
In 2001 the MS and the Ministry of Budgetary Affairs set up tax incentives for
employers who take on athletes on flexible working contracts, and quotas were agreed
with central ministries, regional and local authorities, and (mainly nationalised)
businesses (521 in all). On retirement, competitors can borrow up to €24,000 at 1%
interest over four years to set up their own business (J. LeGrand information for
European Year of Sport through Education project on post-athletic careers, March
2004).
Global trends in professional sport the – the increasing prominence of mega-events like
the Olympic Games, professional matches, TV and Internet coveage, bring in increased
income from fees and sponsorship but at the same time encourage illegalities as the
stakes are raised. This and the glorification of the fit and sportive, both male and female
, comprise what some call the ‘sportisation’ of culture; Maguire59 quoting Grupe from
1991 writes: no longer are sports organisations the only entities concerned; media,
business and political institutions are also involved. From a North American
perspective,
Donnelly60
went
further,
saying
that
prolympism
(a
TV/professional/Olympic sports complex) has pushed out or taken over traditional
19
games, informal and recreatioaln play and much amateur activity; this is, I believe a
much overstated position for Western Europe, but globalising influences are undeniable
and commercial activity has grown greatly - Martin and Mason61 suggested a ten-fold
increase in money expenditure in the UK for only a ten percent growth in volume in the
21 years from the late 1970s.
20
3. PE AND SPORT IN AND OUT OF SCHOOL
This section covers
* a brief review of the development of PE and youth sport in the two countries
* the current state of PE in schools – and moves to incorporate physical
activity, and to encourage lifelong participation
* government programmes for youth sports
* out of school sport and youth in sports clubs
The educational context is noticeably different in the two countries: for example, in the
mid 1990s France had 95% of its youth in education and training at 17 and 65% at 20
years of age compared to 65% and 15% in the UK ( the lowest in the EU14). In France
46% achieved or expected HE qualifications by the age of 21-5 year-olds (compared to
23% in the UK), according to a European Household panel survey data62.
The development of PE and school sport in the UK
In the 19th century, Ling gymnastics, introduced from Sweden, won out over other
forms. First used by the navy (to overcome what was seen as growing unfitness
amongst the urban masses who were now its main recruiting ground), it was then
introduced in schools, for its exercise systems and for the discipline it was believed to
embody. William Jolly, HM Inspector of schools, depressed at the low standards of
provision, argued in 1876 for physical training for a fitter workforce and army, but
adding: our teachers and School Managers should encourage it, for, if it did nothing
more, it would improve discipline by its vigour-giving, cloud-dispelling effects, raise the
mental work done, and even increase monetary results (cited in Kirk et al63). Schools
were eventually given grants to provide PT in 1895, and as teachers resisted pressures
to adopt military–style drilling, a health rationale took over. Health inspections were
introduced in elementary schools and then to all schools before World War I; the Board
of Education issued three curricula between 1909 and 1933, the last adding games,
swimming and dancing to Swedish gymnastics. Playing fields started to be provided by
local authorities, sometimes as job creation schemes during the Great Depression.
Mangan64 described them as part of the social and cultural capital to be acquired in the
struggle to maintain social position.
In 1937 The Physical Training and Recreation Act was passed and a National Council
formed (rather too late to be effective) as another European conflict loomed, because the
21
government was worried at the unfit condition of potential armed forces; the Act
incorporated sport and fitness activities undertaken by youth organisations under the
aegis of Juvenile Delinquency Committees (not much is new! - see Part 4 for
contemporary work projects combating youth crime.) Kirk et al63 saw this as
perpetuating the middle/upper class view of what was needed for poorly housed
working class families, and Kirk65 described the postwar inheritance of the 1930s as
heavy, ponderous, meticulous, coercive, and expressing class and religious social
divides in sport.
Games and athletics arrived by another route, from the boys' public schools, whence the
‘play the game/fair play’ ethic spread throughout the British Empire64, and was
emulated in the grammar schools by the middle class and upwardly mobile. With the
raising of the school leaving age to 14 in the 1920s, the games element in the
curriculum was extended to provide more challenge and interest63, a situation reinforced
when it rose to 15 years in 1947. After the second World War, the Ling system, used to
train teachers (especially women) in places like Glasgow, Leeds and Loughborough,
was challenged by Laban’s educational gymnastics. However the athletics and games
approach backed by early physiology/fitness testing and psychology remained for men,
and the training remained singles sex; circuit training soon brought a new emphasis to
fitness training, even if competitively oriented. As late as 1951 the relative lack of state
provision for sport was such that The Times Educational Supplement could print: In
England, every instinct would be against State intervention in sport, but private bodies
have done and are doing much…with such bodies as the National Playing Fields
Association, the CCPR is doing much practical work to combat the evil of the passive
circus-goer.
By the 1960s the poor performance of Britain in international competition and the
poverty of provision for youth sport relative to other advanced nations led to a debate
about the needs for a state body. The CCPR’s Wolfenden report in 1960 identified a
large drop out rate from participation when, having left the ‘womb’ of the school, young
people had to find their own way in the club system and haphazard community
provision. Tthis came to be knownas the ‘Wolfenden gap’9. After much debate, and
hostility, in particular from the Duke of Edinburgh who was and still is Royal Patron of
22
the CCPR, the bulk of the staff and six national sports centres were finally transferred
under a Trust arrangement from the CCPR to the new Sports Council, in 1996.
R.A. Butler’s 1944 Education Act, which made secondary PE compulsory, meant an
increase in games-trained male PE teachers, and reinforced the perception of PE and
games as a means of bolstering national identity, and as a worthwhile pursuit for
working class youth beguiled by a growing consumer culture. Swimming and some
outdoor activities were added to the curriculum, and the range of games widened in the
1970s as the number of sports halls grew to upwards of 2000, provided in two–thirds of
cases by local authorities (but available to nearby schools for daytime use), and in one
third of cases jointly by local councils and schools on the latter’s sites (with public use
in the evenings and at weekends). This emphasis on games also enabled schools to look
to servicing the base of elite sport. But this range of games available in school had little
to do with the activities young adults chose for their leisure time..
After several decades in which sport enjoyed growing social importance, and increases
of both funding and customers [pupils], the 1980s saw a downturn in all three aspects
and brought shocks the education system was not prepared for . Demographic trends led
to a serious decline, reaching 40% in some inner city areas, to reduced budgets, and
redundant sites and staff. Some facilities were sold, some converted and many retained
under-used because of vocal local citizen and political support. Although the Blair
government moved to stem the sale of playing fields to realise money for school
budgets, the high cost and low priority of PE meant that it saw only scattered reinvestment. The concept of local management of schools came along, leaving both the
DfES and the LEAs with much-reduced roles and influence. Concerns about
performance in numeracy, literacy and the new IT skills in the 1990s year together with
the imposition of a national testing regime meant increased paperwork for teachers, and
reduced the willingness of non-specialist teachers to help with extra-curricular sports
clubs and inter-school competitions at weekends.
The 1980s brought some new trends:


mixed-gender PE teaching, within co-educational schools
‘Teaching Games for Understanding’, developed at Loughborough University,
focussing on understanding and applying common elements among sports, in
techniques and tactics
23

a shift to supporting mass participation, which some saw as a threat to children’s
health through potential neglect of the basics of PE for health65

partly in reaction to this, and partly in response to secular interests in health,
health-related fitness (HRF) units of teaching were introduced (centred on
elements like flexibility and aerobic fitness and their testing), and health-related
exercise (HRE) which seeks to promote understanding and behaviours in
activities that will sustain life-long health benefits, and involving activities like
aerobics in the class room and gym. The debate between these two forms and
games- centred PE is mirrored in France and other countries. (This has to be
seen against a background of growing government policy to make citizens
responsible for their own health and care because of the escalating costs of the
National Health Service)

to improve its status in an ever-more competitive school situation, examinations
for Sport and PE were devised at CSE (15-16 years), A and AS Levels (17-19
years). These combine both theoretical and practical components, and have
become as popular as traditional ‘academic’ subjects32:
no of students, 000 % of all candidates % gaining A*-C grades (cf all subjects)
GCSE
110
2.8
56 (58)
AS level
24
2.4
28 (32)
A level
17
3.3 male 1.7 female
30 (43)
As these figures show by A level the gender bias to males is sustained, and
throughout achievement of higher grades is lower, perhaps still reflecting a view
that sport is a subject for non-academic students .
In 1987 the Conservative government not only devolved management of schools from
local authorities to site level, but also set out core subjects in what they intended to be ‘a
broad and balanced’ National Curriculum with attainment targets and programmes of
study for four key stages, two each in primary and secondary years. In PE the
programmes related to six groups of activity (games, dance, gymnastics, athletics,
swimming, and outdoor/adventure), reflecting what was familiar. The PE profession
wanted a wide range of activities, but, worried about costs and workload, the
Conservative politicians, perhaps instinctively, privileged the sport-based forms. No
programmes were designed for HRE or HRF66. At the same time (1998) the Health
Education Authority67 was advocating the teaching and promotion of more active youth
lifestyles. But how teachers delivered the NC requirements (for instance in single- or
mixed-sex classes) was left up to them; also the quality of staffing and facilities varied
greatly from site to site. After a few years the NC was ‘thinned out’; in PE this meant
that games, dance and gymnastics were given more stress than athletics, swimming or
24
outdoor activities at Key Stage 2 (transfer to secondary school) and at key stages 3 and
4 games was compulsory in every year but outdoor activities were downplayed. If one
considers that As far as extra-curricular activity (which may have more influence on
leisure time habits) was conerned, Bass and Cale68 showed (in a sample of 42 secondary
schools) that 88% of it was games-oriented, and only 41% fitness-related.
PE and school sport in France
As in England, some activities grew from the pursuits of knights and nobles; fencing
and gymnastics came from military academies (notably Joinville) via a Spanish master,
Amoros. They were taught voluntarily in primary schools by 1851 and mandated by
ministerial Circular by 1869 in lycées, colleges and teacher training colleges, eventually
spreading nationwide. This style of systematic physical training resisted Swedish
gymnastics, as well as a more science-based form proposed by Lagrange, until Demény
introduced more rational methods based around Ling gymnastics (emphasizing selfknowledge and control), Hébert’s ‘natural’ gymnastics (adaptation to the environment),
and an element of English games (as preparation for adult society). The latter were
spread by a Paris-based elite, and national sports federations were formed some 10-20
years after their English counterparts. Between the two World Wars, an UnderSecretariat was created within the MEN, and under the Third Republic new policies of
any sort tended to start in the major cities and then spread to rural areas.
Under the Popular Front government, paid holidays appeared in 1936 and led to 50%
subsidies for community and private facilities, and the creation of the Popular Sports
Licence for competitors. The competitive and ‘leisure sports’ wings of clubs began to
diverge in purpose.
The workers' movement which had started by espousing the
concept of proletarian sport, shifted to become part of the international competitive
structure24. Even under the Vichy government of occupation, a new Masters of PE and
sport and 15 regional training centres were established, together with a secondary schoo
lsports curriculum of two hours a week or more, and Wednesday afternoons devoted to
PE and sport.
PE was seen as an aspect of social rebuilding after 1945, and Associations Sportives
(supervised for 3 hours a week by PE teachers) were introduced in secondary schools
and made voluntary for primary schools. Nevertheless, currently, one in eight secondary
25
pupils (860,000) in 1,400 associations, and 800,000 primary children in 11,500
associations are active in this way. Youngsters keen to work as match officials can be
trained for a state-recognised diploma. The Associations took part, like the British
School Sport Associations, in local competitions, wiht the aim of helping to meet the
needs of children in deprived, unemployed and disaffected communities. Although
France’s poor performance in the 1960 Rome Olympics gave concern, educational aims
were reasserted as the school leaving age was raised from 14 to 16 years in 1963. In
1953 experimental ‘Classes de Neige’ taking urban children to the mountains for winter
sports soon became a general two-week event, and were later follwed by ‘Classes de
Mer’ for water sports.
The Gaullist period (1958-69) saw increased centralisation by the state, and a distrust of
the national sports organisations; meanhile coaches, teachers and administrators had to
train professionally while the bodies they served remained amateur. In 1969 new
arrangements were introduced: in primariy schools this included the ‘tiers temps
pédagogique’, three nine hour blocks for basic social/civic studies and artistic/creative
ones, of which PE had six hours, (reduced to five hours in 1977) to be taught by class
teachers with peripatetic support. In secondary schools there were five statutory hours,
two in class and three of games; because of staff shortages, primary teachers were
redeployed to teach three hours. For older children the other two hours (including travel
ime) were offered outside school hours in Centres d’Animation Sportives set up by local
authorities, or in free use of other municipal facilities.
This was not without tensions, some qualified teachers resenting the use of coaches or
instructors, and fearing the loss of the progressive pedagogic process (a current concern
in England regarding teaching assistants). The curriculum became more sport-specific,
and children were examined in athletics, gymnastics or swimming plus one free choice
activity. France has a short school year of 180 days (compared with over 200 the in UK
and many other European countries), but the long school day pushes some sport into the
late afternoon. PE accounted for about 8% of the Baccalauréat (school leaving
certificate). Nonetheless, school sport facilities are often poor (see below). Talented
pupils have a chance to attend one of 200 regional Section Sport-Etudes where there is a
normal curriculum in the mornings and sport in the afternoons – a different form of
26
provision from Britain’s specialist sports colleges69. These number 2,100 in fifty sports,
with 40,000 young people attending.
The small medal haul by France in the 1960 Olympics had led to major community
facility plans and the setting upof a National Institute (INSEP), for 300 young athletes,
in Paris, of course, with a mountain centre at Font Romeau in the Pyrenees. A similar
result in 1964 provoked the Secretary of State for Youth and Sport to claim that winning
was the main aim, and an annual subsidy of €1m for elite sport, under the 1975 Law on
the Development of Sport, was aimed at better talent identification, medical and sports
science support, and help with preparation for a trade or profession after a competitive
career. There are special arrangements with both public and private sector employers. A
National Foundation for High Level Sport was established in 1975, funded by a levy on
tickets for professional events: apart from sponsorship and National Governing Body
support, an Olympic gold medallist can receive €30,000. The World Class fund of the
UK Lottery is now the equivalent.
Defrance and Renard24 argued that sport for all in France has been an ambiguous if not
contested term, having different meanings for different groups, viz:
a) for left wing politicians the democratisation of sport in all senses, including its
management
b) for industries' new mass markets
c) for world bodies like the International Olympic Committee idealistic targets for
universalising sports practice, and
d) for public bodies a similar rhetoric for justifying public expenditure.
The various moves led to the ‘massification’ of French sport, with club membership
leaping from 2m in 1980 to 13.8m in 1997, while the growth of public sports
administration nationally and locally was matched by the growth of commercial sport
and fitness services. As in England the growth of the state intervention was attacked; it
was too costly for liberals and too state-driven for those in favour of voluntary activity.
Meanwhile unemployment grew to alevel where policy action was needed (in 1980 10%
of young men and 17% of young women aged 16-25 were workless) and there were
urban riots in 1981, leading to local area-based initiatives of the kind seen in a paler
form ten years later in England.
27
Defrance and Renard’s24 argument (2003:240) was that this sports system is more
unified than its British counterpart, more coherent, less pluralistic and gives much more
power to the hierarchical organisation that starts at the bottom with the local club, then
rises to the Department committee, the Regional League and the National Federation.
The system reached its apogee in 1965-75, and has been subject since to the pluralizing
tendencies around 'New Public management' as in Britain, but to a lesser degree.
The current state of PE in Western Europe
Hardman and Marshall2 in their world-wide survey for the International Council of
Sports Science and PE were gloomy, saying that school physical education appears to
be under threat in all regions of the world (2000:66), and recording that in many
countries PE has been pushed into a defensive position, ...suffering from

Decreasing time allocation (less than 2 hours a week in years 1 and 2 and 10
to12)

Budgetary controls with inadequate financial, material and personnel resources

Low subject status and esteem, occupying a tenuous place in the school
curriculum and not accepted on a par with seemingly superior academic
subjects concerned with developing and child’s intellect, and

Marginalisation and undervaluation by public authorities.
Their data from western European countries (which included information from UK but
not France) showed the picture as displayed in Table 4. In England reduced timetabling,
low status, old or poor buildings, inadequate initial training for many teachers, very
patchy updating and inadequate integration and provision for disabled children add up
to a poor situation; for France, data are lacking, except that provision for disabled
youngsters would seem to be better.
28
Table 4: Facets of school PE in western Europe
facet
Situation in England and France
1. PE implemented according
to state regulations
In England, PE often suspended, eg for extra
numeracy/literacy work, losing 30+ minutes a
week70; in France – much elementary PE a
beautiful dream with 72% fewer than 2 lessons a
week 72
In England especially beyond year 9
Lower than ‘academic’ subjects
2. Reductions in curriculum time (average 7%)
3. Status relative to other subjects- actual (legal)
Non-essential in curriculum
4. PE’s academic value perceived sceptically
Non-support of headteachers, parents
5. Resources Finance declining (PE likely to be
cut when money short)
Facilities inadequate
Specialist staff- primary (secondary)
6. Training Initial
In-service
7. Curriculum content and delivery – growing
shifts to health focus
8. Prospects
9. Equity Gender - achieved
Disability - integration complete or
partial
More credit is given to what you can do with your
mind than... your body – Scottish female pupil
(Gowrie, 1996:47) 73
PE gives them [pupils] a chance to switch off their
brain .for an hour and a half…it is just relief –
male head teacher (Gowrie, 1996:48)73
Poor buildings, often only a hard playground, and
badly maintained pitches and lack of equipment in
many primary schools in England
England - average initial training 32 hours
undergraduate, 23 postgraduate, but some less than
10
sketchy (Oxley, 1998)74: local advisory services to
schools cut
Shift from health-related PA to health-related
exercise67 in England, and a lack of meaningful
activity and low skills in primary (Oxley,
1998:56)74; for many PE has become a joyless
experience in the quest for cognitive acceptability
(McNab, 1999:2) 75
Many gloomy
Pretty much achieved
20% found provision difficult for pupils with
Special Educational Needs 76
Applying in %
of Western
European
countries
93
71
21
60
16
37
48
30
-
72
88
45
17
Hardman and Marshall, at a Summit on PE of the International Council for Sports
Science and at the PE World Summit in 1999, prayed in aid the 21 year-old article 10 of
the 1978 UNESCO Charter of PE and Sport for bilateral and multilateral cooperation as
a prerequisite for the universal and well–balanced promotion of PE, and urged
governments to act instead of fiddling while PE burns (ICSSPE, 2001:33)76. At the
same meeting Talbot argued for PE’s contribution to building children’s self-confidence
and motor skills, to helping them cope with constant changes in society and
29
understanding their human rights better, to supporting national identity, and to
providing a foundation for community sport; Brettschneider evaluated evidence for
improving self-esteem and coping with stress and substance abuse, and Kidd argued for
the economic benefits of PE in combating obesity.
In France in 1991 virtually all colleges and lycées met national targets for respectively
three and two hours of PE and sport each week, and erosion of this has not occurred on
anything like the British scale, although Bonhomme’s comment suggests some
reduction has occurred relative to the regulations. Provision is for sports like athletics,
basketball and volleyball rather than those requiring specialist facilities; indeed only 2%
of schools had swimming pools, 10% a football pitch or athletics track, 23% a gym, and
40% a covered playground or hall. They depended to a much greater degree than in
England on provision by communes (Council of Europe, 1992 Sports Information
Bulletin 28:2182-4 Brussels: Sports Documentation Centre).
Physical Education, Physical Activity and PE for Sport
The debate as to whether PE should be about teaching children movement skills, about
(mainly) non-competitive health-promoting lifestyles, or about preparation for sport had
raged throughout the world since about 1970. The failure to resolve this debate and to
give PE a clear image in the eyes of parents, teachers and funders of education has
helped weaken its status as a subject, as Houlihan77 showed clearly in the UK, USA,
Canada and Australia. In England some left-wing LEAs in London and other major
cities became rabid about removing competition from school sport, and lost credibility
with many parents. It has also allowed the sportification of school PE to a position of
dominance78 with those same stakeholders having a clearer view of what sport was
about. In France Andrieu79 commented that after the 1960s there was no doubt that
l’èducation physique est devenue de plus en plus sportive et les liens entre les écoles et
les clubs qui s’etaient renforcés dans les anneés cinquante perdurent (1999:7-8). Sports
interests see schools as the ‘antechambers of clubs’. The problem with both the games–
based and fitness-related curricula is that they can appear to stress competence and to
humiliate obese, unfit and clumsy children 80.
Penney and Evans (1999:124)67 concluded that this has had strong associated effects on
the curriculum in England which still features disproportionate attention to a narrow
30
range of competitive team games, sex differentiated programmes, and teaching
characterised by a narrow range of teaching methods and strategies. Prime Minister
John Major particularly stressed the role of team games in the first six years of the
1990s; in a similar way, Terret81 emphasized the long-established and prominent roles
of gymnastics, swimming and athletics in French PE.
PE, school sport and lifelong participation
The current existence of a liberal choice of activities, even if they are only tried as
tasters, seems in the UK to have provided for those interested a portfolio of skills from
which to draw in later life. It has helped them overcome the fractures in participation
which can happen when life circumstances change. Thus Roberts and Brodie82 recorded
successively higher involvement in sport in age cohorts of men and women in five inner
cities, those who played regularly between 16 and 30 often becoming ‘locked into’ a
sporting lifestyle and establishing continuous sports careers which…are unlikely to be
disrupted for many more years. On the other hand, in one of the few follow-up surveys,
of Canadian young people, Trudeau et al83 could find no correlation between school age
and adult activity. Telama et al84 pursued 1,234 9-18 year old Finns over nine and
twelve years and found low but significant effects of school PE grades and sports
training/competing on continued participation. Daley85 reviewed various studies and
believed that continuing participation was evidenced in the short term (3 to 5 years), but
over longer periods only weaker tendencies to remaining active could be found, citing
studies over 12 years in Finland and 18 in Scandinavia; Physical Educationalists
frequently say that it is the quality of the early experiences that will determine their
effectiveness86.
Government involvement in school sport in England
The Sports Council was set up in 1966, reporting to parliament first via the Department
of Education and Science, then in 1970 via the Department of Housing and Local
Government and finally via the Department of the Environment. In the 1970s the
Council developed a close working relationship with municipalities in delivering first
new facilities and then new programmes of sports development in a phase of public
sector growth which lasted two decades. In this time the Sports Council’s relationship
with the Department of Education was distant and really only related to promoting the
community use of schools outside teaching hours. For two years at the beginning of the
31
1990s the Council came back under the aegis of Education, but was then shifted to the
new Department for National Heritage (later DCMS). After seeking to support a wide
range of target groups and initiatives it decided that it should have a primary focus on
youth sport of the sort that is common elsewhere in the world9.
But sport and PE came back together when John Major’s Conservative government
published Sport: Raising the Game11 which encouraged schools to increase the number
of active pupils and the levels of performance of those with some talent. It provided
Sportsmark and Sportsmark Gold awards for secondary schools with extra-curricular
opportunities (encouraging them to make effective contacts with local amateur clubs
and community organisations), leadership and coaching qualifications, and routes for
talented performers. Primary equivalents, Activemark and Activemark Gold, were
introduced in 1998. At the same time it abandoned mass Sport for All as expensive and
ineffective, choosing to switch support to measures aimed at gaining medals including
planning a specialist institute modelled on Australia, and ensuring that the money from
the new National Lottery was well spent 9.
The framework for development until the mid 1990s was a continuum from novice to
elite sport (Figure 4). This began with large number learning basic sports skills in
primary schools (or for adults relearning skills in adult education classes), moving on to
sports-specific skills in secondary schools, or (for a minority) in clubs. Seeking to
improve performance meant a need for basic coaching which then became more intense,
with the whole panoply of sports science and medicine support for the tiny elite. At any
stage people may drop out for a host of reasons (including injury, boredom, leaving
school, starting a job or studying, getting married, having children, moving house to a
place where there is no provision for the current sport). High performers may move
back down the continuum as a result of age, injury or stress . This concept is in contrast
to the situation in France where mass/leisure sport and competitive play are two
separate subsystems.
32
Drop
out
Drop
out
Drop
out
Drop
out
Excelle
nce
Perform
ance
Drop
out
Participa
tion
Drop
out
Drop
out
Introduction and
re-introduction
Drop
out
Founda
tion
Figure 4: The Sports Development Continuum

In 1997, with a new Labour government in power, Sport England published a
new strategy England: the Sporting Nation87 with ambitious targets for four
stages of development - young people, active participation throughout life,
performance development and achieving excellence. Taking the figures from the
first major survey of school age sport in 1994 as a base, the aim was to increase
by the year 2001:

by 50%those receiving at least 2 hours secondary school PE, from 55% to 83%

by 20% those doing extra-curricular sport from 43% to 52%

sports club membership by 10% for boys (from 56% to 62% at secondary ages) and by
20% for girls (from 38% to 46%)

by 10% for secondary boys and 20% for girls the numbers those who ‘strongly enjoy’
doing sport in their leisure time (from 67% to 74% and 45% to 54% respectively).
Nothing was said about how the necessary resources would be made available, but the
following year the Council launched its Active programme. This was based on formal
local sports development Partnerships between local authorities, clubs and schools in 45
counties headed by managers appointed with government funds, while the equipment
33
and programmes were to be bid for from lottery funds. Active Schools is selfexplanatory; Active Sports focused on improving facilities, coaching, and specialist
support services in nine sports (athletics, basketball, cricket, girls' soccer, netball,
hockey, rugby union, swimming and tennis). Active Communities wasaimed at reducing
unequal opportunities, and supporting local sports development, youth and community
workers, and voluntary organisations. World Class was the programme that supported
excellence. Similar youth sport strategies were produced in the other parts of the UK.
By 2002 in England, 50,000 young people had been involved in coaching events, and
the same number in county youth competitions, and 10,000 in talent camps. £69m had
been allocated to the programmes from the Lottery 88.
At the same time, the Youth Sport Trust was founded with philanthropic support from a
millionaire businessman, John Beckwith. It was led by Sue Campbell, who had
established her name as Director of the National Coaching Foundation; she became a
very significant figure in the policy system as advisor simultaneously to Sports and
Education ministers, and then Chair of UK Sport. The YST initially sought to support
children in the middle years of school, by offering training for teachers, equipment, and
information on delivery, and later extended its programmes to pre-school children and
those with disabilities, as shown in Table 5.
Table 5: Youth Sport Trust programmes
Programme
Years
Aim
TOP Tots
1.5-3
To help parents, childminders and nursery staff introduce children to
physical activities and games
TOP Start
3-5
To help nursery/playgroup staff to help children learn via PA
TOP Play
4-9
To support children in developing ‘play skills’
BT TOP Sport
7-11
To aid skill development in sports including basketball, soccer, netball,
squash, cricket, hockey, swimming, tennis, hurling and Gaelic football,
Sponsored by British Telecom
TOP Gymnastics/
Athletics/ Outdoors 7-11
To aid skill development in these activities
Medisport Fit for TOPS “
To address aspects of fitness and health in a range of activities
SportSability
To produce and aid opportunities for disabled young people
Ecclesiastical Insurance TOP
Link
14-18
To help young people play a role in organising sport, sponsored by EI
34
BT Top Sport has now been taken up by the majority of primary schools in England,
indicating the paucity of official support programmes; such programmes are being
extended to the other parts of the UK89. The author has argued that it is still a cheaper
expedient for government than ensuring good primary PE by providing specialist
Males
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
70 +
60 to 69
45 to 59
30 to 44
25 to 29
20 to 24
Are we increasing participation?
participated on at least one occasion in the last 4 weeks excluding walking
17 to 19
12 to 16
Females
6 to 11
Percentage
teachers.
Age group
source: 89,90
Figure 5: Participation in sport and physical activity by gender once a month or
more often
90
80
70
60
50
1987
1993
1996
%
40
30
20
10
0
16-19
20-24
25-29
30-44
45-59
60-69
70+
Age
Source: 90
Figure 6: Participation increasing or decreasing 1987-96?
35
As clearly seen in Figure 5, rates of participation in sport of any sort are highest
amongst 8-15s at 96%, but fall to about 76% among 16-24s; however, as in France, rate
have remained static in recent years, increasing only among the over-45s and even
suffering a small fall in the youthful groups (Figure 6). Outside school, participation of
schoolchildren has been nearly static since 1994, with a slight increase for girls and
small decreases for boys in and out of school over this period (Table 6). The table also
includes activities that are rarely available in school but are increasingly popular as
leisure time pursuits - an illustration of the games-dominated British curriculum that
favours boys over girls67.
Table 6: Sports participation by young people in school years 2-11 in and outside
lessons, England 2002 *
Sport/activity
Boys
In out of
lessons
Change, in
lessons %
1994-2002
Boys Girls
Change, out
of lessons %
1994-2002
Boys Girls
Football
38
58
13
17
-2
+6
-3
+5
Cycling
4
53
4
45
=
=
-9
-7
Swimming
32
48
32
55
=
=
-1
+4
Tennis
18
25
24
20
+5
+4
+2
+1
2
25
1
22
=
+1
+13
+8
20
22
7
5
=
=
-5
-1
4
21
3
23
+1
+1
-2
=
Track & field athletics
32
13
33
13
-2
+1
-2
+1
Running/jogging
15
12
13
10
-2
-2
=
+2
Aerobics/keep fit
10
5
17
19
-2
-7
=
-5
Netball
5
1
33
3
+2
+3
-1
-9
Hockey
13
4
24
6
-3
=
-1
+1
Rugby Union/League
16
10
3
1
-4
=
-2
-1
Basketball
19
16
12
8
=
+2
-1
+2
Rounders
21
8
38
14
-2
+9
-5
-1
5
2
17
21
-2
+1
+1
+4
Gymnastics/trampolining
26
11
36
22
-10
-5
+1
+5
Any sport including walking
82
88
82
85
-3
-3
-2
+1
Roller skating/blading/skateboarding
Cricket
Walks longer than 1 hour/hiking
Dance classes
Girls
In out of
lessons
* aged 6-16 participating at least 10 times in previous 12 months
36
source: 90
The proportion of those doing more than 10 hours a week outside lessons fell from 24% to
19% in this period, while proportion of those doing 1-5 hours increased a little. Despite over
a hundred sports being available in the community, 88% of all adult participation is devoted
to seven activities (swimming, football, cycling, aerobics, fitness, dancing, running and
exercise)55.
On the subject of participation among adults generally, Rowe et al (2003:8)91 opined that
although there is some evidence that small progress was made to close the ‘gender gap,’
there is no evidence to suggest that sport has widened its base to include more people from
low income groups, from different ethnic minorities and from people with a disability. Taking
population projections to 2024, when there will probably be 250,000 fewer 6-15 year-olds
and 1.3 million more people over 45, they reckoned that participation overall would drop
from 53% to 46%, other things being equal.
Despite growing concerns about equal opportunities in adult society from the 1970s, it was
only in 1999 that provision of and participation in school sport and PE was measured92. The
contrast between the sport of disabled and all children was stark:
Disabled children
Average no. of sports played once a year
6
Average no of sports played regularly (10+ times a year)
2
Active out of school in term time
Active in school holidays
Sports club membership
40%
59%
12%
all children
8
4
79%
78%
46%
Equivalent data for France is not available, although La Fédération Française handisport has
450 associations, 26 regional committees, 34 Departmental committees, 22,000 participants
and 12,000 licence holders 93.
The Blair government’s strategy for PE and School sport set out in 2002 had as key themes :

raising school standards

encouraging healthy lifestyles

realising personal potential

developing social responsibility (eg in volunteering)
37

encouraging creativity and innovation

improving quality of life, and

improving behaviour and attitudes94.
Table 7: The government’s PE, School Sport and Club Links Strategy for England
TARGET: 75% of schools with minimum of 2 hours of high quality PE and sport a week by
2006 – currently 40% at key stage 2 (7-11) and 33% at 11-16 (KS3 & 4)
Elements

400 Specialist Sports Colleges by 2005- wider curriculum, extra funding for 4 years
and club/community links

3,200 secondary School Sport Coordinators by 2006 and 18,000 Link Teachers in
partnerships between secondary and their ‘feeder’ primary schools

Gifted and Talented camps - each for 400 children by 2006 in 320 SSPs

Qualifications and Curriculum Authority investigation - into enhancing staff,
curriculum and fringe time- a ‘clear mechanism’ by 2006 to improve PE and the
school

Step into sport- encouraging 20,000 volunteer coordinators and 100,000 young
volunteers in 45 county partnerships – a sustainable infrastructure by 2004

Continuous Professional Development for PE and sport teachers- videos,
interactive training, mentoring – pilot, then nationwide by 2006

School –club links – targets not yet set

Swimming – 2 ASA pilots, Swimming charter launched early 2004

Community sports coaches scheme – no details yet
Source: 95
Table 7 sets out the nine major programme elements being implemented jointly or separately
by DfES and DCMS. It is too early to judge the results of this wave of investment, totalling
£459million for school sport and £686m for school sports facilities in 2003-06. There were
already, in 2003, 232 specialist sports colleges, serving 250,000 children, who achieved
better overall GCSE grades than their peers in ordinary schools (56.7% compared with.
49.2% obtaining five good passes) (DfES Press notice 15.1.04). This matches the findings of
some Californian research which found that fitter children had better grades especially in
maths, and especially older girls (www.aahper.org/naspe accessed 2.3.02). In Britain, an
evaluation of progress with School Sports Coordinators after two years concluded that the
work is delivering excellent value for money and has undoubtedly increased the profile and
38
enhanced the standards of PE, after-hours programmes and school sport in general, but it
cannot be regarded as simply a short-term exercise at the margins of mainstream school
life…. funding for PDMs and SSCos needs to be for the marathon and not the sprint (DfES,
2003:10)96. An evaluation of the first 31 School Sports Partnerships between secondary
schools and their feeder primary schools showed that: 61% of pupils spent at least two hours
on high quality PE and sport in and out of curriculum hours (compared to a third of all
secondary schoolchildren); schools provided on average 14 sports and had links with 5 sports
clubs; 21% were involved in inter-school competitions; each school, and 12% of year 10/11
pupils were volunteering97. By 2003 the number of such partnerships totalled 222. The clubs
links programme began with seven sports but was extended in February 2004 to include 22
(DCMS Press notice 07/04 of 22.2.04).
When it comes to commitment to competition and training the best index is of club
membership, and as Figure 7 shows, this falls dramatically after school leaving age and
continues to fall gently with age.
50
%
47
45
40
35
30
25
20
17
15
12.6
10.5
10
8.2
8.9
7.7
6
5
2.9
0
Total
11 to 16
16 to 19
20 to 24
25 to 29
30 to 34
45 to 59
60 to 69
70+
Age
sources: 89,90
Figure 7: Sports club membership in England
School sports policy in France
The most recent survey of French sports practice98 records participation for the 8 million
young people aged 15-24; for some purposes it divides this group into three:
39
Aged 15-18: mainly students, showing the highest levels of regular participation, club
membership and licence holding
Aged 19-22: showing a small decrease in participation club membership and licence
holding, and a marked decrease in competition, especially among girls. This
period coincides with the end of Baccalauréat studies and entry to higher
education, and hence with low incomes
Aged 23-24: some return to clubs, licence-holding and competition among males; girls
return less strongly and take up non-competitive sports, as in Britain.
These patterns are illustrated in Table 8.
Table 8: Sports participation amongst 15-24 year-olds in France, 2000
Sport & physical activity
Males
%
12-14 15-18 19-22
None
na
2
7
At least once a week
77* 88
82
As a member of a club
61
52
37
Playing in competition (displays) 49
44(58) 32(51)
Holding one licence
56
58
58
Females
12-14 15-18 19-22
na
14
68
66*
68
61
49
35
23
23
20(32) 15(27)
33
34
23
Total
12-17 15-24
na
8
66
75
51
38
30
28(42)
33
38
Sources: 98,99
The most popular sports among 12-17 year olds are shown in Table 9; gender contrasts are
similar to those found in England99.
Table 9: Most popular sports among 12-17 year olds in France, 2000
% overall
practice
girls
swimming
cycling
football
running
table tennis
jogging/walking
basketball
badminton/squash
39
38
32
24
19
19
18
17
45
39
20
54
30
44
38
42
tennis
dance
gymnastics
riding
16
12
10
5
33
76
68
71
% among
club
competitors
members
30
18
6
5
61
51
27
11
25
15
43
32
73
50
69
47
43
74
71
67
23
20
34
26
The lower emphasis on team games and the higher reliance on clubs than in England is
noticeable. Sports taken up but abandoned were, not surprisingly, those especially demanding
40
of effort or skill – martial arts (by 14% compared to 8% currently practising), dance (by 9%
compared to 12%), and gymnastics (by 9% compared to 10%).
There is a social/income gradient with young people from well–to-do households (annual
income above €32,700) playing badminton, squash and football; skiing, , skating, cycling
and rollerblading, whereas youngsters from low-income households (below €15,800 a year)
did walking, dancing, handball, gymnastics, and fishing. Reasons given for disliking or
avoiding sport in the two countries can be summarised as follows:
Reasons for not doing sport:
Reasons for being put off sport
France
England
Too much school work
Do not like sport
School sport is enough for me
Not enough time to play sport
Health problem
Boys
23
15
16
21
7
%
Girls
21
20
18
15
9
% Both sexes
being hit/kicked/falling over 49
going outside in bad weather 42
getting hot, sweaty, dirty
36
getting cold and wet
36
having to change clothes
27
Having to wash/shower after 22
The English were much more pragmatic and the French more strategic; yet 91% of the
former said they liked sport in both school and leisure time! Gowrie72 argued that in the
decentralised system of management for English schools, managers (i.e. headteachers)
and lay governors must promote sport if it is not to become the poor relation of other
subjects; he cites an unenlightened female head teacher as saying (1996:48) children
interested in sport will be doing it outside of school anyway. Therefore not opting for
PE at school will not be a loss to them. That is not the case with other subjects. The
school must see these subjects as their priority.
Sport outside school hours was given a boost in France by a measure of 1998 to allow the
development of Local Educational Contracts with one or more communes for activities
especially at lunchtimes and in the evenings; by the end of 2001 2,200 of these had been
signed with one in nine communes but covering 38% of the population. PE and sport figured
in almost all these contracts, delivered by local animateurs100.
In France, aA general policy review conference held by the CNOSF in late 2003 agreed that
the federal model should be kept but improved. Some suggestions for policy were to:

develop access to sport e.g., by improving transport, providing coupons, setting VAT
at only 5.5%, giving newcomers their first state licence free
41

develop citizenship through the voluntary sector e.g., by lowering the voting age for
young club members and promoting training for volunteers

contribute to social insertion e.g., by providing local facilities and offering a tax
rebate for sporting associations’ salary costs

help to combat violence and incivility e.g., by providing local open spaces, and
improving management of youth conflicts

connect with local social policies e.g., bycreating local charter for the use of sports
equipment and help with transport, forming local observatories on sports policy101.
Nonetheless, when the MJS proposed a 5% tax on sport broadcasting (analogous to the
voluntary 5% levy on professional spectator sport proposed by the British sports minister to
help fund grass-roots amateur sport), CNOSF’s chair, Henri Sandour wrote in Le Monde (1
Feb 2000): I am not against the idea of supporting a youth club (catholic youth centre) or an
association that organises a physical or sporting activity, I just wonder what this has to do
with sport, except that it allows youngsters from low-income households who would
otherwise lack the opportunity to take up sport. The voice and power of elite sport is still
strong. However, Defrance and Reynaud24 suggest that 18 heterogeneous sport-for-all
organisations that came together at the beginning of the 1990s may start to redress the
balance, even though no provision for mass sport was included in the 2000 Sports Act.
42
4. YOUTH SPORT FOR SOCIAL GOOD
In this section we look at moves to use sport for other social ends, viz:
* sport for health
* sport and social inclusion
* sport and educational achievement
* creating jobs though sport
* improving social cohesion through sport
* reducing youth crime through sport
Throughout the world sport is increasingly seen by politicians as a means to other social
ends. At first their attention was caught by the prestige that sporting achievement can
bring to nations (or cities); then in the 1980s there was concern with regenerating cities
and regions suffering industrial decline, especially by means of hosting major events.
Next, the escalating costs of health care led some countries, notably Finland and
Canada, to concentrate on the links between sport and health; then unrest among urban
youth created interest in the use of sport to combat delinquency and drug abuse, make
cities safer or help with rehabilitating offenders (a 20th century version of the character–
building benefits claimed by 19th century English public schools). Sport is mainly a
sociable set of activities and there is interest in whether it can extend social inclusion
and encourage social cohesion.
Finally, social policy makers are interested in whether sport can help lifelong learning
by improving the generic skills and thus job prospects of young people; in whether it
can draw in socially excluded groups, and motivate young people to be more active
citizens. This has been a strong theme of the DCMS 102 and Sport England103, and of the
MJS in France. Local authorities are now expected to deliver all of this rather than
merely sport for enjoyment and personal achievement –the traditional object of Sport
for All as promulgated by the Council of Europe since 19669. This 'repositioning' of
sport and recreation in the public mind as a tool of social policy has been taken up in the
USA (see Crompton105)
and by
English local government104. It must also be
43
remembered that education and cohesion apart, most of these benefits would come from
adult sport.
Sport for Health
Sport for Health has been a byword for policy in most countries but was not strongly
signalled in England until the DCMS made it a feature in Game Plan8, seeking, despite
differences in culture and spending levels, to make English adults as fit as Finns by
2020 (that is, with 70% doing moderate physical activity five times a week for 30
minutes). An expert panel recommended an hour’s moderate activity a day for children,
(with the less active starting with less). From the literature, Cavill, Biddle and Sallis106
recognised the following benefits to youth sport:

Enhanced well being and reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety

Increased self-esteem, especially for disadvantaged and low participant groups

Possibly enhanced social and moral development

small but significant reductions in body fat

small but significant reductions in blood pressure, insulin resistance, and skeletal
health, and

benefits to youth transfer from childhood activity; but there is little evidence yet
of transfer of youth sport to adulthood.
Sport England’s strong focus on youth sport in England during the last decade has been
criticised by Dopson and Waddington23 and Collins107 as perverse for ignoring the
greater benefits to health among older people in an ageing population; the small gains
among young people are substantially offset by the injuries strong and vigorous young
people inflict and suffer (Nicholl et al)108. Such effects were a major concern of Game
Plan8 but sport for older people was hardly mentioned; nor has it has received any
prominence in French sports policy.
Sport and social inclusion
I have dealt with issues of class and income above but it needs to be reiterated that they
are reflected in unequal opportunities for children to start and to progress, as studies in
Nottinghamshire109 and Merseyside110 show. Disability brings inequality also – as does
ethnicity – not in the class room but outside: children from Asian and Afro-Caribbean
44
backgrounds follow the standard curriculum with insignificant differences in
participation, but fewer (T% against Z%) become members of swimming clubs and
virtually none make it into the national squads111. There is an economic factor but a far
greater cultural one.. In societies riven by long-standing religious and political
differences like Northern Ireland schools and leisure centres in the ‘other’ communities
can be dangerous places for children and young people112
There is a National Resource Centre for the Educational and Social In France, whose
immigrant population is of similar relative size to England's, there is a National
Resource Centre for the Educational and Social Functions of Sport, located in Reims,
which informs and supports efforts at social inclusion. Through its communal offices,
the Sports Ministry promotes ‘Challenge Young People’ among 15-28 year-olds,
covering projects on ecological, humanitarian and cultural themes, including sport.
Sport and educational achievement
Research on the links between sport and educational achievement has produced
conflicting results. Studies in Hong Kong113, California114, Australia and Canada115,
have shown no more than that childrenmore active in sport do no damage to their
academic performance. The early results from the English Sports and other Specialist
Colleges is that their pupils achieve better marks than those in other schools116.
More striking are the results of a programme by the DfES called Playing for Success117.
Here children with poor academic and attendance records signed up for extra afterschool lessons in English, maths and IT held at centres attached to 58 professional
soccer and other sports venues, and got to play and receive some coaching. After some
twenty hours’ attendance, there were startling increases in achievement scores (for
numeracy by 17 months for primary schoolchildren and 24 months for secondary
pupils; for reading by some 8 months in secondary ages; and significantly for all
children in IT tasks.) Additionally, the children's attitude and self-image improved.
These results applies to both boys and girls, to children from poor or more affluent
homes, and to those from both first and second language English-speaking backgrounds.
Why, asked the monitoring team, did these children make up lost ground? They
attributed it to the ‘wow’ factor of being at a professional venue rather than school, to
good support in groups smaller than school classes, better IT equipment than at most
schools, and better motivation as they realised their gains (Sharp et al, 2003)117. Most
45
pupils attended for 80% or more of the sessions; as one boy explained I like [name]
Football Club. I wouldn’t go if it was at school…you have to come to school every day.
Employment in sport
France has a focussed programme of employment contracts in various fields including
sport, aimed at creating jobs that will become self-sustaining. This programme offers
€10,800 per job in year 1, tapering to €1,700 in year 5. 60,000 young people had such
jobs in 2001, 22% of them as animateurs, with two out of five being under 24 and a
third each aged 24-5 and 26 or older. 86% of these contracts were with National Sports
Organisations and one in eight with communes. Most had the Baccalauréeat or higher
qualifications, which indicates a lack of impact on deprived youth118. Le Roux et al119
discovered that the most popular purposes of these jobs were to offer better services to
federation/club members (35%), and to create new services (25% of Federations, 16%
of clubs- mainly among those already offering leisure time sports). Most recruits were
in organisations already receiving state help for volunteers or employees. Most clubs
were seeking to reinforce their traditional membership and coaching services, and only
one in four were sure of continuing the employment.
Sport increasing community safety/reducing crime, especially among youth
World-wide, because of the cost of crime, this has been the fastest growing area of
policy interest in using sport32, and there are active programmes in both countries.
Outdoor activities which involve battling against the elements have long been seen as
character-building and the same view is now extended sto urban sports.Active
citizenship is taught in English secondary schools, and PE is seen as an important
contributor to understanding and coping with cultural diversity, democracy, community
action, the media, and the internet (DFES, 2002)120. There is no adequate theoretical
explanation of the causes of crime; McCormack121, quoted by Collins32 identified a
range of social/structural, intermediate and personal/internal factors that can combine to
push people from observing to offending; this makes clear that housing, welfare, leisure,
police, probation and justice organisations have to work together and at national, local
and personal levels.
In the UK a quarter of known offenders are under 18, with 6% of these regular
offenders, committing 70% of recorded crime. With this in mind, the Home Office in
46
2000-02 came up with a scheme of substantial funding for half-term and vacation
sport, music, drama and art schemes (SPLASH) for 13-17 year-olds and in some cases
9-12 year-olds in 300 high crime estates.. In 2002 central Youth Justice Board funds
were matched locally to total £2.8m, or £1.63 per hour per attending child ( £48 for each
child on a summer scheme.). The scheme appeared succesful, with local crime figures
showing a reduction of 7.4% over 2001 (but in the context of some fall nationally), and
'nuisance' hardly increasing whereas it had risen 13% the previous year122. Another
youth programme, Connexions, provided similar Summer Plus activities for some
10,000 8-19 year-olds123. The problem with such schemes, however, is that they are
resurrected each holiday, often with different leaders and children; there is no
mechanism to sustain work. And what is not known is whether crime is displaced to
neighbouring areas without the benefit of leaders and groups.
Another scheme, Positive Futures, is spearheaded by the Home Office drug prevention
team and steered by a group including Sport England and the Youth Justice Board. With
a budget of €6.85m it was delivered in 2003 in 67 of the most deprived areas, by local
authorities but also by the Football Foundation and the National Association for the
Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO). Most projects focus on the ‘top 50’- the
50 young people aged 13-16 most at risk. Data from all 65 schemes involving 34,600
youngsters, including 8,500 new clients in 2002 shows the important role of sport124 in
this project (Table 10).
A real problem for such schemes is the use of sessional staff and substantial staff
turnover, which makes it hard to establish continuing relationships with the young
people. Clearly in most schemes sport is simply a diversion from crime and nuisance.
One school said Following reports of anti-social behaviour during the school lunch
beak, it was agreed that the project would deliver extra football sessions at this time to
occupy the young people. These sessions have been successful in reducing such
nuisance behaviour and have impacted on the target of crime.
47
Table 10: Key features of Positive Futures, 2002

35% of the young people involved in regular physical activity, 11% intensively

girls comprised only 30% of new participants

football and basketball were the most popular activities (in 78% and 37% of
schemes) averaging 81 and 48 attenders at their sessions

the largest benefits claimed are in better relations with peers and family

a minority (2%) did obtain awards - notably Community Sports Leaders and
Duke of Edinburgh Awards

2% joined a sports team and 1% a club

most schemes had 16 partners, 72% including sports clubs

future developments includ widening the range of sports and activities for girls
(e.g. dance aerobics, fencing) and trying to get partners to commit money to
extend the sessions and sustain the programmes
source: 124
In France an organised movement emerged to serve this need – the National Union of
Outdoor Sports Centres [Union Nationale des Centres Sportifs de Plein Air] which with
multi-agency funding runs programmes linked also to reducing drug and alcohol
dependence, and improving nutrition and health125. Programmes for youth at risk may
be informal (eg sports du rue - roller skating, roller hockey, rollerblading, soccer,
basketball126) or organised to combat poor health diet, anti-social behaviour, drug abuse
and crime. The Union ran programmes for 55,000 young people at 140 centres in
France in 1997125; Charrier127 summarised eight action research projects promoted by
MJS, INSEP and the Association of Technical Directors covering a range of sports;
qualitative findings of a programme arranged round boxing in Montauban convinced the
coordinator of a strong impact on delinquency in the city–je suis sûr que ca a un impact
très très fort mais vraiment très fort (Charrier, 1997:283). But as in most studies these
were not quantified128,129,130.
McCormack121 showed that in the short term, given such opportunities, offenders could
improve their diet and health, reduce their drug abuse, improve their socialising and
48
technical sports skills, learn to use public leisure facilities (consumption skills no one
had taught them in their fragmented education and upbringing) and improve self confidence. Critiques of such programmes, like Collins32 and Coalter104, are that they:

are unclear about the purpose of their intervention, or try to meet too many
objectives


may only divert offending to other places or times
do not make links with the other agencies to provide comprehensive care,
and/or

have too few resources or too short a timescale to produce long lasting results,
so that most (seven out of ten) convicted participants re-offend.
Clearly expensive incarceration does not work, yet British politicians are loath to put
money into careful long-term work with youngsters for fear they will be accused of
providing holidays for hooligans. French politicians seem more inclined to fund the
work, but still do not have convincing data about the outcomes and benefits.
49
5 CONCLUSIONS
Here I
* re-iterate the difficulties of comparing populations and systems from existing
material not gathered for the purpose
* draw together broad trends, similarities and differences/ between in England
and France
International comparison is fraught with difficluty even when undertaken with specially
collected and comparable data; differieng historic and cultural circumstances mean that
apparently simple and similarly named and intended laws, actions and policies are
subtly or radically different in practice. The problem is compounded when, as in this
study, one is splicing together data from scores of sources prepared for totally disparate
purposes over a couple of decades or more. Nonetheless, the exercise is challenging and
fascinating; the reader must determine whether it is in any way successful or useful.
Here I briefly try to give an overview of the similarities and differences between these
two major West European states, at different times enemies and allies, borrowing
enormously from each other’s language and culture but very distinct. To keep this
structured and manageable, I will resort to some tables.
Similarities
Similar sized populations, with ethnic
minorities of similar magnitude
Both populations aging
Both sports systems complex and hierarchical,
but UK labyrinthine (cf Figures 1 and 2);
similar levels of spending by households
Both amateur systems of mainly small single
sport clubs, but more multisport clubs and
larger employment (government-aided) in
France
Similar gradients in income/social class, and
sports participation
Health a major issue, but France spends more
on services
Separation of elite from mass sport, more
formally in France, and with better support of
athletes and post-athletic careers
Growth of media/sponsor/pro sport complex
Differences
Amateur system started slightly earlier in GB
Government involvement much longer in
France, covering all age groups
UK central control of local spending strong,
but France centrally regulated in detail, e.g.
through licences, but more enthusiastic
support of programmes for sport
French Ministry of Sport separated from
Education after decades; one of eight functions
in UK Department now working closer to
Education than in 30 years
Fewer poor people in France because of higher
state benefits
More new managerialism and entrepreneurial
public management in UK, possibly to the
detriment of deprived people
Strong evidence of, low activity, obesity and
poor health in UK children; less so in France
Table 11: Franco-British differences and similarities in context
50
Context
As Table 11 shows, in general there are more similarities than differences in the context
for youth sport and they tend to be of degree rather than of kind.
PE and sport in and out of school
Table 12 looks at these situations, and suggests that the integration of French school and
club sport and better state support for the latter certainly has a better outcome in terms
of club membership and participation up to post-Baccalauréat years; after that time,
differences in measuring participation make it much more difficult to judge adult
outcomes. Tensions remain between popular and elite sport131,132.
Similarities
Concerns about curriculum time and status
though both holding up better in France than
UK (Hardman and Marshall survey2)
Differences
No specialist primary PE teachers in UK,
support by Youth Sport Trust TOPS courses
Still wider choice for boys in and out of school
Always new programmes, but in England
more actions on schools under Blair since
1997 (Table 7); but support for/understanding
of clubs weaker?
Most sport happens after academic work in
France
French PE and sport depends on facilities
provided by communes
England national curriculum more dominated
by team games
Sports club membership significantly higher in
France- better support?
Table 12: Franco-British differences and similarities in school PE and sport
Sport for good
In commone with many European countries133,134, both England and France want to see
sport producing other outcomes in society but this is more directly expressed sin policy
in England (Table 13). As in other European countries there is a lack of evidence for
these outcomes except in the area of health, but England seems to be more actively
seeking evidence. Sport England57 classified youth into five groups, according to their
attitudes and extent of involvement in sport and physical activity, as shown in Figure 8,
as follows:.
51

sporty types – about a quarter- higher than average enjoyment and frequent
involvement, in both primary and secondary schools; disproportionately male
and with few from ethnic minorities; the model to aspire to?

untapped potentials – over a third - these are not averse e.g., to getting wet or
dirty but spend limited time playing; younger and female; may be receptive to
more activity

unadventurous – small group (one in seven) , with limited activity(and choice?),
mainly girls aged 11-14, and ethnic groups –may be attracted to wider choice

reluctant participants – a quarter- same choice as sporty types but little take-up;
one in three are couch potatoes, girls who dislike sport intensely and are
inactive; two in three are tolerators, with average levels of activity but little
interest, from primary girls and secondary boys; these may already be lost to
sport and at health risk91.
Even in childhood, differences in terms of sustained or vigorous activity hold, with
children in professional and managerial households doing more both in England128 and
France98.
Couch
Potatoes Tolerators
Untapped
Potential
Unadventurous
Sporty
es
Potato
Low
ww
ww
Negative
ww
Participation
Attitudes
High
Positive
Source: 57
Figure 8: Activity typology of English schoolchildren 2002
In terms of other social policy areas, it is clear from chapters by Dopson and
Waddington23 and Defrance and Reynard24 that sport and welfare policies have had little
to do with each other; certainly in neither country have sports interests been strong
enough to affect welfare policy; rather, as Houlihan77 has suggested, the sports policy
52
network is ‘loose’, with ‘porous’ boundaries through which more powerful policy
influences ( from education, health, internal affairs or foreign affairs) fairly easily
penetrate.
Little evidence of outcomes has been forthcoming in the area of youth crime, beyond
description and anecdote. Nor is there hard evidence of sport’s role in regeneration,
beyond providing a magnet for visitors who spend larger sums eating, drinking,
gambling, shopping and being entertained in other ways. France is undoubtedly
spending more on creating jobs in sport, both in government service and to support the
club movement. English data seems to hint at educational benefits, though a few more
years are needed to confirm short run trends.
Similarities
Similar programmes for deprived communities
(with more Area-Based Initiatives in France),
disabled, ethnic minorities
Differences
Childhood obesity now much more of a ‘moral
panic’ in England? But almost certainly
similar problems in France?
Similar concerns about drugs, youth crime, but
even less monitoring in France than UK of
outputs/outcomes; more sports du rue in
France
Jobs in sport growing in both countries but
more specific programmes in France
especially to help clubs/national sports
organisations
Sport involved with regeneration but no proof
of benefit beyond attracting visitors
In England Playing for Success strongly and
Specialist Colleges initially show educational
benefits
Table 13: Franco-British differences and similarities in sport for good
Wwhat can one say in conclusion about this journey of comparison? There are many
broad similarities, but even more specific differences in structures and systems, policies
and programmes and investment priorities. Sport plays roughly equally important roles
economically in both countries, but has undoubtedly been more important in politics
and public policy in France for several decades at least until the time of the Major and
Blair governments in the UK after 1995. Clearly government in Paris holds a tight
administrative rein over a mainly decentralised system of delivery; ironically, since Mrs
Thatcher’s premiership, financial control by Whitehall has been iron-clad, and with a
non-statutory basis. There is no strong basis for saying in either case ‘X;’ is better than
‘Y’ for youth sport, except perhaps in terms of greater coherence between schools and
clubs; in adult sport, it might be said that recent competitive results might suggest the
53
French elite system is an effective one, but making a causal link between these two
would require much detailed research. Findings hint at other areas where there are
lessons to be learned from each other, even if we avoid the more hazardous operation of
trying to transplant practices, which have a high risk of cultural rejection because of
these differences. More work is needed!
54
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