Debates in Physical Education

Susan Capel, Richard Blair, Susan Capel, Richard Blair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429996672
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Grundschulbildung

This new and updated second edition of Debates in Physical Education explores issues physical education teachers encounter in their daily lives. By engaging with both established and contemporary debates, this volume challenges readers to think about and reflect on the relative validity of positions presented in order to develop their own reasoned and personal view in relation to the topics explored.

Divided into four accessible sections, this book investigates and offers fresh insight into topics of central importance in physical education. Chapters include, for example:

• 
  
  

• Physical education as a means or as an end in itself;
• Knowledge for physical education;
• The physical education curriculum;
• Assessment in physical education;
• Technology, pedagogy and physical education.
• Physical education beyond schools and teachers.

Designed to stimulate discussion and support readers in their own research, writing and practice, Debates in Physical Education will be a valuable resource for any student or practising teacher engaged in initial teacher education, continuing professional development or Master's level study.

Section 1

The evolving context of physical education

Chapter 1

Government and physical education

David Kirk

Introduction

Government is involved in physical education primarily in two ways, through legislating for national curricula for schools and through the development of sport policy. Behind this relatively simple statement, however, lies a tangled web of complexity. Complexity is an enduring feature of the governance and organisation of sport in the UK generally, and of physical education’s relationship to sport more specifically (Green, 2008). Within such complexity, debates are bound to take place.

In this chapter, we will explore some of the lines of debate that constitute the tangled web of the relationship of government and physical education. One line of debate centres on what we mean by ‘government’ and ‘physical education’. As we reflect on this issue and the questions it raises, other lines of debate emerge. Some of these criss-crossing lines are: the ‘relative autonomy’ of educational systems, the operation of power and vested interests, participation versus elite sport, neoliberal practices in education and sport, the role of academic research in policy development, and the obdurate challenge of educational change. In order to follow these lines of debate, we can draw on insights offered by fields such as sport policy, educational policy sociology, and curriculum studies.

The chapter follows these debates and the cross-cutting and inter-related insights to them offered by these fields of study. After a brief definition of the core notions of ‘government’ and ‘physical education’, the chapter considers in turn the two main points of connection, national curricula and sport policy. For the sake of coherence in the chapter, the examples and evidence are from the UK, with a particular focus on developments in England. Readers who do not have experience of the UK are invited to consider the extent to which events in other countries do or do not follow the patterns outlined here.

‘Government’ and ‘school physical education’

Before we can begin to examine their relationship, we need a view on what we mean by the terms ‘government’ and ‘physical education’. The most recent policy for sport in the UK, Sporting Future (HM Government, 2015), is clear about what ‘government’ means. The writers outlined three levels of ‘government’ for sport policy: central, local and devolved.

Central government is Her Majesty’s Government, based in Westminster, with a UK-wide remit. Central government’s role, according to Sporting Future, ‘is to set the high level policy that guides how public money is invested rather than to make each and every funding decision’. According to the authors of Sporting Future, government operates on an ‘arms-length principle’ across a number of its departments. As such, ‘Government will not generally prescribe which organisations, sports or types of activity should be funded; that is the role of UK Sport, Sport England, Public Health England (PHE) and others’ (HM Government, 2015, p. 12). Local government refers primarily to Local Authorities, ‘the biggest public sector investors in sport and physical activity’ (HM Government, 2015, p. 13), who also have an important role to play in bringing together the work of a range of other agencies such as National Governing Bodies of Sport (NBGs) of sport, schools, clubs, health and the private sector. Devolved government refers to responsibilities for elite sport and education in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In this chapter, each of these levels will be referred to as government, the formal legal entity for governing in the UK.

The meaning of ‘physical education’ has had a long and disputatious history (Kirk, 1992). Here we will use the term to refer specifically to those activities undertaken during school curriculum time and in extra-curricular time, where formally sponsored by the school and where a majority of pupils are routinely included. The School Games aims to be inclusive of as many children and young people as possible, at least in principle, and arguably could be considered to be part of or an extension of school physical education (http://www.yourschoolgames.com/how-it-works/what-school-games/). The many sport-specific competitions at local, county and national levels we will not count as school physical education since they routinely exclude a majority of pupils. Nor will we include in this definition the many community, club-based sport and physical activity opportunities available to young people on a voluntary basis, though these activities will be considered in the second part of the chapter.

We can see already that complexities, qualifications and nuances emerge around notions of ‘government’ and ‘physical education’. Armed with these definitions, we can now turn to the two primary ways in which government at each of the three levels identified relates to school physical education. The first of these is national curricula.

National curricula

Debates around national curricula reveal the extent to which the nature of school physical education, its form and content, has been called into question by various individuals and groups and the range of parties who have vested interests in the character and conduct of physical education. These debates also show the limited influence government has over the form and content of school physical education, despite the existence of the National Curriculum Physical Education (NCPE).

There are national curricula operating on each of the ‘home nations’ that comprise the UK. The earliest is the NCPE in England and this is the focus of the discussion here. Some though not all of the issues that are debated in relation to the NCPE apply to other countries’ national curricula for physical education. The national curriculum sets out programmes of study that all state-funded schools are required to follow by law, though Academy Schools and private schools are exempt (Roberts, 2018). While attainment targets are outlined for each subject, and they are subject to Ofsted inspections, schools have considerable freedom to determine how these might be reached.

This is the current situation. The passing of the Education Reform Act 1988 by the Thatcher Conservative government created the necessary legislation for a national curriculum. As the House of Commons Briefing paper by Roberts (2018) reveals, the national curriculum has been revised regularly since its implementation in the late 1980s.

For physical education, free from the dictates of high school examinations for most of its history, this was the first action by government to specify the nature of school physical education since the publication of a series of Syllabuses between 1909 and 1933. As I noted close to the time, the NCPE marked ‘a watershed in British physical education discourse, a new moment in the production of definitions for physical education’ (Kirk, 1992, p. 2). This was in part because it was borne out of controversy and strenuous debate. Engineered by the right wing of British politics in the lead up to the 1987 General Election which brought Margaret Thatcher to power for a third time, a debate about school physical education erupted in the mainstream and professional press. The debate was over the place of team games and sports in physical education, fuelled by an allegation that physical education was being subverted by ‘trendy left wing radicals’ who wanted to rid the subject of sport and competition. The titles of articles appearing in newspapers of the time capture the flavour of the debate: ‘Worried Sports Chiefs Call for Games Policy’ (December 1985), ‘Pupils’ Views of Sport Spark Competitive Games Row’ (January 1986), ‘Get In There and Win’ (July 1986), ‘Howell (former Sports Minister) Calls for Sports Re-Think’ (August 1986) and ‘Passing the Fitness Test?’ (March 1987).

This final article, which appeared in The Listener, was the basis of the script for an episode of the BBC’s current affairs programme Panorama, which aired in March 1987 and was titled ‘Is Your Child Fit for Life’. In it, the journalist Richard Lindley built on the debate in the print media to create an impression that Britain’s proud tradition of team games and sport was indeed in jeopardy in state secondary schools, targeting for criticism in particular the English Sports Council’s slogan of ‘Sport for All’. Lindley’s reporting conveys to viewers that teachers’ efforts at inclusion were undermining ‘standards’ and denying the ‘realities of life’, such as success and failure through competition. More than this, left wing-inspired physical education teachers were subverting Britain’s success as a sporting and trading nation and, indeed, as an international power (see Kirk, 1992, Chapter 1).

An editorial in the Times Educational Supplement (TES) provides a typical example of the material Lindley had to work with. In a July 1986 issue of the TES, the Editor wrote:

What is to be made of the 1960-ish ideology which prompts ageing PE organizers to decry traditional forms of sporting competition on the basis of value-judgement that are wildly at odds with those of the society the schools exist to serve? Last weekend, London TV viewers were treated to a comprehensive school where pupils engaged in stool-ball, a primitive forerunner to cricket played with a softball bat which, The Times man said, ‘allows both sexes to play and is not competitive’. Viewers must have reflected that one thing is fairly certain; the West Indian pace attack was not reared on stool-ball and stool-ball is not going to help England find a quick bowler.

(Editor, TES, July 1986)

Physical educators attempted to answer back. Colin Hardy (1986) of Loughborough University pointed out in the British Journal of Physical Education’s newsletter that far from declining, evidence from surveys showed that participation in some team games was actually increasing. Terry Williamson, Editor of The Bulletin of Physical Education, wrote of his concern that a self-interested lobby group was gaining such a high profile just prior to a General Election and the promise of a national curriculum if the Tories won. The Physical Education Association (the forerunner to the Association for Physical Education [afPE]) went to the length of creating a special Commission to investigate whether sport was declining in school physical education, which reported in March 1987. Although the Commission began with wider intentions, the PEA inquiry could not avoid being shaped by the issue of whether and to what extent school physical education had a primary responsibility to produce elite performers for Britain’s international sports teams (Kirk, 1992, pp. 6–7).

Despite these protestations, the impression was sown into public opinion that school physical education was in danger of being overtaken by dangerous anti-tradition radicals. John Evans (1990) insightfully argued at the time this was because the protagonists for the Right had tapped a tender nerve in the psyche of the population centred on the powerful symbolism of sport as a cherished aspect of British cultural heritage and Britain’s status as an international power.

The NCPE was created in the immediate aftermath of this debate. Penney and Evans (1999) document in detail subsequent developments, which resulted in an essentially sport-based version of physical education. This is not to say the NCPE took this form without some struggle and resistance from physical educators and other stakeholders. As Penney and Evans recall, the Working Group convened and tasked with providing recommendations to the Secretary of State for Education produced an interim report which sought to balance the wide range of practical physical activities. This report was rejected, however, for not giving enough emphasis to sport and the Working Group had to amend their recommendations to accommodate this request from government.

We might conclude on the basis of this narrative of the origins of the NCPE that school physical education was at this time vulnerable to powerful vested interests, particularly those who support the right wing of British politics. It was certainly no accident that a media storm engulfed school physical education in the lead up to a high-stakes General Election in which a controversial Prime Minister who had championed a form of neoliberal politics was standing for the third time. Evans was right in his assessment that physical education’s associations with games and sports, cherished traditions within Britain’s cultural heritage, made it a plausible ‘fall guy’ for other ills in British society at the time.

At the same time we might ask, does this example suggest that government and some vested interests can determine what form school subjects such as physical education might take? Theories of the ‘relative autonomy’ of education systems from government control were much discussed by Leftist scholars of education in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Hargreaves, 1982; Whitty, 1985). The question was, can education change society? (Apple, 2013). Apple’s answer is yes, it can, but not necessarily in the ways Left scholars would wish for, in terms for example of greater social justice and equity. Consistent with Apple’s analysis (2013), the birth of the NCPE shows how the political Right has been adept at manipulating popular sentiment for their own interests, utilising the media and recruiting others to their cause, often unwitting, as in the case of various NGBs of sport in the mid-1980s who had no ostensible political affiliations. If the creation of a national curriculum in England in the late 1980s marked a new moment in government’s attempts to exert overt control of the school curriculum, we might conclude along with Basil Bernstein (2000) that education’s relative autonomy from the state was being continuously eroded and reduced over time. We will see when we turn to the example of sport policy how that process has played out in another context, beyond the education system itself. But when we consider what happened next, once a sport-based form of the NCPE had been legislated into existence, we identify some further points of complexity and debate concerning the relationship between government and school physical education.

Because, ironically, the form of physical education that constructed and constituted the NCPE did not look very much different from what had existed previously, from the 1960s up to 1988. Extensive research by Kane (1974), Whitehead and Hendry (1976) and Underwood (1983) showed that there was much local variation among schools across England in terms of the specific games and sports offered, the time allocated to types of activities, and so on....