? Participation rise looks set to fall well short of target
? Shadow minister 'deeply sceptical' on coalition's school plan
Tessa Jowell, the shadow Olympics minister, has insisted she has no regrets over setting ambitious sports participation targets for the London Games, despite the fact that the figures are set to fall woefully short.
After London won the Games on the back of a series of legacy promises, Labour set a target of one million more people playing sport three or more times a week, and a further million engaging in more physical activity, by 2013. Sport England was charged with delivering the first of those missions and the NHS the second.
More than halfway through Sport England's four-year period covered by the Whole Sport Plan, in which �480m is being invested through sports governing bodies, the figure has gone up by just 109,000. The number of people playing no sport at all has continued to increase.
No other host city has managed to increase sports participation as a result of staging the Games. The targets attracted criticism because they were focused on getting already active people doing more sport rather than getting inactive people into exercise. In any case they have failed to have the desired impact.
"I don't think it's a millstone and I don't regret it," said Jowell, who still sits on the London 2012 board. "If you're going to set a goal as ambitious as that goal was, you have to make achievement against it visible for everyone. Had I still been secretary of state I would have been trying to build some national momentum towards it and looking at every possible way to build capacity for more adults to take part in sport.
"I am not somebody who is allergic to a small, selected and purposeful group of targets. Transparency is important and those two targets in sport and physical activity were focused on creating a sense of national mission and purpose," she told the Legacy Ready summit held by the Fitness Industry Association and the Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity.
Since coming to power the coalition government has dropped the exercise target and has hinted it will also axe the Sport England goal, although that remains officially in place. Having changed the release schedule of its Active People survey to twice a year rather than quarterly, Sport England's latest update will be made public next month.
Jowell also said she was "deeply sceptical" over the government's plans for school sport. Last year, an outcry greeted plans to axe the �162m budget that paid for a network of school sport co-ordinators through the Youth Sport Trust. The funding was partially reinstated to provide �87m over two years, with �22m allocated to pay for so-called School Games Organisers to work on three-day contracts and �65m to allow secondary schools to release a PE teacher one day a week to work with primary schools.
It has also ringfenced �20m in funding for the School Games, a series of intra- and inter-school competitions that will culminate in finals on the Olympic Park.
"Although I have said how much I support the School Games, I am deeply sceptical that will be enough to even get participation back to where it was a year ago. This was a world?class system for school sport," said Jowell. "The Australians are copying it, the Brazilians could not believe we're getting rid of it. It's just not too late to withdraw those redundancy notices. If you're going to get kids playing sport in school, you've got to organise it."
Jowell said that under Labour 90% of schoolchildren were receiving two hours of competitive sport a week and it was on track to hit five hours a week among 70% of children by 2012, but figures were now going backwards.
"If there is a significant fall [in participation] between 2010 and 2014 of course it would be a significant missed opportunity. As of now, the jury is out on that one."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/nov/29/tessa-jowell-olympics-sports-participation
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