School 'sports' day was farce

From the archive, first published Tuesday 26th Jul 2005.

How wonderful that London has been awarded the Olympics for 2012.

Not so wonderful that some of our primary schools, including the one that my children attend, don't believe in sport.

The so-called 'Sports Day' -- the bit that we were allowed to watch -- consisted of team games (nice idea to mix the kids from different classes and year groups).

However, no individual activities, let alone sports, were included.

An obstacle course that had to be completed while carrying a cup of water was the final event -- what a complete anticlimax and total lot of nonsense.

One other 'sport' featured consisting of the children sitting (steady now, wouldn't want them doing anything energetic) and taking it in turns to look under carpet tiles to find letters of the alphabet.

Last year, the children were allowed to do one set of races at the end -- all seemed to thoroughly enjoy it -- but these have now been excluded, along with all other activity that might bring out any competitive spirit in children.

What a complete farce. I feel sorry for the children, they all tried their best and enjoyed the day.

However, they would all benefit from more sport in schools, not less. Sport teaches children about their amazing bodies, it gives them a sense of pride, achievement and something to strive for, it has benefits for their mental as well as physical health and just as importantly, it is fun.

Life is competitive -- we all have to learn to win and lose. We compete for jobs, lovers, friends, university places, houses and many more things throughout our lives.

It is the duty of our primary schools to equip our children with the skills to cope with competing.

Instead, it seems they want to molly coddle our children and give them the false impression that life is fair -- it isn't.

As parents, we don't rely on our primary schools for sports any longer. My boys are lucky if they get one lesson of 'sport' a week, and even then, this can consist of walking around the gym with a bean bag on their heads or sitting watching a select handful of pupils perform some gymnastics. This is just wrong.

I have written to the headmistress to express my concern and disappointment and look forward to her reply.

Maybe we Brits should be lobbying the Olympic committee to include carpet tiles hunts, bellringing and hoop-la in future Olympics as that looks to be the only hope of medals for our future generations. God forbid they actually compete.

I would be interested to hear if any other parents/readers have had similar non-sports days at their primary schools.

Alison Beasley

Chipping Norton

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