Dame Caroline Dinenage, Member of Parliament for Gosport and Chair of the Culture, Media, and Sport Parliamentary Select Committee, is calling on the Government to scrap its proposal to slash PE budgets by 22%.
Her consistent approach to this has now been backed up by a high profile intervention by former sports stars Sharron Davies, Tanni Grey-Thompson and Daley Thompson who claim that the funding cut risks “closing the door on the sporting superstars of tomorrow”.
Caroline said:
“Too many children are being denied the benefits of physical activity because PE is not being fully utilised in schools. Movement should be embedded into the school day but the Government refuses to mandate two hours of PE a week. These proposed cuts show that the Government isn’t serious about getting children active.”
Caroline raised the issue of PE funding cuts in the House of Commons across the summer. During a debate on her Committee’s report "Game On: Community and school sport” in June she told Sport Minister Stephanie Peacock that a £1 billion school sport funding announcement was “a cynical cut disguised as new funding…It is smoke and mirrors.” The Government’s new PE and School Sport Partnership Network is worth £1 billion over 3 years supporting both primary and secondary sport provision, resulting in a real terms cut compared to the previous £320 million-a-year PE and Sport Premium.
In April Caroline asked Education Minister Georgia Gould to commit not to reducing school sport funding, saying:
“Recent reports suggest that the Government are proposing funding cuts for physical education, so will the Minister please give a very clear commitment today that there will be no reduction in funding for PE in our schools? In fact, I would love to hear from her that there will actually be increased investment in our children’s health, wellbeing and learning through a more active school day.”
The Minister replied:
“The Government absolutely want to see children engaged in physical activity, and to support that through the school day. We have recently announced funding for school games organisers and will be setting out further information about our new partnership model, which will bring together different partners from across the private, public and voluntary sectors to ensure that children in every community have opportunities.”
