Sport to be big part of Labour's manifesto, says Clarke

Friday, 27 August 2004 12:00 AM

Promoting school sport will be a major part of Labour's next election manifesto, Education Secretary Charles Clarke said today.

Speaking at a press conference on school playing fields, he said: "It [school sport] should have a large role in the next manifesto."

His remarks follow an announcement earlier this week by Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Tessa Jowell that Labour wanted more emphasis on competitive sport in schools.

Mr Clarke was launching new rules to make it harder for schools to sell off their playing fields. He said the new rules would tie in with the drive to improve competitive sport in schools, as they emphasised schools' links with local sports clubs.

Labour's target for school sport is to have three-quarters of all children playing sport at school for at least two hours a week by 2006. Currently, only 62 per cent of children have achieved this target.

Mr Clarke admitted: "There are still many schools where we're off the pace."

When pressed on this failure, he quipped: "But that's true for all our targets."

He insisted, however, that more sport did not mean lower academic performance.

"There's absolutely no question that parents want to see schools doing well academically, but they also want to see their children growing up healthily," he said.

"All the evidence is that the more sports activities children engage in, the better they do academically. It is not a trade-off between doing sports and doing maths."

He added that in addition to the two hours a week during school hours, he would like to see more students playing sport after school and at weekends.

It is expected that Mr Clarke and the Health Secretary, John Reid, will make a children's health announcement in early September, looking at the food that schools provide to their students and how they can better educate them about healthy eating.

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