Being fat often makes you a bit aimless. I was fat for some years so I know how it feels: unmotivated, depressed, vaguely defeated. Somehow fat Scottish children often look particularly unhealthy, because most have pasty complexions. Being the colour of a peeled potato as well as looking like one is an unhappy combination.
Apparently, it’s all the fault of local councils. Although more than a fifth of primary one pupils are overweight, with an appalling 9% qualifying as obese and 4.4% qualifying as severely obese, and more than a third of 12-year-olds falling into the same unhappy bracket, fewer than one in 10 Scottish children actually receive the recommended two hours of physical education a week. Primary pupils receive just 70 minutes and secondary pupils about 80 minutes. Cue much huffing and puffing.
There are two questions here. Firstly, is even two hours of PE each week really going to cure Scotland’s fat problem? And, secondly, can we really pass the problem off on to schools? My recollection of school PE lessons is of short bursts of activity followed by long periods of queuing for equipment. As far as exercise was concerned, the actual timing of the lesson was of far less importance than what you did, and in terms of concerted and prolonged effort, going for a brisk walk stretched the heart more effectively than any PE, except when we were allowed to play pirates.
I dare say modern PE, with its specialist teachers and its “mission statements” is different, although even today, a question addressed to my children about their PE lessons does not precipitate even a faint memory of frantic physical jerks. In the main, when asked, “What did you do?”, they say, “not much”. I often wonder whether 10 minutes of aerobics each day would not be of far more use than three hours of the “high-quality PE experience ” so beloved of jargon-addicted educational bureaucrats.
What’s more, I wonder whether the teachers should not have to do it too. Even if working up a sweat did nothing for obesity — from which the teaching community is not immune — some vigorous aerobics would at least wake everybody up before lessons begin.
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On the other hand, why should schools take full responsibility for the exercise a child takes? Reading the reports on childhood obesity, one word was notably absent: parents. Yet it is parents, not schools, who are really responsible because it is parents who largely influence a child’s eating and exercise patterns.
It is nice for parents, of course, to be able to blame the school or the council for the size of their children, but not helpful in the long run since all it does is provoke a sense of grievance. Doctor: “Your child is overweight.” Parent: “I know, it’s a disgrace what the council does to kids these days.” Yet who provides, or is supposed to provide, breakfast, supper and a bit of an example? Moreover, another question arises: what can schools really do? Even in those schools that promote PE, the days are long gone when a PE teacher could physically force an unwilling child to swing on the bars or vault over a horse under threat of a hefty bit of corporal punishment or verbal humiliation. Now, large children tell the teacher: “It’s my genes, Miss,” and dare anybody to haul them off the bench. There’s not much point in even two hours of PE per day if the very children who need it know just how to get out of it.
The so-called “postcode” lottery of PE is a complete red herring. If a primary pupil in Clackmannanshire gets three minutes more PE than a primary pupil in East Ayrshire, or even 30 minutes more than a similar pupil from Falkirk, does that mean that fewer pupils in Clackmannanshire are fat? I very much doubt it, because if they were, the council would most certainly have told us.
Most schools that I have visited already provide fruit and healthy lunch options and make it clear that they do not wish their pupils to be overweight. They encourage games in the playground and, if they are still lucky enough to have sports facilities, attempt to use them. To concentrate on the figures for PE provision and to castigate some areas for being “worse” at PE than others completely misses the crucial point, which is that timetabled exercise at school can never cure obesity in children.
Of course it is good for children to take exercise at school, but to pretend this is anything more than a thumb in the dyke is nonsense.
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Perhaps the person who dreamt it up should be forced to spend at least half an hour climbing a rope before hanging upside down from the monkey bars.