PE lessons have not changed for decades and are “failing miserably” to engage pupils - particularly girls - in active lifestyles when they leave school, says the head of Scotland’s largest school of education.
Girls feel “humiliated”, “shown up”, “judged” and “forced” to do things in PE, according to research by the University of Strathclyde’s David Kirk, who has spent the past year trialling a new approach in Glasgow schools. He argues that secondary schools are, by and large, failing to address these barriers to girls participating in lessons, despite 35 years’ worth of research showing that girls’ physical activity hits the buffers in adolescence.
Instead, secondaries are continuing to deliver the same “one-size-fits-all multi-activity curriculum” that they have done since the 1970s, whereby pupils in early secondary learn about sports like basketball or hockey or swimming in blocks of around six weeks.
The delivery of PE lessons also remains “didactic” - they are about “showing and telling and demonstrating”, says Professor Kirk. And things that are offputting for girls, such as the use of “the jakey box” - Glasgow slang for the box of clothes left over by other children that pupils who forget their kit are forced to wear - continue to be “commonplace and widespread in UK physical education”.
Kirk says: “We are like a stuck record in physical education: we are still doing stuff that was common practice in the 1970s when I was at school.”
However, Kirk believes that relatively small changes to the way PE is delivered - such as making single-sex classes the norm, giving pupils more choice over activities and making girls feel comfortable and safe in PE from the outset - could make a big impact, and he is in the early stages of trying to prove it.
In 2015-16, he began working with Kim Oliver, professor of physical education pedagogy at New Mexico State University in the US, to trial a new way of working with girls aged 13-15 in PE in four Glasgow schools.
But the head of Scotland’s association of PE teachers has hit back at Kirk’s claims, insisting that - while he shares his concerns about inactivity - it is “ludicrous” to suggest that PE lessons have not changed since the 70s.
Becoming physically literate
Listening to pupil voice has become increasingly important in schools and PE departments are no exception, says Russell Imrie, principal teacher of PE at Lenzie Academy in East Dunbartonshire, and president of the Scottish Association of Teachers of Physical Education (SATPE).
While physical activity is an important aspect of PE, teachers are also trying to develop physical literacy - coordination, rhythm, timing, balance - as well as personal qualities such as cooperation, competition, self-discipline and showing respect, he says.
“Schools should have [both] PE and physical activity,” Imrie tells Tes Scotland.
Secondary schools, as a whole, need to embrace the idea that physical activity is important, Imrie argues. The Daily Mile - 15 minutes dedicated to running or walking worked into the school day - has taken off in primary but not at the secondary level because schools struggle to make room for it in the timetable, he says.
“The aim of PE is to make pupils physically literate. It’s about preparing them to be physically active later on in life. It’s about having the skills and the coordination to take on a sport,” Imrie adds.
“If we moved away from developing these skills, in five years’ time the national governing bodies for sport would be saying, ‘What’s happening to our sport?’ and David [Kirk] would be writing an article about the skill level having dropped.”
However, Kirk maintains that there is room to change secondary PE lessons for the better.
Early findings from his project show that if girls have more say over what they do in PE, they are more engaged. The researchers have also found that it is possible to quickly create a comfortable and safe environment - so that girls don’t feel judged or embarrassed - by dedicating time to building trusting relationships between teachers and pupils.
One pupil taking part in the pilot commented that previously she had felt that everybody was “constantly making a judgement on you or saying stuff about you”, but now she can “get on with it without having to worry”.
Kirk explains: “It’s about being comfortable in the space and being prepared to engage in a range of physical activities that expose your physical competence. If you sit and do your maths sums and get it wrong, nobody knows except you and the teacher, but doing PE is a very public display.
“The teachers and girls do a lot of work to create an environment in the classroom where girls trust each other not to ridicule or humiliate.”
One Glasgow PE teacher who took part in the trial notes that “the other teachers found [giving girls choices] a little bit disconcerting in my department”.
However, another teacher says that the girls were more willing to try new and different activities because they had helped to choose them, and it was not “us dictating to them”.
Kirk says: “PE teachers will tell you, ‘We deliver a broad curriculum so that people can find something they are good at and continue to do it for the rest of their lives,’ and they’ve been saying that for the past 20 years.
“But all surveys of adult physical activity show that [school PE lessons] have been miserable failures when it comes to what they say they are there for.”
However, he is full of praise for the Glasgow teachers who took part in the trial for “pushing up against the status quo of traditional physical education”.
Who teaches the teachers?
According to Oliver - who has been trying since the 1990s to find better ways to engage the large number of girls who do not like traditional PE and sport in physical activity - the key to successful PE lessons is “being student-centred and finding out what facilitates and hinders their interest, motivation and learning and then using that information to guide our pedagogical decisions”.
However, Imrie argues that inactivity among adolescent girls is not a problem that PE teachers - who might have a class for two periods of 50 minutes a week - can solve alone. Parents need to take responsibility for getting their children active and keeping them active and, as a society, we need to make it easier to exercise, he believes.
“You can go to the Kelvingrove [Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow] for free, but step across the road and it’s £6 or £7 at Kelvin Hall [sports arena] to book a badminton court - to me, these things should be free,” he adds.
Schools of education - like Kirk’s - need to dedicate more time to the teaching of PE during their courses, says Imrie, because primary teachers often lack confidence in delivering the subject.
As he puts it: “Kids come through primary and already they don’t have a good experience of sport, so I would throw it back to David Kirk and ask: how much PE do his primary postgraduate and undergraduate students do?”
