It’s a common sight at the start of a PE lesson: the student clutching a note explaining why they can’t take part. Most, of course, have valid reasons, but there will also be those who simply don’t like PE or feel anxious about taking part. 

Helping those students to overcome these issues isn’t easy for PE teachers but doing so could soon be more crucial than ever: in December 2021, the House of Lords published a report recommending that PE should be a core subject, alongside English, maths and science. 

The report points to evidence which suggests that more lessons, longer breaks and additional sports facilities could improve student mental health and overall health outcomes. The obstacles schools face in facilitating those recommendations include funding, lack of curriculum time and exam pressure. 

And yet some schools are already actively trying to engage more students in PE, despite the challenges. 

Alternative PE: ripsticks, skateboarding and yoga

Jenna Strain is a PE teacher at Selby High School in North Yorkshire, where, over the past five years, her department has increased the number of options available. They now offer 32 different activities, including rollerblading, boxercise and mountain biking. Since Easter, ripsticks, skateboarding and other street sports have also been added. 

While key stage 3 lessons are focused on helping students to learn new sports safely, older students are able to choose between different themed “pathways”. The “mental health” pathway, for example, offers yoga, dance fitness and exercise classes.

This doesn’t mean that they’ve done away with their football and netball teams, though. 

“The competition elements are still there with traditional sports,” says Strain, with school teams competing in local leagues.

However, the impact of the pandemic made it even more urgent to update the offering. Covid led to a widespread “lack of confidence”, says Strain, and simple things, such as changing into PE clothes at school, suddenly became barriers for some pupils.

As a result, her department has focused on engaging students who have lost confidence, making sure there were activities to suit every interest.

Another school adjusting its PE curriculum is The Wherry School, a specialist academy provision for autistic students with mainstream ability profiles. 

Principal Rachel Quick says that the school used to run a standard PE curriculum but that “even with small class sizes, it was awful”. The sensory experience of shouting, loud noises or competing visual stimuli could be overwhelming for some, while others struggled with the physical touch, loss of personal space or sense of negative judgement that came from competitive team sports.

Instead, the school now runs “physical enrichment”: a choice-based exercise programme that allows students to pick between a rotating set of six to eight sports per half-term. The students can choose the activities that resonate with them, Quick explains, giving them ownership of the journey, which leads to better engagement. 

The move towards individualised sport 

According to Dr Justen O’Connor, an associate professor at the School of Curriculum Teaching and Inclusive Education at Monash University in Australia, it’s no surprise that the approaches outlined by Strain and Quick are resonating with pupils - they reflect a wider movement in society. 

O’Connor says that adults are moving towards “individualised ‘sport my way’”, and away from organised, competitive sporting hobbies. He witnessed this phenomenon while he was president of a small, regional cycling club in his hometown in Australia.

“We would host regular competitions and 20 people would turn up. The next day, with the same course and no competition, we would get 50 people,” he says. “And I was asking the question, why are there more people turning up to the non-sport version of what we do when they’re essentially the same?”

Similar patterns are evident in the UK, where casual exercise activities, such as Park Runs, have seen a boom in participation. Indeed, in 2015, Park Runs attracted more than double the number of participants that took part in the London Half Marathon. 

“Even traditional sports are being turned into these less structured, less rigid, less competitive forms of participation,” O’Connor says.

In a new research paper, “Rethinking the classification of games and sports in physical education: a response to changes in sport and participation”, he proposes the addition of five kinds of “sports” to the school curriculum. 

They are lap or circuit sports, such as swimming lengths or running laps; route or journey sports, like road cycling or trail running; rush or action sports, such as skateboarding or surfing; stunts or tricking sports, like parkour or trampolining; and rhythmic or aesthetic sports, such as rhythmic gymnastics or dance.

O’Connor explains that all of these sports fall under the umbrella of “parallel play” - a term that comes from peer sociability studies in the 1930s. They allow students to work independently in the same spaces, which makes them more inclusive, and offer them opportunities to practise key skills, and get active, without the pressure of “winning” or making the team.

“[At the] skate park, kids are skating side by side - there’s no winner. They mastered a trick that was at their level that they couldn’t do two days ago but now, because they practise, they can, and they’re getting better. They can see people who are better than them, people who are worse than them, and they see themselves moving up on a continuum,” he says.

With the global trend towards more individualised sport in full swing, the need to engage all students in physical activity post-Covid, and the recommendations from the House of Lords around PE becoming a core subject, more schools may soon wish to draw on O’Connor’s model. 

How to make the funding work

But how realistic would this be in schools with stretched PE departments and dwindling budgets? 

According to O’Connor, there are small, inexpensive changes that can make a difference, such as focusing on student voice.

As part of his research, he and his team explored “mapping exercises”, which give students the opportunity to use their orienteering skills to assess their local environment and make a “map” of all the different places on school grounds or in local spaces that could be used to make a new PE activity.

In groups, students can then design an activity they would like to take part in, such as a 5K fun run in the park. 

Strain agrees that student voice can be really valuable: “At the end of the day, you are learning from the child; you are not going in with an assumption of what they will or won’t engage with,” she says.

Getting the right continuing professional development in place is also crucial, she adds. At her school, teachers were trained in a range of activities, from learning to ride a mountain bike to getting their boxercise certification. 

Staff have also had to jump some logistical hurdles in order to realise their vision, such as developing new risk assessments and sourcing funding for equipment.

There is help out there for schools on the funding front: Sport England, for example, offers a grant scheme, as does the National Lottery Fund.

But both Strain and Quick stress that, if you really want to make PE more inclusive, it takes a whole school commitment. Time has to be set aside for implementing changes to the curriculum and addressing any reticence among staff.

O’Connor believes that all of this work will be worth it, though. 

While there are important lessons in sportsmanship that children can learn through oppositional sports, the message that there must always be a winner and a loser in physical activity is not “nice” for children, he says - especially those who are already ambivalent or averse to PE. 

And sometimes, he adds, making the traditional sports more inclusive is simply about reframing the activities. 

“If you think of a net and ball game, say volleyball or tennis, I’m standing opposite my opponent and it’s very clear who wins. There’s no dispute: one will be better than the other and the scoreboard will tell you,” he says. 

“So, that’s where we open up the question; we change it from ‘how do you beat your opponent?’ to ‘what kind of questions would you need to ask if we wanted to make this fun and engaging for a group of people?’ And the tactic then is not about ‘how do I beat you?’, it’s about ‘how do we include others and have a shared experience?’”

Schools don’t need to do away with their netball, football or rugby, he stresses: “We’re saying there is more to think about here than just the traditional, competitive team-based sports that dominate [PE].” 

So, who’s up for an hour at the skatepark? 

Molly Bolding is a freelance journalist, inclusion consultant and online educator