Stopping sport at schools is not a good idea

 

The importance of sport at schools – to both teachers and learners – became really apparent in its absence this year. All school sport was halted in March 2020 when the nation went into lockdown as a result of the Coronavirus and it only resumed, in a limited fashion, in November. The entire winter season didn’t happen, neither did the start of summer in the third term.

The schools were closed down completely for quite a while and online learning became a new phenomenon. That, in some cases included online encouragement to pupils to stay active and engage in some sort of training regime. Virtual coaching sessions and webinars and workshops were presented to keep sport and sporting matters alive at a time when everyone was stuck at home.

Many admirable attempts were made, but there is no substitute for the real thing and there were reports of children becoming anxious and even depressed at not being able to get out there and run around with their friends.

In June the kids were allowed to go back to school – the grade 7s and 12s first – under strict protocols, with the rest coming back, bit by bit, in the months that followed. The conditions laid down included a ban on all school sport. There was some relaxation of that towards the end of the year, but returning to normal interschool activity was not allowed.

Clearly, the health of the children has to take precedence and limiting contact limits the chances of transmission of the virus. That said, however, there seemed to be little sense in allowing children to return into class rooms where they would be in close contact with each other, in enclosed spaces, but not allowing them to engage in sporting activities, in the outdoors, with limited physical contact.

If protocols could have been drawn up which, supposedly limit the risks of transmission in classrooms, the surely the same could be done in a sports context?

It comes down to two issues that have been recurring themes in my parallel interests in sport as part of the educational process and in the sadly unequal state of education in South Africa. Sport is unquestionably part of the educational process in schools, not a nice-to-have add on that can be dropped  just to be safe rather than sorry when it comes to transmission of the virus. At the same time, however, the sorts of sporting programmes that I tend to speak of do not exist in the majority of the schools in the country. I have written before of the damning ratio of five to twenty-five thousand – only five thousand of the twenty-five thousand schools in the country, according to research, meet the lowest standard of functionality: teaching and learning taking place on a daily basis.

In many of those schools there are issues of attendance - by teachers and learners, buildings are in disrepair, there are no sports fields there is very often no electricity or running water and the scourge of pit latrines has not been fully eradicated. When Covid-19 struck, of course there were bigger fish to fry than the authorities wondering how sport could be safely practiced in schools of that type.

It’s about inherited privilege and inequality and what should have been done to redress the situation. I don’t have the solution, but it’s clear that while there have been efforts, there hasn’t been much success in the last 26 years.

Fixing those schools, both physically and in terms of the development of the principals and teachers who work in them should be one of the top priorities, sadly it hasn’t been. And included in fixing them should be the establishment and upkeep of sporting facilities and the introduction of well planned and efficiently run sports development programmes. Without that, as I’ve often said when looking at transformation, we will never have the organic shift in the demographic composition of provincial and national teams which everyone desires and which at the moment can only be achieved through compulsory racial quotas at the selection stage.

But most importantly, it’s about preparing all our children as well as we can for the futures they face and there’s no question that sport plays a massive part in that.

Everyone should be given the chance to play, and let’s think very carefully before we stop them from doing that because we don’t think the lessons taught outside of the classroom are as important as the ones taught inside.