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Labour's Andy Burnham has written to the UK statistics authority detailing two disputed claims
Labour has accused David Cameron and senior ministers of misleading MPs and the public over the controversial decision to end £162m a year of dedicated school sport funding.
Andy Burnham, the shadow education secretary, has asked the statistics watchdog to investigate what he says are "misleading" statements made in parliament and to the media by the prime minister, the education secretary, Michael Gove, and the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt.
It came as the Department for Education (DfE) admitted that the funding is disappearing altogether, and not being subsumed into the general schools budget, as had been previously claimed.
Members of the public who complain to the DfE about the issue are being sent a response which makes clear that the £162m is not being added to the overall budgets of schools in England. That contradicts previous government statements that the money was no longer going to be ringfenced, but would still be available for headteachers to spend on sport or other priorities.
The response says: "There are no plans to devolve the £162m down to schools. The secretary of state believes that the former government's PE and sport strategy was expensive and burdensome and deprived large amounts of young people the opportunity to play regular competitive sport. That is why we have decided to cut the £162m that the previous government allocated to its PE and sport strategy."
When Gove was asked by Andrew Marr on his BBC television programme in November if the sport money was going, he replied that it wasn't, before adding: "We're increasing spending on education overall, so headteachers can decide on their own priorities."
Headteachers, young people and scores of elite athletes have protested that Gove's decision to remove funding for 450 school sport partnerships across England from the end of next March will reduce participation and increase childhood obesity. The uproar prompted Cameron to pledge a rethink two weeks ago.
Burnham has written to Sir Michael Scholar, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, outlining "serious concerns about the way in which government ministers have used statistics relating to participation by schoolchildren in sport activities".Burnham He then details two disputed government claims about pupils' participation, which he says are based on "highly selective use of the data in this area".
Gove told Marr that "we haven't seen the increase in the number of people playing competitive sport". That, Burnham said, is disproved by the school sport survey earlier this year, which found that 27% more boys and 60% more girls now take part in interschool competitive sport than in 2006.
Burnham also took issue with Cameron's claim in the Commons in November that "last year the proportion of 11- to 15-year-olds playing sport went down". The Taking Part survey, from which Cameron quoted, did find that the proportion of that age group doing sport in the previous week had gone down by 0.8%, he said. But it also found that the percentage doing sport in the previous month had risen, albeit by only 0.7%.
The withdrawal of the £162m means that heads will have to pay for PE and sporting activities out of their usual budgets. Gove admitted to the Commons education select committee yesterday that schools would not be receiving a real-terms increase in their budgets, as inflation is higher than had been forecast.
Burnham said: "Michael Gove has used misleading statistics and sought to imply that funding is simply being devolved to head teachers. But the truth is that school sport has been earmarked for severe cuts. Olympic athletes, head teachers and hundreds of thousands of young people have condemned this move – does he really think he knows better than them?"
A DfE spokesman said last night: "We believe headteachers should have the freedom to spend money in the way they think best suits their pupils.
"That's why at the time of the spending review we announced that we were de-ringfencing numerous grants that schools received and mainstreaming them into the direct schools grant. This included funding for specialist schools including specialist sports colleges."
"We also made it clear at the time of the spending review that we were ending the last government's PE andsports strategy. and would set out an alternative route, redeploying resources and people, because we felt that it had failed to deliver competitive sport in schools."