• Chair of Youth Sports Trust makes plea for long-term strategy
• Campbell says School Games can be 'driver for change'
A year after forcing a partial government U-turn on plans to scrap the dedicated national budget for school sport, the chair of the Youth Sport Trust has warned that long-term funding must be guaranteed if there is to be any lasting legacy from the 2012 Games.
Baroness Campbell, who is also chair of UK Sport, the funding agency for elite Olympic sport, said her plea as the Games drew closer was for ministers to recognise the progress that had been made in school sport ahead of last year's changes and ensure they ringfence funding for the long term.
Under a complex compromise deal, which involved a refocusing of the strategy to concentrate on an intra- and inter-school competition that will climax in a School Games staged on the Olympic Park, much of the funding is only guaranteed until next year.
Campbell said: "It's a very complex situation. My plea is that if you want a legacy, you need to think long-term strategy. There was a legacy from the last strategy, which was greater participation [in schools]. If you really want to make the School Games a driver you've got to think long term. Changing the system, changing things locally, sorting out local transfers, they take more than a year or two years.
"Creating real legacy requires consistency. If you can get that I think the School Games can be a real driver for change."
Following an outcry from athletes, schoolchildren and opposition MPs, the education secretary, Michael Gove, was forced to reinstate part of the £162m annual funding that was ringfenced to provide a national network of school sport co-ordinators. But the new funding package amounted to only around half the original figure, with any additional money to be found from individual school budgets. Between 2003 and 2010, the number of secondary school children playing two hours or more of sport a week rose from 20% to 85%.
One of the key pledges that helped secure the London Games was a promise to "reach young people around the world" so they were "inspired to choose sport".
The Department for Education has promised £32.5m a year to release secondary school sports teachers for one day a week to work with primary schools, but only until 2012-13.
The £11m promised from the Department for Health is also only confirmed until 2012-13. Meanwhile, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's contribution of £11m a year towards the costs of organising the School Games is guaranteed until the end of the current public funding round in 2015, as is £4m in lottery funding.
Campbell praised the commitment shown by the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, but said that guaranteed long-term funding across government was required if the School Games policy was to be a workable strategy rather than an eye-catching initiative. She said: "Make it a legacy programme and give us a sustainable four-year vision. If you want to move to a different structure or funding regime at the end of that four years then you can do that over time. You can't do it all at once."
The YST chair said the primary school programme was crucial and called for "physical literacy" to be given as much prominence as literacy and numeracy.
"All the research that is out there shows that a child gets a better sense of wellbeing, is healthier, more physically capable," she said. "If you haven't captured that kid by eight, nine, 10, then you're into remedial stuff. You can set as many targets as you like for adults. But if your earlier experiences of school sport are negative, it can take you a lifetime to get them back."
She also paid tribute to the 450 school sport co-ordinators who had to reapply for their jobs as part-time school games organisers and said their achievements should be recognised. The YST's own figures showed that just over half of secondary schools had retained their entire sports structure despite the cuts, while 34% had maintained some and 11% had axed it altogether.
Although she said there was still residual anger from those affected, Campbell called on them to move on and work under the new policy. "In terms of timing, people will look back and say it couldn't have been a worse decision," she said. "You've gone through this massive transition. Right now it's scary. There are still people who are angry and cross. My message is that they have a right to be angry and cross but we need to start moving forward. And if they don't, they're going to be left behind."
"We were building something very special. If you look at the fact that Australia and New Zealand and everybody wanted to model on it and are modelling on it, you say that we were building something really special. We're having to redesign and reshape that. But it's no good to keep looking over your shoulder. We are where we are. People will say 'was that a good decision?' I could linger on it or I can say 'that was a decision that happened'."
Campbell said that a combination of the School Games, guaranteed curriculum time for PE and the DoH's Change4Life scheme, which is introducing school clubs to introduce a range of activities to children who are not naturally keen on sport, still stood a chance of success if long-term funding was in place.
Later this month, Hunt is expected to unveil changes to the government's sports participation strategy to refocus the £480m currently spent over four years through Sport England and national governing bodies in an effort to boost sports participation numbers.
After falling woefully short of an earlier target to increase the number of adults playing sport three times a week by 1 million by 2013, more stringent performance targets are expected to be enforced with a particular focus on the 16 to 19 age range.
Campbell said that for the new initiative to succeed there needed to be a fundamental overhaul in the way sports clubs were organised and a determined move to professionalise coaching.
"If you're going to drive change in terms of young people's participation beyond the school gates there are only two things. It's clubs and it's coaches. The way we've designed clubs in the past has not necessarily helped us forge the right kind of links," she said.
"In Europe, clubs are physical places where the kids can go along after school and mum can swim and dad can go in the weights room. We don't have that. We need to redefine what we mean by the notion of a community club."
"The other massive thing for me is this whole business of professionalising coaching. It seems amazing to me that we still think somehow this coaching network should be voluntary. Of course, there are millions of volunteers who do a fantastic job but if you really want to create that connectivity, you've got to professionalise coaching.
"That whole area, professionalising that workforce and creating new and very different club environments – they are huge step changes. That's got to be funded and by Sport England and delivered collaboratively with the governing bodies. It's a big, big, big challenge that we've never really addressed."