To whom it may concern,

I'm a head of PE and am very interested in the outcome of this inquiry. I thought I would give you my perspective. As a PE teacher and middle manager I'm constantly battling with senior managers for more curriculum time & evidence for one thing or another.  Due to the changes constantly being made in education pupils are doing far less physical activity in pe lessons than ever before. Curriculum constraints have seen my school personally lose 1 lesson a week for Key stage 3 pupils. Having to include literacy, numeracy & now the digital framework is further reducing the time pupils actually spend being physically active. It is fantastic when it fits, but constantly providing evidence is what ESTYN & ultimately the Welsh assembly government expect. By doing this it will only reduce the time spent doing physical education, I'm not one to shy away from including literacy, numeracy or digital literacy, in fact I embrace it where it fits, providing evidence is the difficult part as it takes so much time from the actual doing. Sometimes young pupils just need to be able to be physically active without written or video evidence. Some of my pupils are becoming less engaged in PE because it's becoming another academic subject, they just want to take part in sport and be physically active!

The second issue, the GCSE PE specification and exam has more weighting on the theory of pe than actual practical. This is forcing pe departments to further reduce the pupils physical activity time and spend more time sitting at a desk. The exam board (WJEC) has taken fitness out as a practical choice. Girls in-particular don't generally continue with team sports once they leave education, therefore we need to encourage 'fitness' by taking it off the specification means most schools will take or reduce its curriculum time! This is thoughtless & I think will have a very negative impact long term, especially for girls.

The third issue, Schools are very reluctant to give time up for sports days or activity day. My local sports development department are fantastic and create a yearly programme of sports events, it's full of every activity you can think of. But the events are not as well attended as in previous years. Teacher just can't get the time (in some cases the pupils) off to attend many events. My school try their very best to allow us to go to as many events as possible but we still don't go to enough. This is not giving my pupils a wide enough variety of opportunities.

Please contact me to elaborate on any point. I would be happy to assist you in anyway I can.

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