Duly noted!! Don't even know why I started it all to be honest. I was at work, sh[ii[/it day and all that. I'm the same as you to be honest, sometimes I just can't be ar[is[/ied doing it properly, so I shall leave the grammar police!

P.S. - "resign" (Sorry! Couldn't resist! I've left now... honest!)

there are loads of clubs around for kids outside the schools. in my small town let alone a big city we have two really well run junior football sides from u7 to u19.
there are archery,cricket, trampolining virtually every sport you can think of expect the two rugby codes, and nearby wetherby and sherburn have both codes.
there is no excuse for any child to be unable to find something to do.
the biggest reason we don't win things is the last goverment brought in this 'no competative' policy with no winners and losers. total b'.

also the fact is a lot of clubs have well meaning but untrained parents 'coaching' and i use the word loosely. i reffed an u13 game last week where the visiting manager berated his team yet gave no clear instructions. he was clueless.

seth, i am really sorry about your job loss but this is a time where we are in massive debt and cuts have to be made. i have no sympathy with the students, the majority it seems can afford to take a gap year and spend fortunes going around time drinking yet cannot afford to pay for lessons. boo fkin hoo my heart bleeds.

You cannot expect the schools to give your child the sport they want or enjoy. Parents also need to take resposability to get the children active. to many people ask "what is the government doing for me and my family?"

Take my youngest lad this term he is doing badmington next term it is gymnastics FFS he hates doing both but the school has to be "inclusive" like most boys it is football, rugby and swimming he wants to do. So what do you do? he trains for football and plays on Sundays cost £4.50 a week. swimming training 8 hours per week cost £30 per month. then he plays Rugby with his brother if parents and children want to actively take part with a sport and partake in competition they will and can do it. if a sport is to be competative and have people enjoying it and have competition it needs to survive in the market place . it is known as capatalism. If as a parent you feel the child obesity is high take them out walking up the moors cost £0

Those two quotes may seem to be opposite sides of the argument but in fact its only the parents who are willing to give up their time who make sure that the clubs you mention in the first quote exist.

You also need to factor in the government/sports council/lottery aid given to these clubs to enable them to continue existing in the first place with or without voluntary coaching, the RU club that my brother coaches at spend a lot of money on CRB checks and on coaching courses & awards every year, some of this comes from grants from central government, where will it come from if this source dries up, certainly not from the majority of parents who never show their face from one season to the next and are usually very reluctant to send their child to training with the correct subs.

The English RFU are actually very good at pinpointing grants from all sorts of sources and recommend that each club has a dedicated contact to apply for these, I don't know if it works as well in RL amateur clubs but I've been extremely impressed at the backup that is given from the RFU.

Fact is its not just school sports, cutting funding could affect all other forms of amateur sports too.

I'm not so sure about that. One of our big problems is that there is too much focus on winning at junior levels, which typically means "give it to the big lad" regardless of the sport, and training that concentrates on fitness and tactics. Instead, we should be focusing on skills development at those levels.

you do have a point but in every sport, or even in lessons such as art, maths etc, there is a pecking order. the kids know who is best at what.
in lessons they are divided into sets so they can learn at the pace of there classmates.
in games they are told they are all equal and nobody is better. it's a farce.

upto, i believe,under 11 they only play 6 a side football with no league tables and the emphasis on skill

and why was the policy of playing to win fine up to the last 20 odd years? we have won world cups in football and RL with this policy?
to me it's because kids today have so much more to do. we played sports every waking hour. you must read jimmy greaves autobiography where he describes playing with tennis balls in the street and convinced its where he honed his skills. brazilians play for hours still on the beach and it hasn't done them any harm

seth.. i am sorry you're losing your job, but reading various letters from Baroness Campbell and The Sec of State, the "RING fenced" funding for school sports partnerships is being removed.
The money will still be available to schools but this is where the kids could lose out. If you have a sports minded head teacher then the current sports activities will continue, however if the head is a sports hater then they are liable to reallocate the money to other school items (computers, chairs, etc etc). The government is laying all the decision making on the head teachers.

Forgive me if i have read this wrong

Been a goal keeper on hard concrete certainly taught me to stop been a big wuss. In fact it was my goal keeping that won my form second place out of four in school inter-form championships . Such a shame that the team that finished top had a striker.

I don't think I've ever come across a policy of having to tell everyone they are equal and no one is better.
In fact, the current thinking is that training needs to move away from drills, and more towards mini-games....to tap into that competiveness we all have.
But in doing that, get away from playing lots of matches, which lead to team training being focussed on winning the next match.

Because the rest of the world was equally backwards in their training methods. They moved forwards, whilst we stood still with the methods that once gave us a narrow win in the soccer WC, when it was played at home.

You're right about playing the game though. Hence the move of training away from drills to games. Playing games is fine. It's when you've got a league structure of a ton of matches ahead, training gets shifted to prepping for one game at a time and winning that game.

A couple of misguided bits of information from the coalition-

the money does not exist anymore, ringfenced or otherwise, it's gone from the school budget completely.

Michael gove is trying to hang the ssp's with this 2 in 5 figure (when he said 1 he misquoted himself!) this relates to regular competition which translates to a child competing 12 times at least in a year, a rediculous goal which should never have been set, children doing 11 who access school club links in the community would not count.

However politicians always interprate the figures to suit their agenda as we know, as not once have they consulted the Youth Sport Trust and Sue Campbell nor have they visited a school sport partnership.

450 partnerships nationally cost 160million a year, peanuts in comparison to the national debt, and what will also cost the nation in future through poor health and crime etc, prevention is better than the cure.

An SSP consists of a development manager, competition manager, a school sport coordinator in each high school (usually 7) for 2 days a week and a pe coordinator in each primary (usually up to 50 per SSP) released 12 days a year to provide opportunities and transition work with the high school.

Ssp's have seen the 25% of children doing 2hrs of PE a week rise to 90% in 5 years, schools who are judged almost soley on maths and English results by Ofsted will increase these subject lessons to the detrement of pe.

The highest improvements in academic attainment are Sports Colleges, as sport improves this along with the agendas mentioned earlier.

Millions more children are active in a sport for all plan we now have, hundreds of thousands of young people are sports leaders, competions now extend to national levels in a wider number of sports, gifted and talented programme run, coaching nutrition education....the list goes on.

These things will not happen when the funding is cut, it doesn't take a genious to realise the impact of that on so many social agendas.

This is not just opinion and manipulating figures like a politician, I have worked in sport development for 10 years, coach on Leeds scholarship, club level and service area and seen the impact on young children this has.

If my job goes but the partnerships stay I'll be happy, as I believe fully in what we have achieved. This isn't about my job.

A couple of fundamentals:

Sport in School is very important (competitive or otherwise) as it gives kids exercise, discipline and structure.

Reduction in Expenditure has got to be made, the Country as a whole is living beyond its means.

How you rationalise the two is a bit beyond me, although there must be areas where we can reduce spending without necessarily compromising quality too much.

Here's a radical idea, why dont we ask the people doing the job how we could improve the output for less cost?

Exactly right Batley, we accept the fact that cuts were going to be made, but not to be scrapped completely. And we were not consulted.

I could give a number of senarios where we could cut funding, possibly half it, the impact wouldn't be the same but many projects could continue to run.

I can't begin to a full picture of the impact ssp's have made on here, but the national petition was started by a 16 year old sports leader, who writes that sport made her confident and changed her as a person, as Nelson Mandela said 'sport has the power to change lives'. the millions signing the petition certainly care.

And there you have it. Our school sports teams were run by the PE teachers, various interested teachers who gave up a couple of hours of their spare time, and the school janitor! In fact the jani's team, which he was in charge of from Under 12 through to Under 16, were one of the most successful football teams in the history of the school.

No SSP...no partnerships...no £160 million budget, just ordinary people with an interest in promoting sporting excellence in the kids at their school.

All a far cry from the headmaster at my son's school 15 years ago, when I asked him why there was no sports day, replied...."Competitive games mean that for every winner there has to be a loser, and we don't want any of our children to feel disadvantaged!" This was the same guy who sold 3 out of the 4 school playing fields fields a couple of years later to developers, with the result that there was only 6 weeks each per year of football, rugby,or hockey able to be played on the remaining pitch.

You're a bit late in closing the stable door Seth, that particular socialist horse bolted long ago.

Best of luck though in your job search.