ABSTRACT
The primary aim of the physical education (PE) co-ordinator is to raise both the status and profile of physical activity in the school by improving the quality of all physical activity experiences. This task has never been easy and has been made more difficult in recent years as a result of PE’s late appearance in the National Curriculum (NC) implementation programme. The perceived status of PE has been further confused both by the stated intention of central government (Major – Conservative Party speech 1994) to ‘restore competitive games in schools and increase the time allocated to them for all pupils under 16’ and by the re-emergence at national level of health and fitness concerns as a result of recent studies such as the Allied Dunbar National Fitness Survey (1992). These studies predict a bleak picture of physical and cardio-vascular health in the future as the current young and middle-aged progress into old age. The findings are reinforced by the work of Armstrong and Sparks (1991) whose research reveals the very low physical activity levels in many of the children they have studied.
