Why Not Put Sports Like Snooker as a Choice on the PE Map?
You might be wondering why this is being written on a snooker website?
For the simple reason, that snooker is a sport, a very mental one – and, yes, at times, a physical one!
Sport England is investing millions of pounds to fund a training programme to teach PE teachers how to teach PE better in school.
It comes as a survey they produced in 2015 revealed 14-year-olds were turned off PE – and the up to £13.5 million run in partnership with the Teaching School Council seeks to retrain PE teachers better and give them better mentoring.
The 2015 survey showed that a proportion of school kids had a bad experience in PE, and, whilst this isn’t a change to the PE curriculum, it’s a start to understanding why kids dislike PE in schools.
Jennie Price, SE chief executive, said it is vital that all children enjoy a great experience of PE and sport at school.
“Our research shows that a bad experience of sport at school can put them off being active for life,” she explained. “Lots of people have bad memories of being picked last for a team, or just feeling really uncomfortable in PE lessons.
“This programme is designed to stop that happening. It will help schools and individual teachers design a wider range of opportunities to increase young people’s enjoyment of sport and PE, which gives them a much better chance of being active in later life.”
LACK OF CHOICE
However, one of the many reasons in SnookerZone’s view is the lack of choice of sports in schools. Variety is, as they say, the spice of life!
Generally, kids have three choices, (more if they’re lucky) between football, rugby, and tennis. Sometimes there’s athletics and running.
However, not everyone wants or is good at those sports. It’s human nature that if there is something we don’t like or are not considered good at it, we will try to avoid it as much as we can.
Therefore, one of the simple solutions is to offer more choice for kids at PE so they do find something they do like. Having a snooker table in schools is not as difficult as it would appear. Heck, it doesn’t have to be a full-size one! It can be a mini table or something much smaller!
Snooker is no different to giving kids a table tennis bat, or a cricket bat to try out. Give them a snooker cue and see if they like it.
There is no one size fits all in sport. As humans, we all have something we are good at. You never know, you give a snooker cue, a table-tennis bat, a cricket bat, a rounders bat, or any other bat to a school kid and you might just have found the next future World Champion!
For more on this, go to the Sport England website: here
