THE Scottish Institute of Sport Foundation will call today for the establishment of six new sports schools. A few days before a major summit on sport, convened by the sports minister, Stewart Maxwell, the foundation is urging the government to redirect funding from sport, health and education towards the development of multi-sport schools, placed throughout the country and augmenting the one that currently exists - the Glasgow School of Sport, established in 1999 at Bellahouston Academy.
The plea for six sports schools follows a major piece of research commissioned by the foundation, which is backed by private-sector and government funding, the research conducted by Professor Fred Coalter and Dr Sabine Radtke of the University of Sti
rling.
They examined sports schools in ten successful sporting nations, and the resulting 92-page document, entitled Sports Schools: An International Review, "delivers a proven road map for the new Scottish government," according to the foundation's director, Graham Watson.
"This builds on our previous research and acts as a reminder that we need to do something about this," continues Watson. "Our call for six new sports schools is also consistent with what the SNP said in their manifesto."
Watson, whose golf-playing daughters, Sally (pictured below) and Rebecca, attend a sports academy and university in America, continues: "The Glasgow School of Sport exists, and there are other proposals for sports schools in Scotland but they are ad hoc. What's interesting about this latest research is that it shows how each of the countries we studied has a different approach, but they're all systematic in how they provide sports schools. We're not."
Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore and Sweden are the countries that feature in the report, which is the second major piece of research commissioned by the foundation, following last year's into Scotland's sporting culture. That report warned that Scotland's international sporting success was being held back as a result of the lack of an integrated strategy for elite sport and the failure to develop "cultures of excellence".
It prompted the foundation to call for the reintroduction of competitive sport in schools - a campaign that won widespread support, including that of the then First Minister Jack McConnell.
Now, though, they are taking the campaign a step further by calling for the commitment to sports schools to build on the one that exists in Glasgow, and to harness initiatives being launched in Edinburgh, West Lothian and the Borders before, in Watson's words, "we go too far down the track of everyone doing their own thing, without integrating with the established pathways".
The most pressing issue is that those pathways typically don't open up for talented young sports people until they are 16 or 17, when they might be selected to one of the six area institutes of sport.
"We've identified problems in the absence of links between schools and sports clubs," says Watson. "That got us thinking: what are other countries doing, and is there a model we should be following? What we found in other countries is that the sports schools are not ad hoc; they really do take seriously the need to bring forward sport in line with education. And that is one of our key objectives: to highlight the importance of sport to education, and the need to link the two.
"One of the problems in Scotland at the moment is that for young people it tends to be one or the other - you can be good at sport or the academic side," Watson continues. "We need to allow talented young people to maximise their talent at sport as well as education, and it's pretty clear that other countries are doing that and getting positive results.
"We wouldn't be doing anything ground breaking; we would simply be following best practice. We're not convinced it would need massive amounts of money, either. It would need additional funding to set up the six sports schools, which would be in each of the areas served by the area institutes [East of Scotland, West of Scotland, Central, Tayside and Fife, Grampian and Highland] but it's more a case of looking at the massive budgets elsewhere and asking: are there ways we can be a bit more creative and clever with that money?"
Among the initiatives that Watson refers to as too "ad hoc" is a new City of Edinburgh School Sports Academy, modelled on the Czech Republic system, which is credited with "discovering" Arsenal star Thomas Rosicky. It began this month and caters for talented young footballers, badminton and cricket players, with basketball, cycling and golf under consideration for 2008.
However, it does not operate from a physical building; rather, it provides specialist technical and skills coaching to a limited number of talented youngsters, outside school hours and under the guidance of appointed coaches.
"The [eventual] aim is also to allow kids to use time within their curriculum," explains Robin Yellowlees, acting manager of the Edinburgh project. "The new Scottish direction for education is to move towards a curriculum for excellence, challenging pupils and giving them the opportunity to build a portfolio of activities."
Watson believes that a flexible curriculum is vital. "If we're serious about creating world-class athletes, and we want them to come through with an educational background, then flexibility in the curriculum is key."
The Glasgow School of Sport is the only case study in Scotland, of course. Here, the specialist sports pupils are fully integrated with the mainstream school, and they follow a balanced curriculum. The sports that feature are athletics, badminton, gymnastics, hockey and swimming
Angela Porter is the head teacher. She explains: "In a 30-period week the specialist sports pupils have eight periods of sport. They have no PE classes, and fewer classes in technology and creative and aesthetics [art and music in old money]." The percentage of pupils who remain involved in sport at a high level after leaving school, says Porter, is "about 80%". But she adds: "We measure success in a number of ways. We had a recent inspection and they were impressed with the links between the main school and sport; it's well integrated, and there is a definite positive impact on the main school in terms of attainment and goal-setting."
Of the 1,000 pupils at Bellahouston, 132 are sports school pupils. "We're not residential but we have 15 different authorities represented here, and in many cases we help with transport costs," says Porter.
She would welcome the addition of new sports schools: "I'd be interested to see the model, but Scotland would undoubtedly benefit from more sports schools."
Watson believes that integrated schools - mixing sport and mainstream pupils - is the way to go. "The evidence we've gathered suggests that it's better to integrate as much as possible. Our recommendation would be that you identify an existing facility and build the infrastructure around that. That would seem the most sensible and cost-efficient way to go about it."
Another important point as far as Watson is concerned is that a network of sports schools, open and accessible to all, would "balance the preponderance of medals for privately educated kids".
He explains: "It's an anomaly that exists, that a disproportionate number of kids from private schools represent national teams and win medals at major championships. It's a very complicated issue, because it's also to do with the support network around the athlete, and the time and effort that families put in, which is something that maybe isn't consistent across the [social] spectrum. But sports schools would provide that network, and so help to maximise every youngster's opportunities."
As Watson says, there is no uniform model of sports school favoured worldwide, and neither is there any shortage of methods and techniques that could be adopted in the proposed Scottish schools. Some seem quite bizarre: in Germany and the Netherlands sports pupils can be paired up with mainstream pupils, the deal being that they keep sports pupils up-to-date with the content of missed classes.
Germany has 11,000 specialist sports pupils. In Australia, where there are 36 sports schools, the original one, in Sydney, is recognised by the government as a Project of National Significance. Finland's Makelanrinne sports school has produced 21 Olympic and world medals in eight years. In Belgium and Germany, coaches must hold their country's highest coaching qualification. And in Sweden, although only 30% of pupils continue their sporting career beyond school, it's recognised that "attending a sports school is valuable because it assists pupils to learn to set goals and to develop achievement orientation".
And this, perhaps, is the key point. In the ten countries studied, there was only one reported case of poorer academic attainment in a sports school. This was in France - where the sport/study balance is weighted heavily in favour of sport, with 24 hours of lessons and 20 hours' training - but in general academic achievement among sports pupils is higher than the national average.
As Watson suggests, establishing sports schools would not allow Scotland to move ahead of some of our neighbours. Rather, they might allow us to catch up.
The full article contains 1525 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
