All young people should have the opportunity to live healthy and active lives. As set out in the 2015 cross-government sport strategy Sporting Future, sport and physical activity improve our children’s physical and mental wellbeing, and help them to develop important skills like teamwork and leadership.
A positive experience of sport and physical activity at a young age can build a lifetime habit of participation, and is central to meeting the government’s ambitions for a world class education system. Physical literacy (building physical competency alongside confidence, enjoyment, knowledge and understanding) and high quality, modern physical education (PE) lessons that engage boys and girls of different backgrounds and abilities
should be a fundamental part of every child’s school experience.
Ensuring young people have access to the right amount of daily activity can have wider benefits for pupils and schools, improving behaviour as well as enhancing learning and academic achievement. Sport has also been identified by the Department for Education as one of the five foundations for building character, helping young people develop resilience, determination and self-belief, and instilling values and virtues such as friendship and fair play. It can help children and young people to connect with their peers, tackling loneliness and social isolation and building stronger communities.
This action plan is a statement of intent, setting out a joint commitment from the Department for Education (DfE), Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), to ongoing collaboration at national level to ensure that sport and physical activity are an integral part of both the school day and after-school activities, so that all children have the opportunity to take part in at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day. Further details on these commitments will be published in an update to this action plan later in the year.
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