Mission impossible? Reflecting upon the relationship between physical education, youth sport and lifelong participation

Abstract

It is widely believed that school physical education (PE) is or, at the very least, can (even should) be a crucial vehicle for enhancing young people's engagement with physically active recreation (typically but not exclusively in the form of sport) in their leisure and, in the longer run, over the life-course. Despite the prevalence of such beliefs, there remains a dearth of evidence demonstrating a ‘PE effect’. Indeed, the precise nature of the relationship between PE, youth¹ sport and lifelong participation is seldom explored other than in implicit, often speculative and discursive, ways that simply take-for-granted the positive effects of the former (PE) on the latter (youth and adult participation in sport and physically active recreation). Using largely European studies to frame the issue, this article reflects upon the supposedly ‘causal’ relationship between PE, youth sport and lifelong participation and, in doing so, highlights the inherent problems associated with attempts to identify, characterise and establish a ‘PE effect.’ In the process, the article points to a need for more longitudinal and biographical research exploring sports careers and the sporting habituses of young people, not least in order to better understand in precisely what circumstances PE interventions might work to enhance youth involvement in sport and physical activity and, subsequently, lifelong participation.

Keywords:

• Physical education
• Youth sport
• Lifelong participation
• Causation
• Correlation

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments on the original draft of the paper.

Notes

1. Youth is defined as a life-stage that in chronological terms can be very broadly mapped onto the latter teenage years, with some leeway at the upper end to include the post-teen years up to young adulthood. Thus, youth is regarded as a period of transition ranging from roughly 15 to 25 years. For the purposes of this article, the emphasis will be on the latter secondary school years.

2. It is worthy of note that a major reason why the PE community has felt compelled to ‘prove’ that PE can increase physical activity now and over the lifespan—and, as a consequence, has tended to be supportive of this claim, offering it up to policy makers as a ‘PE effect’—has been a desire to bolster and extend the place of PE and sport in schools. Nevertheless, it is a hostage to fortune for physical educationalists to attach themselves so vehemently to a claim that appears so untenable and may well, despite the substantial investment of resources into strategies such as School-Sport Partnerships in England, be shown to be, at worst, unachievable and, at best, all but impossible to prove. Nevertheless, in the context of increasing pressures on PE resulting, among other things, from the incipient marketization of education systems that threaten to bring about the marginalization of the subject it is unsurprising that physical educationalists have, indeed, chosen this course of action.⁶

3. And, as Marshall (2009) observes, studies reliant on cross-sectional designs have simply failed to provide plausible and compelling let alone conclusive evidence for a causal relationship.

4. Triangulation refers to examining a subject from two or more angles or perspectives in order to arrive at amore adequate or valid portrayal.

5. Lifestyle sports or activities are best defined as non- or, at least, less-competitive, more recreational, flexible, individual or small group activities, sometimes with a health and fitness orientation (Coalter, 1999); in other words, activities that can be undertaken how (more-or-less competitively, for example), where (commercial gyms, voluntary or local authority sports centre), with whom (singly or with friends) and when (in bouts of spare time) they want.

6. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this point.