The Irish Sports Council is eager to spur all age groups into action
MUCH TIME and money is spent on research studies, so here's one I just made up: In a nationwide study among parents, 99 per cent agreed that sport and exercise was an important lifestyle factor for both themselves and their children. (The other 1 per cent didn't respond).
For years now, we've all known that sport and exercise is good for us, and we've all known our children should also get involved as much as possible. Yet in many instances that's still a lot easier said than done. It's no secret that physical education has been increasingly squeezed from the school curriculum and, at the same time, our lifestyles have become busier and more demanding, therefore allowing less time to dedicate to sport and exercise.
Sometimes, it just seems easier and more sensible to buy them that PlayStation.
Sport as we generally know it still thrives at the more competitive end, and Ireland's three major sports - rugby, soccer and GAA - now boast higher participation levels than ever before, and are still growing fast. However, that's only a small part of the picture, and only now is the wider aim of getting more parents and their children involved in sport and exercise being properly addressed.
The body most responsible for this is the Irish Sports Council, established as recently as 1999 - and therefore hardly ahead of its time. Initially charged with the elite end of competitive sport, the Sports Council now deals almost exclusively with general participation across all ages - from pre-school children to the elderly and retired.
Most of this work is done through the Local Sports Partnership scheme, identified in its first statement of strategy, A New Era for Sport, published in 2000. This has already had a significant impact on increasing participation levels across all levels of sport, including specific parent-child programmes designed to bring both parents and children into sport at the same time.
"Our work is still mostly perceived as dealing with the elite and high-performance side of sport, anti-doping and so on," says Paul McDermott, communications officer with the Irish Sports Council. "But in fact, the majority of our work now evolves around the participation side of sport. That is based largely around the Local Sports Partnerships, and the governing bodies of the individual sports.
"Once the new Institute of Sport is fully up and running, then we'll be overwhelmingly looking at the participation side. A lot of our research is into that area as well. And most of the Government investment, actually, goes into the participation side of sport."
The Sports Council is acutely aware of where and how this work needs to be done, partly due to the already extensive research in the area. "There's no point in us starting a big campaign saying sport and exercise is good for you," says McDermott. "That's not the challenge. The challenge is actually activating people, in the sense of getting them involved.
"So the challenge there is to get these exercise and activity programmes as close to people as possible, so if you live in Dublin or a rural area, and are wondering 'how do I get active?', you know where to go. That's the issue we're trying to address through the Local Sports Partnerships, the sports for older people and the women in sport programmes, and so on."
The Sports Council now has 12 full-time officers dealing with the participation side alone, and - somewhat surprisingly - only four officers working on the elite and high-performance end. Central to this work are the Local Sports Partnerships, which have a two-fold aim: to increase participation in sport, and to ensure that local resources are used to best effect.
Initially these were rolled out in 12 areas (Co Clare, Cork, Donegal, Fingal, Kildare, Laois, Limerick city, Meath, North Tipperary, Roscommon, Sligo and Waterford); these were extended to include Kerry, Kilkenny, Mayo and Westmeath in 2004, and more recently Monaghan, Offaly and Carlow. It is hoped the Local Sports Partnerships programme will be State-wide by the start of May.
Yet the Sports Council's participation unit assists not only with the Local Sports Partnerships, but also the Youth Sport Programmes (Buntús and Buntús Start), the Code of Ethics and Good Practice for Children's Sport, the Active Leadership awards and Sport for Older People.
They know what they're working towards as well. Some of the extensive research in recent years has identified the key target groups, such as those that fall outside the range of the volunteer aspect of sport, and those in disadvantaged areas (these often being related).
A 2005 report on children's sport, published by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in conjunction with the Sports Council, found that teachers who give up time outside formal teaching hours to organise extra-curricular sporting activities are at the heart of the delivery of children's sport in the Republic. Adult volunteers in sports clubs outside the school make a similar contribution, so that almost half (46 per cent) of second-level students get four or more sessions of sport per week from these two sources combined.
However, while the majority of students do get some access to sport, there are significant minorities who get little or none. More than one in four (27 per cent) of second-level students get one session or less per week of extra-curricular or non-school sport - and among this group there is also a substantially higher number of girls than boys (38 per cent against 17 per cent respectively).
Physical education (PE), provided as part of the school curriculum, accounts for only a small proportion of children's sporting activity: the average student in second-level gets 69 minutes of PE per week, compared to the two hours recommended in the PE syllabus.
Yet this report also found that the only aspect of sport that causes concern to a majority of students is the fear of being left out of games because they are regarded as not good enough.
Clearly that became a priority area, and the Sports Council has already targeted the school curriculum under the Buntús and Buntús Start programmes: "These are essentially generic sports development packages, initially to help with the PE curriculum in primary school, based on what was international best practice," says McDermott.
"There is the practical resource, but it also provides training, and a follow-up resource through the sports partnership. The whole philosophy around it is to help the teachers give the kids access to good physical education. That's also being adapted to specific sports, from soccer to basketball to golf, both in school, and out of school, in a community setting. And there's also going to be an adapted version for pre-school.
"If kids are coming into sport at this early age, then it's not about competition, but a way of organising sport so that everyone can have a go, and there's access to different levels."
Among the findings of another report published last year, Fair Play? Sport and Social Disadvantage in Ireland, was that a person in the richest 25 per cent of the population who has a degree was five times more likely to play sport than a person in the poorest 25 per cent of the population who left school after the Junior Certificate. The impact of income got stronger with age, while education was constant across all age groups.
Lower-income earners were also more likely to drop out of sport altogether. However, the report also suggested that the motivation to participate and general interest in sport is as strong in both lower-income earners and those with lower educational attainment.
"What this research has told us is that there are certain factors that are very important in terms of why people participate in sport," says McDermott.
"Length of time in education is hugely important, and also things like income and gender. But also things like coming from a sporting family which is very important," he says.
"We've been working on those triggers, because it's not just enough to know that we need more people participating in sport. We need to know how to do that. And what we know is that if parents are involved in sport, in either coaching or playing, or engaged in any way, be it driving the kids down to the club, then that means the child is more likely to get involved.
"This works at all levels of the family in that if the grandparents are active at some level that also creates a culture of physical activity within the family setting," McDermott says.
"So many people still see sport as a competitive thing when in fact so much sport takes place in a non-competitive environment."