JM Blanquer communicates on “Move 30 minutes per day”. The challenge is to meet the recommendations of the WHO on health, which recommends 1 hour of physical activity per day for 6-11 year olds, i.e. 7 hours per week (3 hours per day for children under 5). We are far from it today, when it is a public health issue and the reduction of inequalities. However, is the minister’s announcement capable of making a difference? Nothing is less sure ! It even contains the risk of achieving the opposite result to that desired. Here are some arguments.
The PE schedule is 3 hours per week. If it were already insured everywhere, that would be progress! Communicating about “moving 30 minutes a day” risks being understood as “moving instead” of PE, which would amount to endorsing 2 hours of activity per week and would be a regression. The ministry is however careful to say that it is a question of “moving 30 minutes” in addition to the EPS … but, at the same time, it continues to put enormous pressure on maths and French. However, we know that primary school teachers already devote more than 60% of school time to maths and French, that around 20% remains for all other disciplines (history-geography, sciences, arts, English, EPS …). The remaining 20% being devoted to non-disciplinary time (learning to pack your satchel, learning to keep your notebook, learning to resolve conflicts, etc.). In this very constrained school time, adding half an hour of physical activity can only be done at the expense of something else. … So it’s a safe bet that the PE schedule will not increase (it is now on average around 2 hours). One can even fear that the EPS will become only an activity considered as “hygienist” which will not have much meaning for the children, or that the “movement 30 mn” encourages only to lengthen the recess a little and to the “them”. to school ”. In this case, we would lose on both aspects. We would no longer really have a PE and no more recreation… and a great confusion on the role of the school for the pupils as for the teachers!
For the PSE schedule to increase and move closer to the official 3 hours, it would take several things that Mr Flanquer does not do.
– Have a clear speech and actions on PE. The school aims to teach students to dance, to play together, to run fast, to run for a long time, to swim, to orientate themselves, to ride a bicycle… This is how they will develop a taste for sport, that they will enter into the physical, sporting and artistic culture of their time, and will develop habits of practicing the activities of their choice and will be in good health. With only “Move, Jiggle without learning, the motivation of the students is not sustainable.”
– Have a clear discourse on the skills of teachers. R. Maracineanu must stop saying that the sports federations will come to provide EPS instead of teachers (implying an inability to do so), when at the same time the Ministry of National Education on which it depends keeps reducing the PSE schedule in training.
– Stop reducing the training of school teachers: in his new reform, Mr. Blanquer imposes 55% of maths and French in the master’s models and other priorities which mean that only 20% of the time remains for all the other disciplines of polyvalence (history, geography, SVT, LVE, EPS, musical education, visual arts). Immediate consequence in the INSPEs which apply this rule: a vertiginous and historical drop in the hours of training in EPS (- 63% in Réunion, – 53.8% in Lille, -52% in Clermont, – 45% in Reims, – 37% in Créteil!) How can we train students to teach in such a short time? Learning to swim, to dance, to play collectively, to reflect on one’s bodily activity, to create something in common in a class group, to build rules,… cannot be improvised!
– Restore EPS pedagogical advisers everywhere to support teachers in their projects and sports meetings during school time. Today these advisers are completely absorbed by training in maths and French, while they have a decisive role in boosting PSE.
– Provide local authorities with the means to build PSE equipment within the school, or very close to it, so as not to waste time traveling.
The WHO recommends 7 hours of physical activity per week. The priority is therefore to ensure the 3 hours of PE at school, because they are compulsory for everyone. But that will not be enough. It is necessary to study all the other times of the child:
Within the school:
– Provide teachers with the means to animate school sport (USEP) as an extension of EPS. A sort of “package” such as exists for PE teachers for the UNS would allow many school teachers to get involved in school sport.
– Developing playgrounds to make them more active, in complete safety, while being vigilant about equality between girls and boys. And this without “educating” them, they must remain a time of breathing, of freedom, of “re-creation” for the pupils, as for the teachers.
Before / after school:
– Allow all children to come to school on foot or by bicycle. For the little ones, allow a physical expenditure in a square, a park after school, which obviously raises questions of town planning and financing.
– Allow all children to have at least one free physical activity in a sports club or association for a year (or another formula allowing them to try before choosing what they like). Ex: Have ten free sessions at the swimming pool once you have learned to swim at school.
– Have observatories of sports practices in the territories to identify whether there are persistent inequalities (between girls and boys, between social backgrounds) and be able to remedy them with all the players: local authorities, the sports movement and the educational world .
To increase the physical activity of young people, to be concerned about their health (in the broad sense, not only in the hygienic sense), is to allow them to enter into the physical, sporting and artistic culture of their time. This requires ambitious measures, training, debates between actors … A challenge far more exciting than “moving 30 minutes a day” …
Claire Pontais
former INSPE trainer in Caen and responsible for the primary school EPS file at SNEP-FSU
See Aline Blanchouin’s article on CP classes
See “An attempt at an inventory of primary school timetables”
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