Physical education coming back to schools as a full subject in South Africa
New Sports, Arts and Culture minister Gayton McKenzie says that his department plans to switch up the transformation of sports in South Africa, which will include reassessing the approach to quotas and going back to the school level to promote physical education and activity.
Responding to a written parliamentary question this past week, McKenzie said that, under his leadership, the department would flip the “equality of outcome” approach to sport in South Africa to an “equality of access” approach.
He said that “there has been an overemphasis over the years” focusing on the former, which has led to society’s tendency to look at the demographic profile of people who succeed at the upper and professional levels of sport (ie, quotas).
“But by then, it is already too late,” he said.
Instead, this minister said that “equality of access” is more important, which speaks to “young people being able to participate and train in various sports from an early age on”.
“Many professional tennis players, for example, started at the age of five. The game becomes second nature to such players.
“We see people from underprivileged communities succeeding in sports that don’t require a large investment in resources. To learn to play soccer, you just need an open patch of ground and a ball.
“To become a cricket bowler, you just need a ball. However, to be a batter, you need pads, a bat, a helmet, gloves, a groin protector, and more. This is why we see our system producing many black bowlers of talent, but few batters. Equality of access is, therefore, the critical challenge,” McKenzie said.
To support this shift, however, the minister said that the country needs to revive Physical Education in schools as well as revive the School Sport System.
The Department has attempted the implementation of a School Sport Programme in partnership with the Department of Basic Education through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).
However, this MoU expired last year, in May 2023, and underwent a review, which culminated in the hosting of a national School Sport Indaba.
“It was clear at the Indaba that there has been little to no progress in establishing sustainable school sports leagues in less privileged communities, which constitutes the vast majority of where our children are affected,” the minister said.
“A new MoU is currently being discussed between the two departments that will see an intensive focus on the establishment of school sports leagues and setting of structures to manage those leagues.
In addition to reviving school sports leagues, McKenzie said that the department would also work with the Department of Basic Education to ensure that Physical Education is revived in schools—another resolution to come from the indaba.
Proposals to make Physical Education (aka PE) a full subject again in South Africa have been floating around for about a decade.
PE in South Africa has gone through significant curriculum reform since 1994.
Before 1994, PE existed as a stand-alone school subject, but this changed in 1997 when it became a reduced learning outcome as part of a new subject—Life Orientation (LO)—as part of outcomes-based education (OBE).
A second revision of the curriculum followed in 2009, resulting in Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) for each subject.
LO, and therefore PE, is the only subject in the CAPS that is not externally assessed or examined in Grade 12 at the final end-of-year examination.
Research shows that less than two-thirds of children participate in weekly PE classes in South Africa. At the 2023 Indaba, the DBE said that the aim is to get school-going children to have at least two hours of physical education every week.
The proposal is not without its challenges, particularly from a resource point of view—including a lack of facilities and apparatus, as well as inadequately qualified or unqualified teachers to present the subject.
However, McKenzie has already started discussions about building sporting facilities that can be located within accessible distance of clusters of schools.
This will be done in “such a way we begin to turn around a statistic that shocked me when I first took on this role—and that is that only one in 10 school children are participating in sport,” he said.
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