I remember hearing in the news, school preventing the kids to run in the playground because of unaffordable insurance costs … could this be part of the issue ?

I’m thinking back at my class in primary school ( finished 1995 or thereabouts) and I genuinely can’t remember overweight kids in the class, think maybe 2 fellas were slightly chubby but deffo nothing like some of the kids I see today.

Our big break was about 40 minutes and we would run around until we were sweaty Betty’s! Even when they banned bulldog!

I think there are a combination of factors today why kids are overweight, poor meals, lack of education for parents, the wrapped in cotton wool world some parents create for their kids and the busy stressful lives parents are now leading due to both working long hours etc etc.

IMO good healthy eating and exercise needs to start at home, no point in kids running around for a bit in school to go home to deep fried whatever and a night in front of the computer?

as a parent i think it is the parents responsibility not the schools, as a parent you are responsible for what your child eats, how much time they get running around etc so if your child is obese it is your fault not the schools, the school isn’t there to raise your children, you raise your children!!! take responsibility

It’s not up to the schools, parents need to teach the kids about exercise, and healthy eating…after all primary school kids don’t do the grocery shopping nor do they cook that much!

Quote: Put simply, young people need a minimum of two hours mandatory high-quality PE each week to fight rising levels of inactivity, obesity, type 1 diabetes, depression and other mental health concerns.

I think you need to change that from type 1 diabetes to type 2. Thats wrong, I KNOW you should change it to type 2.

Type 1 (diabetes mellitus) is not caused or in any way connected to inactivity….

Kids are dropped to school in cars, are not allowed to run and jump in the playground for fear of the school being sued, the local playgrounds were closed in the 80′s and “Child friendly” playgrounds are bulit way out of town so that kids have to be driven there (because no one wants the playground at the end of the road to be a hangout in the evening for the teenagers). PE is cut in schools, and organised sport costs a fortune when families are struggling to make ends meet!
Then we complain that the kids of today are suffering from ADD, ADHD or PDD-NOS and medicate them to the hilt, and wonder why child obesity is on the rise.
It’s time to let kids be kids and run and jump and play, even if that means breaking a few bones.

Parents ? Children spend a lot more time at home than they do in school. There is nothing stopping parents taking their kids for exercise after school, join a team, ban the playstation.

Maybe drop religion and make room for mor pe?! Complete utter waste of time for the children…..

Strangely enough research from US shows increased PE has no effect on obesity. Its the parents need to buy and cook healthy foods n switch off the tv. Get kids exercising. Schools haven’t time to sort this problem out. Finland make parents accountable for obese children. This is a parenting issue.

I’m a secondary school student and we currently receive a measly 40 minutes of PE a week. Take away a few minutes at the beginning and end of the period for changing and you barely get half an hour. In comparison we get 240 minutes a week each in Irish, English and Maths. There is something seriously wrong here. Exercise stimulates the mind, I daresay concentration levels would rise if there were more PE classes.

as a newly qualified PE teacher I strongly agree with all of mr lyons’ points in the above article. As mentioned,3 universities produce a large number of PE graduates each year who have worked hard for 4 years in innovative,well delivered programmes. However due to school’s failing to deliver the recommended amount of PE a week,many of these young teachers are left unemployed. If the government and department of Education don’t do something about this soon,the health of the children of this country will continue to decline. As fergal pointed out,introducing more PE in schools alone will not reduce the level of obesity but a properly administered PE programme will give young people a postive outlook on physical activity which will in turn encourage them to continue to be physical active outside of school and throughout adulthood. This supports the aim of the JCPE curriculum which is to ‘promote a life of autonomous well being’. One of the most popular TV programmes at the moment is ‘Operation Transformation’. I argue that if these candidates had more time in PE at school they would be better able to take responsibility of their own physical fitness and would not need as much help later on in life. We need to take action soon to ensure employment for highly skilled graduates and for the physical fitness of our young people. Afterall,what is more important than our health?

The European Physical Education Association formulates clear requirements in this topic and by this supports the PEAI:

There is a need to promote and defend physical education as a core subject in the school curriculum. ‘No education without physical education’.
Therefore it is necessary to:
- seek to maintain or achieve compulsory physical education for the period of formal schooling
- recognize the contribution of physical education within higher education
- seek sufficient curriculum time in schools for physical education
*early grades of schooling – daily P.E. (eg. up to 11 or 12 years of age)
*later grades of schooling – 3 hours per week as outlined in the European charter
- demand that physical education, as a critical aspect of education must be delivered by teachers who are properly qualified in this subject; within the concept of education existing in each country.

We should consider adopting a similar model to what they have in Japan, mandatory preschool exercise, it’s been proven to have a positive effect on the mind for learning, as well as the body. Like anything else in life, good exercise habits need to be developed at an early age. It’s such an important issue, both schools & parents need to get involved, poor exercise & dietary habits are the foundations of an unhealthy population.

When I was in primary school very few of the kids were fat let alone obese, id say probably five and that included two with medical conditions and that was out of a few hundred.

How anyone can honestly say that the kids of this generation are not fatter when as a country we have approximately 327k kids obese according to the U.N

I’d suggest that schools start the day with a role call then 30 mins of exercises
on top of normal lunch breaks and P.E
and maybe a parent nutrition education course would help.

Parents buy the food and it’s their responsibility to prepare it.Some are just too lazy or uneducated about nutrition and order takeaways consistently.

Think of the health conditions that will solely be your fault. Type two diabetes and a host of cardiac problems and most likely some bullying and ridicule by the childs peers.Thats great for a child’s self image and confidence and health,
Putting the child on the right path to an early grave.Take a bow irresponsible parents.

Would it not be better to spend time in school educating kids as to the importance of physcial exercise/sport for both their physcial and mental well being, perhaps encouraging them to find the particular sport that suits/interests them. A child who is strugling with their self image is pobably going to struggle further in your average pe class, where as healthy discussion around the importance of it physcial exercise and encouragement to get involved would perhaps do more for them.

It’s not lack of PE that makes children over weight it’s what they eat !!

In my day we cycled to school, played football & handball in yard & cycled home, we were all happy & healthy
These days, too many parents are leaving their kids to school in cars & too many schools don’t do enough PE,
or allow kids to run around, add to this fast food & sugar drinks = overweight kids with serious medium/long term health issues. This is not a complicated issue to solve, its common sense.

Yes there should be more exercise for kids and it should be encouraged and supported strongly. BUT there needs to be just as much (if not more) emphasis placed on proper nutrition and education. It’s about setting them up ready for the future.
I don’t know a lot of adults who continued doing as much sport as they did as children. But looking back – all the children who ate healthier continue to eat well more or less. Yes, of course, this was down to the parents. And in an ideal world, every parent would do the same but that ain’t happening.
Honestly in an ideal world we’d scrap mandatory religion and introduce a cooking/nutrition class. Even if these classes were once every two weeks think of the knowledge gained.

There are all sorts of reasons why you could argue for more PE, but childhood obesity is not one of them.

The link between anything but sustained, frequent high level exercise and weight loss or maintenance is tenuous. While even mild to moderate exercise has all sorts of benefits for your health and your mental well being, weight loss is not one of them and repeated studies have shown this to be the case. It’s food. That’s what matters.

No PE class can claim to be more than light to (at best) moderate exercise and the truth is those kids who most need it are the ones who will put least effort in and get least benefit.

I also think the idea that PE will foster a lifetime habit of exercise is wildly optimistic. Can any slim and active person here honestly say that it’s down, even in part, to PE in school? It’s much more likely to be due to a mixture of diet and a love of taking part in sport. Sports participation and PE are NOT the same thing, a compulsory PE class is not going to magically turn any kid who loathes taking part in sport into an enthusiastic team player. It’s just not happening. That comes from somewhere else entirely.

Can’t blame an organisation who are fighting to maintain PE jobs for floating anything they think will gain them sympathy though, we all want to hang onto what work we have.

What do people expect Physical Edcuation to be. Do you a) See it as a class which promotes physical literacy and lifelong physical activity for your children or b) See it as a class whcih contributes to your child’s overall physical activity? I’d like to hear people’s opinion on what they perceive the role of PE to be?

If their so worried about kids falling and suing. Let them run on the grass!

Because the purpose of our education system is to produce fat computer programmers for U.S. multinational corporations. It’s the smart economy.

This is a crazy decision. Surely it us time we made the health of Irelands children a priority. With the obesity and health issues currently facing children should the time allocated for PE not be going up? You have to wonder where the govts head is at reading this?

Yes, PE stands for physical EDUCATION. Simply put, children need to be educated about exercise and diet, along the same lines as junior cert level SPHE but at a more practical level. For example: do children, young adults and even parents know that a potato does NOT count as one of your 5 fruit and veg a day and that 45 mins of moderate intensity exercise 3-5 times a week is required to AVOID becoming obese.

I was trying to encourage my daughters school to start a breakfast club to ensure every child was starting the day with a breakfast but I was told the budget was spent on tennis lessons, while I don’t object to tennis I think a child who may have eaten nothing since whatever dinner they had the previous evening is better able to learn with a breakfast inside them. I can’t understand why pe has to be so formal we had what you would now call circuit training in primary school.

I loved PE at school, a lot of the class used to try and find excuses not to take part, this was in the 80′s there where very few over weight kids then, no shortage of them now

Fergal you are drastically overstating the case for PE, and it is obvious why, it is a self serving argument.
The article of course is an opinion piece, and a bias is expected, complete myopic spin is another matter.

There are so many holes in your case, ill only mention a few…..

1. Is lack of physical exercise the consensus cause of childhood obesity? Answer NO. It will contribute, but shit cheap processed foods, and high sugar content, and lazy parent giving money for chips at lunch are far bigger culprits.
2. Your statistics refer to adult health effects of inactivity, where are the childhood ones? You are inferring that these adults would be more active if they had more PE in schools. There is no reason to believe this, so your stats are irrelevant.
3. You ask the question can we afford it, then avoid answering your own question with a cop out “can we afford not too”.
4. You say 2 hours a week “could” result in some arbitrary saving……the “could” game is fun, but come on, it is a little weak.
5. You talk about the social aspects of sports etc……again without any tangible link to P.E. An interesting factoid but once again irrelevant to your subject (unless you use very loose and shaky links based on assumptions and guesswork)

Don’t you agree that a mature, well balanced, intelligent honest and justified opinion that supported more PE teachers would be worthy of respect and consideration.

This piece however has none of that.

The PE system needs more improvement than just being given more time though. It needs to stop being a filler class run by whatever teacher had free time or who wasn’t up to teaching the more academic subjects, and it needs to stop farming out so much to the local sports clubs. The ISC’s had plans for teaching PE in a structured way for years now, but how many schools have even heard of things like LTPAD, let alone have a structured PE curriculum in place? Mostly it’s just haphazardly organised games based completely off whatever equipment and facilities the school happened to have or was able to raise money for. And if it’s a minority sport, forget about finding it in a school at all.

To be honest I think we have the same amount of fat kids we had when I was a kid,and to be honest a few of them lost the puppy fat and are at right weight

My son has PE on Mondays and Wednesdays, but last week when I asked him on the Monday how was PE he said they didn’t do it cause the hall wasn’t free so he said he had to wear his track suit the next day for PE, on that day he never got to do it again and when I asked why he said he didn’t know because the teacher never said why… So then Wednesday came and again no PE and no reason… Just as well he has football at weekends to run around, so far this week he has had PE but I will be asking why if it happens again!

Because this Government believes everybody must suffer, even the children.

It’s not just up to parents. We know we can’t rely on every parent to actually have the Physical Education required to teach their kids, but a proper syllabus will teach kids the importance of staying fit. Also a large part of it is playing organised team sports and using equipment not available at home.