Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate his Department has made of the proportion of school-age children who receive at least 30 minutes of sport and physical activity each school day.

Sport England collects data on activity by children and young people through the annual Active Lives Children and Young People Survey. The data for the 2019/20 academic year showed that 44.9% of children and young people (3.2 million) met the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines of taking part in sport and physical activity for an average of 60 minutes or more every day. Data for the 2018/19 academic year showed that 40% of pupils did an average of 30 active minutes during the school day. School closures mean that it is difficult to produce a comparable figure for the 2019/20 academic year, but the Government will continue to collect data for future years.

Physical activity and school sport play an important part in supporting pupils to recover from the effects of school closures due to the COVID-19 outbreak. To support this, the Government has confirmed that the Primary PE and Sport premium will continue at £320 million for the 2021/22 academic year. Schools will also be permitted to carry forward any unspent PE and sport premium funding from the current academic year to ensure that this is spent to benefit primary pupils’ physical education, school sport and physical activity recovery. In addition, in February the Department announced a £10.1 million investment into schools across England to help them to open their school sports facilities outside of the school day. This will allow them to open their facilities and run more sports activities and clubs before school, after school and during the summer holidays.