- guardian.co.uk, Sunday October 5 2003 09.26 BST
- The Observer, Sunday October 5 2003
Primary school pupils will be given access to the equipment, sports halls and swimming pools in health and fitness clubs around the country to help overcome the chronic shortage of sports facilities at schools.
Pupils aged 10 and 11 are the first beneficiaries of a joint anti-obesity initiative between the fitness industry and state schools. High street gyms will send specialist staff into primary schools to teach children exercise routines and give advice on healthy eating, and let pupils use their premises during the day.
The 'adopt a school' scheme will start in January in Bristol, Birmingham, Sunderland, Barnsley, Milton Keynes and Islington, north London, and be extended throughout Britain from next May. One school in each area will be twinned with a gym as part of the Fitness Industry Association's 'On the Road to 2010' campaign, which aims to halve the number of overweight Britons from 20 million to 10m by 2010.
'We are offering this initially to 10- and 11-year-olds because research shows that many of them stop doing regular physical activity when they go to secondary school. The best way to stop people becoming overweight is to encourage them while they are young to adopt positive, healthy behaviour,' said Nigel Wallace, the FIA's executive director.
The gym chain Living Well and Leisure Connections, which operates about 80 local council-owned leisure centres, have both agreed to provide three premises, one in each of the six pilot areas, to start the scheme. In Barnsley, staff from the Living Well club already go into local schools to advise pupils on diet and conduct aerobics, boxercise and skipping sessions in the playground to try to sell physical activity as a fun pastime. Children have also used the club's pool.
Enabling schools to make use of private fitness and sports facilities, possibly through fiscal incentives for operators, was a key recommendation of The Observer's recent action plan to revive school sport.
