The UK government recently published guidance for physical education (PE) aimed at all schools in England. The guidance is non-statutory, meaning it is not compulsory by law for schools to follow. Instead, it is intended as inspiration to help schools change their PE provision to benefit all pupils.

Initially, this document seems like a catalyst for positive change. Those, like us, who research and work in school PE have advocated for more high-level support and focus on the subject for years. But on closer inspection, the guidance seems like a missed opportunity. It shows that PE is still undervalued and misunderstood, particularly by the government.

A key recommendation set out in the guidance is that every pupil should take part in a minimum of two hours of PE a week. This, however, falls considerably short of the target set by the UK’s chief medical officer of 60 minutes per day of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for children.

Not only is two hours a week not enough, it’s also nothing new. The Labour government set this as a target for young people in 2002, and set up a specific strategy to achieve it in 2008.

PE could be at the core of a curriculum that promotes embodied learning – learning through all the body’s senses, rather than sitting still and thinking.

The latest government guidance offers examples of schools that have prioritised active learning as models. But it also suggests that PE teachers need to use evidence to persuade school leadership and the school community of the need to include two hours of PE in the weekly timetable. Teachers deserve better than the expectation that they should have to fight for their subject.

Focus on sporting success

The guidance also emphasises that PE should be more inclusive. This includes equal provision for girls in PE, to ensure that boys and girls have access to the same sports and activities. But a big problem with PE’s inclusivity is how closely it is tied to sport and sporting success.

PE isn’t the same thing as sport. It’s an opportunity for children to learn about physical movement, health and fitness, and to gain social and emotional skills. But it isn’t appreciated as a standalone subject in this way.

For many, PE is only worth talking about when it is a way to emulate sporting success or create more successful sportspeople. This can be seen, for instance, in the links emphasised by the government between the success of England’s women’s football team, the Lionesses, and improving PE for girls. It’s also in the education secretary Gillian Keegan’s comment on the new PE guidance: “As the Women’s Six Nations kicks off, I’m delighted that we’re taking the next step to support schools to help boys and girls follow their sporting role models.”

A lack of interest or appreciation for the PE curriculum by school leadership can mean that what is on offer is driven by individual teachers’ sporting interests – with a focus on competitive sport (and often associated gender stereotypes) reinforced along the way.

Of course, increasing access to organised sport is good for the girls who want to play it. But many girls – and boys – don’t. They may feel judged by their classmates if they are less skilled, or that teachers prefer the pupils who are better at competitive sport. Children who don’t have an affinity for competitive sport are pushed out.

Lifetime benefits

PE should increase children’s physicality in learning by offering them a choice of activities that engage, motivate and inspire them to continue a lifetime love of movement. This would require a step-change in the planning and delivery of PE, as well as the training required for teachers. This new guidance will not change attitudes, access and pupil motivation.

Read more: London's Olympic legacy: research reveals why £2.2 billion investment in primary school PE has failed teachers

Good quality PE can enhance children’s mental, social, emotional and physical development. But this new guidance does little to advance the state and status of PE. It will continue to be pushed aside in favour of the subjects that pupils go on to take compulsory exams in.

Children are still experiencing the mental and physical fallout from pandemic lockdowns, and pupil absence is at an alarming high. PE could and should be at the forefront of making a real and lasting difference to children’s lives and education.

PE as a curricular subject must not be viewed just as a platform for sport. To better foster the movement of young people, it should be at the centre of a curriculum that is dedicated to supporting holistic development, health and wellbeing, and improving life chances.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Source: Michael Ballanger 04/08/2024

Michael Ballanger of GGM Advisory Inc. shares his thoughts on the current state of the gold and silver market, as well as a few junior stocks he believes are worth looking into.

Before I begin with my weekly assessment of market conditions, I have a story that needs to be told because as I glided around the blogosphere and Twitterverse and saturated world of ever-repeating podcasts, there was a distinct mixture of elation, excitement, and greed inundating the precious metals space with a particular pungency for silver and the PM miners.

A few decades ago, I had a brilliant, highly successful client who luxuriated in the practice of correcting me whenever I would offer him investment ideas. Be they my grammatical errors or factual oversights, no conversation went uncritiqued by this self-anointed wonderchild of intellectual superiority as interruption upon interruption became the order of the day whenever I dared make the call.

One particular conversation in February of 2020 involved gold and how I believed that it was a suitable place for investment capital given the ludicrous extremes to which the leaders of the Free World would devolve in order to protect their citizens from certain ruin and "death by microbe" after news of a strange new strain of virus was emerging from central China.

After multiple stops and starts, my esteemed client punctuated the conversation by embarking upon a lecture in which he dismissed the notion of gold being the "asset of choice" and opined that if I was worth the fees he paid me, I would know that the better place to be was silver.

No bull market in gold can ever survive without the company of its little sister, silver.

Now, it wasn't that I didn't know about silver. I played silver early in my career when it made the first Hunt brothers-driven assault on a $50 an ounce, only to be soundly and violently repelled by a massive collusion by the government, Wall Street, the CFTC, SEC, and DOJ.

After barely escaping that margin-calling hurricane that befell commodity traders the world over, I decided that despite the fact that nothing is more fun for me than "playing the ponies" at Woodbine on a sunny summer afternoon, silver would be far too "risky" for clients. However, given that this client had an IQ somewhat larger than his considerably inflated ego, it became apparent that by the end of my pitch, he had already mapped out his own strategy for taming the inflationary beast being conjured up by the central-planning pandemic battlers.

A few days later, I was instructed to deposit $100,000 into his futures account and initiate a position in July silver while taking on an equally notional short position in June gold. The idea was that if gold was to move higher, silver would obviously outperform it as it had done in every major bull market in precious metals since the Dawn of Margin Calls. In effect, he was shorting the Gold-to-Silver ratio (the "GSR") at around 90 because, as he so forcefully insisted, "the historic ratio for gold to silver is 15, and if you had done your homework, you would know that."

As you can guess, the rest, as they say, is history.

I cautioned my gifted client with the super-enlarged forehead that there was an inherent risk in assuming that silver would immediately scream ahead of gold because even in the 1970s, there was a "lag effect" where silver played catch-up to gold before it actually took the lead.

As I had suggested in February, the central banks and governments around the world hit the panic button when cases of COVID-19 arrived in Europe and North America, delivered handily by busloads of curious tourists from all over China all collectively spewing out infected microbes as they snapped photos of the Louvre, the Washington Monument, and Niagara Falls.

Gold responded with vigor and leaped to the fore, rising sharply of its own volition and, unfortunately for my client, without the merry accompaniment of silver. The first margin call came four days later, to which more funds were transferred, with the second a week later, after which the client demanded a "meeting" to discuss why he was losing his shirt on "my" recommendation.

Well, I turned to the notes I had written in my journal as he was instructing me like a constipated school marm to enter his orders and reminded him that it gold that was "my recommendation" and that being short, the GSR was a brilliant idea, but a very risky one, despite his obvious intellectual advantage over a plebe like me. By the middle of March, after one of the briefest ownership periods in futures trading history, the trade was liquidated with a sizable loss of both equity and self-esteem, once again proving the time-tested truism that says that when one is trading the silver market, expect the unexpected and never let a loss get out of control because silver, it is said, is a very cruel and unforgiving mistress.

The client survived, and after a few months of therapy and extensive rehab, he returned to the markets, preferring to invest in bonds and utility stocks. He called me to report his jubilation every time a coupon or dividend was paid. Pax tibi! ("Peace be with you.")

Since the very early months of 2023, I have been of the opinion that there would be only two metals that had any chance of dodging the ...

Full story available on Benzinga.com

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