Gove speech: good sports

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/11/gove-speech-good-sports-editorial

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Sport and Englishness have enjoyed a long, close and often fruitful relationship. Like all such relationships, it has meant different things at different times. In the 18th century, sporting dukes recruited their household staff on the strength of how fast they could bowl, and launched audacious gambling coups in contests with neighbouring estates. In the 19th century, sport was about Christianity, morality and imperial identity; a long era that only truly ended with the knit-your-own Olympics of 1948. Thereafter, however, sport swiftly became a metaphor for British weakness, conveyed through serial disaster in almost every sphere of team and individual endeavour, best embodied in the terrifying leaps of Eddie the Eagle and the fate of women tennis players on rain-soaked outer courts at Wimbledon.

This week, sport gained another identity. Of all the statistics of the wildly disproportionate correlation between public success and private education produced by the education secretary Michael Gove in his speech on Wednesday – a speech intended to support his story of failure in the state school sector – one was truly unexpected. The fact, unearthed by the independently educated former England cricketer Ed Smith, was that all but one of the England team who faced Pakistan in the 1987 Test series went to state school, whereas in the current England squad, two thirds are graduates of independent schools.

Private education, obviously, is sometimes a tricky matter for this government. Mr Gove's intellectual sleight of hand is to pretend that its advantages are not a privilege enjoyed by the better-off so much as a confirmation of the fundamental weakness of provision by the state. He mentioned sport, but not the unparalleled sporting facilities of many independent schools (the Olympic rowing is at Eton). He moved on without discussing the decisions of his predecessors: the sale of state school playing fields, the dilution of sport in the national curriculum, the ever-growing demands on teachers' time.

Nor did he discuss the evidence that the policies of the last government were turning round participation in all sports, including competitive team sports, or that when he arrived in office two years ago, he ended the successful school sports partnership which promoted inter-school competition. Or that, although something like it is back, it is less well-funded, and it will be harder to tell what good it's doing, as funding for the school sport survey was an early casualty of the cull of red tape. And most telling of all of Mr Gove's omissions was the point that the England cricketers of 1987, state-educated almost to a man, were the sons of the post-war settlement.