Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)

I am the last contributor today. I want to bring up the area of physical literacy. We obsessively and rightly talk about literacy and numeracy, but physical literacy often gets forgotten. We expect young people to reach milestones by certain stages of their lives of ability in crawling, walking, running, throwing, catching and all so on, yet we expect all of that to be rolled out in a PE curriculum that is implemented in many schools in a general purpose hall no bigger than this committee room with a ceiling of similar height, with a bake sale for fifth class set up over in one part, a book sale happening in another and a clothes collection in the corner. It is raining outside, and the teacher is under pressure to run it off. Physical literacy is not just about who is going to be the next Clare hurler or Meath footballer. It has nothing to do with that. It is about lifelong well-being. As a country we have a really high literacy rate we can be proud of. Our numeracy rate is high, but we score quite poorly internationally on physical literacy. Some children leave the primary school system and certain benchmarks of where they should be at age appropriate levels of physical literacy have not been attained. Yet, they are not fully assessed and there are no OT assessments. A huge amount of it can be fixed in the primary school and secondary school contexts, but it is also lifelong. We wonder then why someone in their 30s or 40s starts getting tight ligaments or the hips and neck do not rotate as much. It is a lifelong skill. It is about health and well-being, but we are expecting to deliver it in these little boxes.

On top of that the school needs a special class. There is a big enrolment coming next September and officials in the Department will ask why they do not reconfigure the general purpose hall. Suddenly all of what we want to achieve gets wiped because in that room, the bake sale gets cleared out, the basketballs are taken into another storage room and that general purpose hall becomes the special education classroom. Will the Minister please stand up for this, and in the lifetime of this Government give schools a bit of hope that there will be a hall added on to the school or at the end of the pitch or basketball court where they can properly deliver physical literacy and physical education?