Well away from the starting blocks but not yet at the finishing tape: the implementation of the Northern Ireland Physical Education curriculum in post-primary schools.
Anne E. Sutherland
Paper given at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference
University of Cardiff, 8th September 2000
Graduate School of Education
Queen’s University of Belfast
69 University Street
Belfast BT7 1HL
Telephone 028 903359 36
1.Introduction
What I hope to do this morning is to share some of the findings of a survey undertaken soon after the Northern Ireland curriculum in Physical Education had become statutory in all the years of compulsory education. By the autumn of 1998, all school pupils would normally have experienced the curriculum at least during all the years they had been in their present schools, if not for longer. But first some scene setting.
1.1: Post-Primary Education in Northern Ireland
The divided (some would say divisive) nature of Northern Ireland education is well-known. In fact, there are three relevant types of division at the post-primary stage.
(1) Some 90% of the post-primary school population is educated in a selective system of grammar and other secondary schools.
(2) Despite recent growth in the number of integrated schools, some 95% of pupils are educated in either Catholic or de facto Protestant schools. Although some grammar schools have substantial minorities of pupils from the other main denominational grouping, it is rare for pupils to ‘cross the religious divide’ to attend either primary or secondary high schools.
Physical Education is one of the school subjects where the religious divide is of particular salience because many games played at school level are associated with one or other of the main religious communities (see Gallagher, 1997, for a review). In particular, the Irish games promoted by the GAA (or Gaelic Athletic Association) – i.e. hurling, camogie and especially Gaelic football – are commonly found in Catholic schools but almost never in Protestant schools. Games which are often perceived as ‘British' – rugby, hockey and cricket – are popular in Protestant schools, especially Protestant grammar schools, but played very much less in Catholic schools. A third group of games – including soccer, netball and basketball – are widely played in both Catholic and Protestant schools, though with some fluctuations over the years. The ‘non-games’ aspects of Physical Education – for example athletics, gymnastics and swimming – do not carry the same denominational associations. Brennan (1996) declares that even national dancing, including Irish dancing, is taught in schools from both communities, although more to girls than to boys – and is not used in the same way as games to reinforce one culture over the other.
(3) There is a higher proportion of single-sex schools than in other parts of the UK, although amalgamations have reduced the proportion from what it was some 10 or 20 years ago. And within co-educational schools, co-educational PE is certainly not something high on the agenda of the present Inspectorate.
A consequence of these divisions is that post-primary schools tend to be smaller than in other parts of the UK. The average enrolment of a secondary high school is about 550 pupils, that of a grammar school about 900 pupils. All these factors affect the provision of Physical Education in schools.
1.2: The NI Curriculum in Physical Education at Key Stages 3 and 4
The 1989 Education Reform Order, brought in to Northern Ireland by the late Tory Government and the subsequent raft of reforms, including those for the curriculum, are similar in essentials to the 1988 Education Reform Act for England and Wales and its aftermath. Both are founded on what Penney and Evans (1999), and others, have described as the belief that market principles can be applied to education and that competition and accountability are the way to raise standards. However, there are certain differences of detail between the legislation in Northern Ireland and in other parts of the United Kingdom.
The Northern Ireland curriculum in Physical Education is unusual in having been introduced into the schools a year before the one in England and Wales. Many of the other subject curricula followed about a year behind those in England and Wales. McFee and Tomlinson (1993) have pointed out that the Northern Ireland working party that drafted the PE curriculum included a higher proportion of active practitioners of Physical Education than did that for England and Wales. It also seems to have experienced much less direct influence by the politicians. Subsequent revisions have been more minor than those on the east side of the Irish Sea.
The Key Stage 3 curriculum is outlined on Slide 1.
Slide 1: The NI Physical Education Curriculum at Key Stage
Compulsory Elements (in alphabetical order)Athletics
Dance
Games / to include Invasion, Net/Wall and Run/Scoring games and with progression from mini or adapted games to full games
Gymnastics
Swimming
with an underpinning of concepts from Health-Related Physical Education
This is a broader curriculum than that required at the same stage in England and Wales. Swimming, which is also mandatory at KS2, reappears at KS3. The most unusual and indeed controversial feature, however, is the compulsory inclusion of dance as well as gymnastics for all pupils during Key Stage 3. Deirdre Brennan (1996) interviewed some of the Working Party and, like Margaret Talbot (1993) in England, though at second hand, has provided some insights into how things came to pass. Evidently there was on the Working Group in Northern Ireland what one interviewee described as a “Holy Trinity” of dance enthusiasts. Apparently the case for dance was very well argued and accepted in the Working Group with relative ease, though one member of the Trinity suspected that some of the men in the Group had not quite fully grasped that the dance requirement would apply to boys too!
Brennan also implies that there was relatively muted opposition to the dance element when the Working Group’s proposals were sent out as a Consultation Document. This may have been because of – par for the course – limited consultation time or because the implications were not fully grasped. The grumblings became louder later.
The Key Stage 4 curriculum is outlined on Slide 2
Slide 2: The NI Physical Education Curriculum at Key Stage 4
Compulsory Element / Optional Elements (any 3)Health-related physical education / Athletics
Dance
Games 1
Games 2
Gymnastics
Outdoor Education
Swimming
Health-related physical education, which has underpinned the curriculum from the Key Stage 1 years becomes at KS4 a discrete aspect of PE in its own right. Amongst other things, pupils are expected to “develop and monitor a personal health-related exercise programme”. How this is done and the extent to which health-related physical education is taught as a free-standing module or taught through the other aspects of PE is left to the school or the teacher to decide. In addition, pupils are expected to participate in a minimum of 3 of the optional activities. Outdoor Education makes its first appearance on the NI curriculum at KS4 – and as an option. It would be quite possible to avoid team games, or even games generally, at KS4 and indeed there would seem to be less mandatory emphasis on games, especially team games, in the official NI curriculum than in England and Wales and the subsequent Government interventions. The Northern Ireland equivalent to the Department of National Heritage's Raising the Game (DNH, 1995) entitled, The Future of Sport for Young Peoplein Northern Ireland, seems to have been altogether more low-key affair. In terms of the masculine and feminine versions of Physical Education, as described by Kirk (1992) and many others – the yang and yin so to speak – the Northern Ireland curriculum would veer more towards yin. than would the English one. It may not be co-incidental that the Inspector who was assessor to the Working Group was female.
Physical Education in sixth form is entirely a matter for the school to decide.
2. The Surveys
The two surveys on the results of which I shall draw were both commissioned by the Sports Council for Northern Ireland. The first one, in the post-primary sector only, took place in the summer term of 1991, the term before the introduction of the PE curriculum into the first years of primary and post-primary education (Sutherland, 1992). The second commission was for the academic year 1998-99, by which time the NI curriculum had worked its way through the school system. This time there were parallel surveys in both the primary and post-primary sectors. Both post-primary surveys had a 73% response rate (after reminders) in each case the response was better from the grammar than from the secondary high schools: 81% vs 70% in 1991; 87% vs 66% in 1999.
The surveys were both very much ‘broad brush’, covering a wide range of topics: time allocations, the organisation of PE classes, the content of the curriculum and of extra-curricular activities, assessment and examinations, physical facilities, human resources for curricular PE and extra-curricular sport and the impact of the Educational Reform Order. The second survey also included a section on teachers’ aims in time-tabled (non-examination) Physical Education. Most of these topics could have been the subject of an investigation in their own right and the questionnaires were as long as we dared make them. There are many factors pertinent to the curriculum that could not be explored, because of constraints of time and space, for instance ‘Just what happens in Health-related Physical Education?’ and to what extent are the sections of the programmes of study concerned with understanding and evaluation being implemented.
I might just add that 1991 survey, for which we were given a draft version of the questionnaire to adapt for Northern Ireland seems to have had its origins in a previous questionnaire from the Sports Council for Wales!
In both surveys it emerged that in post-primary schools there was not one Northern Ireland curriculum but about eight, reflecting the 3-way divisions mentioned in the Introductory section, that is by gender, by religious denomination and by type of school (grammar or secondary). In addition, the curriculum changed with the pupils' age, most schools, quite reasonably, regarding certain activities in PE to be more appropriate for certain year groups than others. In many analyses it proved most fruitful to analyse the data separately for boys and for girls and in each case by whether the pupils were in Catholic grammars, Protestant grammars, Catholic secondaries or Protestant secondaries.
3: The Situation in the Summer of 1991
The next OHP, however, is a more simplified display, showing the percentages of schools with boys and with girls on the roll that were already in May 1991, the time of the first survey, offering the various components of the Northern Ireland PE curriculum for the age group. Many of the schools were, of course, co-educational but these were not necessarily offering their male and female students the same types of PE. The compulsory elements of Key Stage 3 are outlined. There are no compulsory elements in the columns for Key Stage 4, since Health-related Physical Education was not included in the checklists in the 1991 questionnaire.
Slide 3: Components of the NI Curriculum in PE in place by May 1991
Key Stage 3 / Key Stage 4Boys / Girls / Boys / Girls
/ % / % / % / %
Athletics / 95.6 / 91.4 / 91.9 / 84.1
Dance / 14.1 / 94.7 / 5.2 / 43.0
Gymnastics / 82.2 / 95.4 / 27.4 / 29.1
Outdoor Education. / 20.7 / 20.5 / 33.3 / 27.2
Swimming / 61.5 / 65.6 / 47.4 / 43.7
Games
Invasion / 98.5 / 97.4 / 98.5 / 94.7
Net/ Wall / 86.7 / 94.7 / 97.0 / 97.4
Run/ Score / 78.5 / 94.0 / 57.0 / 75.5
Target / 3.7 / 0.7 / 23.7 / 9.3
Combat/ S-D / 1.5 / 0.7 / 3.0 / 7.3
Most of the compulsory elements of the Key Stage 3 curriculum were already being taught in at least 90% of the girls' groups, the main exception being swimming, which was unavailable in just over a third of the schools. It was noted, however, that nearly a third of the Catholic grammar schools were not offering their girls athletics and about a sixth of these schools (Catholic grammars) were not offering girls gymnastics. Almost all other schools were, however, offering their girls these two aspects of Physical Education.
The boys' curriculum in 1991 was, however, further removed from the model of what was going to become ‘compulsory’ than was the girls'. Nearly all boys had experience of athletics and at least one invasion game – most often, according to school type, soccer, Gaelic football or rugby – in their PE lessons at KS3. However only one school in seven taught their boys dance, nearly two-fifths had no swimming and games were more likely than for girls to be limited to the invasion type. As with girls, the shortfalls were more marked in certain types of school than others. Thus, over three-fifths of the Catholic secondary schools (rather than the two-fifths for all boys’ groups) did not offer their boys swimming, while gymnastics did not appear on the PE programmes of a quarter of all secondary schools. No Run/scoring games were played by boys in 44% of the Catholic schools although all but 7% of the Protestant schools included them. This reflects the reluctance in many Catholic schools to include the ‘British’ game of cricket, although there would be no ideological reason why baseball, for instance, could not be included. Girls scored higher on this particular dimension because their PE courses usually included some rounders.
4: The Situation in 1998-99
Some seven and a half years later, how much had the situation changed?
As Slide 4 shows, at least 90% of the schools were offering each of the ‘compulsory’ elements of the KS3 curriculum to girls at KS3. Although about a quarter of the boys were not dancing, the 74% of schools where some was reported is a very large increase on the 14% in 1991. The number of schools offering swimming had increased from less than two-thirds to nearly nine-tenths. A high proportion of the non-swimmers were in two particular areas of Northern Ireland and there seem to have been problems of inadequate facilities in these locations.
Slide 4: Components of the NI Curriculum in PE taught in 1998-99
/Key Stage 3 / Key Stage 4
Boys / Girls / Boys / Girls
/ % / % / % / %
Athletics / 97.6 / 96.2 / 87.9 / 89.4
Dance / 74.2 / 96.9 / 8.1 / 28.6
Gymnastics / 97.6 / 98.5 / 32.3 / 29.3
Outdoor Education. / 1.6 / 0 / 6.5 / 5.3
Swimming / 87.9 / 90.1 / 39.5 / 39.1
Health-related PE / 60.5 / 66.4 / 79.2 / 87.2
Games
Invasion / 100.0 / 99.2 / 98.4 / 97.0
Net/ Wall / 85.5 / 96.2 / 92.7 / 96.2
Run/ Score / 75.8 / 90.8 / 58.1 / 74.4
Target / 7.2 / 3.1 / 32.3 / 16.3
Combat/ S-D / 1.6 / 1.6 / 4.0 / 6.0
As for the Key Stage 4 years, one curious feature is that a fifth of the boys’ teachers and one-in eight of the girls’ implied they were not teaching ‘health-related physical education’, the one supposedly compulsory element of the PE course for the age group.
Slide 5: Boys’ KS3 Curriculum in 1991 and 1999
But the changes are perhaps best viewed diagramatically. Let us look first at boys at KS3. The striking features of Slide 5 are the increases in dance and swimming, though there is also an appreciable reduction in the number of schools not including gymnastics. The increase for swimming was particularly marked in the Catholic secondary schools where it rose from 38% to 88%. However, the admittedly very slight, decreases in the number of schools offering boys Net/Wall and Run/scoring games suggests that perhaps the number of games was being reduced in some schools to allow for the dance and the swimming and the gymnastics.
But one must be cautious not to make too much of small percentage changes in comparisons of findings from 1991 and 1998. Not only are they usually of no statistical significance but the schools in the two surveys were not quite the same. Some responded to one but not the other survey and there had also been some amalgamations in the interim.
Since most girls’ schools were in 1991 already fairly close to including all elements of the required curriculum, apart perhaps from swimming, the changes are less marked than for the boys - apart, of course, from the rise in swimming (Slide 6). The overall percentages for girls, however, mask a very considerable broadening of the PE curriculum in girls’ Catholic grammar schools.
Slide 6: Girls’ KS3 Curriculum in 1991 and 1999
One should, however, be cautious in acclaiming these apparent ‘improvements’ in curriculum offerings without probing just a little deeper although the nature of the research prevents any very deep probes. Heads of physical education – acronym HOPEs – were asked to tick for each activity on the checklist each year it was offered using a system of
one tick if the activity was offered ‘occasionally’
two ticks if it was offered ‘often’ or ‘quite often’
three ticks if it was offered very often or almost every week.
Admittedly, these categories were asking for fairly subjective judgements from the HOPEs. However, it seems reasonable to deduce that if an activity was recorded as taking place only ‘occasionally’ and in one year, it would not have been given much emphasis.
Slide 7: Boys’ KS4 Curriculum in 1991 and 1999
In this connection it was noted that both boys and girls were offered swimming only ‘occasionally’ and in only one of their KS years in about a fifth of their schools. The percentage rose to 38% for the boys’ Catholic secondary schools, the group which most rarely offered any swimming in 1991. Since 12% of the schools in this group had no KS3 swimming, only half of them would appear to have been offering any substantial amount.