RESEARCH NEWS
New UNESCO physical education guidelines aimed at longer, more productive lives
The time children and adults all over the world spend engaging in physical activity is decreasing, with dire consequences for their health, life expectancy, and ability to perform in the classroom, in society and at work.
It’s a trend that the World Health Organization (WHO) has described as a pandemic that contributes to the death of 3.2 million people every year, more than twice as many as die of AIDS.
Macquarie University’s Dr Dean Dudley has contributed to a new publication, Quality Physical Education, Guidelines for Policy Makers, in which UNESCO urges governments and educational planners to reverse this trend.
“Building a sustainable future for all Australians and the wider Oceanic region begins with having healthy, safe, physically active and well-educated children,” says Dr Dudley, Senior Lecturer in Macquarie University’s School of Education.
“The UNESCO Quality Physical Education Guidelines are a call to arms for politicians and bureaucrats who want to resist the growing trend of shrinking school curricula to outcomes on standardised testing regimes.”
The Guidelines seek to address seven areas of particular concern identified last year in UNESCO’s global review of the state of physical education, including persistent gaps between PE policy and implementation; continuing deficiencies in curriculum time allocation; relevance and quality of the PE curriculum; quality of initial teacher training programmes; inadequacies in the quality and maintenance of facilities; continued barriers to equal provision and access for all; and inadequate school-community coordination.
For society to reap the benefit of quality physical education, the guidelines argue, planners must ensure that it is made available as readily to girls as it is to boys, to young people in school and to those who are not.