Sport is not for all, here it is for the few. Physical education is being squeezed out of the curriculum as we sit idly by and watch our children becoming unfitter than ever before. It's time to get up off our backsides writes Tom Humphries, Chief Sports Features Writer

It's spring, the time for the traditional climax of school and college sports everywhere. There is a surface healthiness to sport at this level and the amount of media coverage given to certain competitions distorts this further. Mammy in furs presenting the Senior Cup, the hockey girls shiny and smiling, and so on.

Yet, sport in schools is dying. A minority of good players get all the games and all the pressure, whether it's Leinster Schools Senior Cup rugby or Harty Cup hurling. The coverage given to these exploits could fool a body into thinking that sport in general is in a healthy state at schools' level. It's not.

The most common reason offered for sport's periphality is the change in the nature of teaching profession over the years and the slow withdrawal of the services to sport which many teachers once proffered voluntarily.

However, the broader culture has changed too. Children just aren't encouraged to play "out" as much as they were 20 or 30 years ago. They don't pick up sports and exercise and hand/eye co-ordination as a matter of course. The computer and the TV act as mesmeric baby-sitters. Children don't walk to school even. Sport is an entertainment on TV, not part of life.

Pat Fanning is principal of St Joseph's primary school in Fairview, Dublin, a school which once expressed its identity through sport, especially GAA. Fanning himself is a scion of a noted Waterford GAA family and played for Mount Sion from about the time he could walk. He notices the differences from his own childhood.

"Teachers are different and kids are different. Teachers are loaded with pupil assessment work and profiles and lots of commitments in their own homes. They can't do as much work. And the kids have changed. I notice that some kids who are good at sport will do anything that's on offer. The others will do nothing. We're going to evolve into a species with big fat thumbs because kids think sport begins and ends with PlayStation."

Last year, St Joseph's got to a Dublin primary schools football final. Fanning coralled a panel of 36 into the team to maximise interest. Of those, only three were playing with a GAA club, maybe six played soccer, the rest played no sport outside school. What exercise they got with St Joseph's football team was the sum total of their athletic endeavours.

The odd thing is that St Joseph's are lucky. Fanning has a lifelong interest in the GAA and gives huge chunks of his own time to sport within the school. For what he can't do, he relies on sport bodies themselves to come into the school and broaden the sporting curriculum. Joeys offers judo, table tennis, basketball, swimming and will soon have badminton.

It's a struggle though. The Department of Education began giving a £500 annual grant for PE equipment a few years ago. A small thing. Even that has stopped recently.

There are other issues, too. Somewhere along the way, the view, now being disproved, became fashionable that there exists a choice between academic achievement and sporting achievement. You had one or the other.

And insurance became a factor. Risk is increasingly frowned on when schools are dealing with other people's children. Pupils get injured, parents get litigious, schools can't afford the premiums.

When Pat Fanning began coaching hurling to kids as a young teacher, he remembers lads getting bangs and dropping them home and telling parents that Johnny got a little knock. No harm done. "Now, when I talk to young students about coaching in school, the first thing I say is that you can't do it on your own. Apart from the camaraderie of coaching with somebody else, you need corroboration in case there is an accident, you just have to have somebody else with you for insurance purposes. If a kid gets a knock, we are back filling out forms afterwards, just in case there is a claim. The insurance people will want to know."

In England a few years ago, a boy sued his school and local education authority after he missed the mat while executing the high jump. When you get over the idea of a school sports curriculum broad enough to have included the high jump, you might absorb the detail of the case. The boy had refused to straddle-jump, as instructed by his teacher, and was experimenting with his own modes of flight. The case was dismissed after two days in court, but the costs were horrendous. In a time of cutbacks, schools find it easier to just say no. It is hard to find funds for the equipment, teachers don't want to do it, there are slight risks involved. Individual sporting bodies are only just beginning to become pro-active in the area of filling this void.

In the Republic of Ireland, a country which likes to imagine itself as being sports-oriented, the situation is a little distressing. Sport has a vague and aspirational role in the national curriculum. In the absence of anything more specific, various sports bodies have begun to sniff around in piecemeal fashion, linking clubs and schools, providing coaches and instruction, training teams and so on. That situation is better than a vacuum, but the big picture remains unaltered. There is no national sports policy, there is no ongoing discussion of a primary and second level integrated sports curriculum to encompass not just fitness issues but skill levels, teamwork and career opportunities.

"PE is part of the curriculum, but there is nothing sports specific in there," says Fanning. "We don't recognise sport in terms of what it does for fitness, discipline, general happiness."

Fanning's view is widely supported. There is plenty of evidence to support the old-fashioned view that sport is linked to the development of the whole person - discipline, targets, health - and improved academic performance.

And sport is not just a career choice for the dozens of kids who go to English soccer clubs for trials, it is an option in terms of teaching, coaching, administration, agency, leisure management, planning and various other roles. We cater for these at third level, but have no focused national sports curriculum below that.

There are examples we can follow. Australia put sport into its educational system in a conscious way after the nation's failure at the 1976 Olympics. A quarter of a century on, they have a diverse, successful and healthy sporting culture. In the US, sporting privileges come with academic achievement and in working-class schools, in particular, many states have come to see sport as the pathway to better overall results.

We don't even have to look so far away. Until 1997, Barking Abbey was a run-of-the-mill comprehensive school in east London, catering for 1,600 kids. It's most celebrated past pupil is the singer-songwriter Billy Bragg. In 1997, the school was one of the original six schools chosen to become a sports college, funded by the British national lottery. The idea was to help students fulfil their sporting potential as well as their academic potential. The school was fast-tracked for lottery money for additional facilities and coaches and teachers. Since then, it has excelled in football and produced internationals in sports as diverse as cross-country running, netball and the long jump.

More impressive were the statistics which revealed that the rate of academic improvement in Barking College was twice that in a standard comprehensive school. The percentage of pupils getting five or more A-C grades at GCSE at Barking Abbey school, for instance, climbed from 39 per cent to 64 per cent in the four years after it became a sports college.

As the sports-college system has grown, the results have been replicated and it has been noted, too, that academic performance improves faster in sports colleges than in any other type of specialist college, including arts or technology colleges.

The pity of the British system is that it operates in a very small minority of schools. It shows, however, the value of integrating sport into the educational curriculum. If the Irish education system is to be a broader and more effective influence, rather than just a calibrator of academic ability, we need to look at what we are doing to our children

A British Medical Journal study last year suggested that one in five nine-year-olds is overweight and one in 10 obese. Kids spend the equivalent of a day and a half watching television and an hour and a half per week playing sport. Coaches in all sports report a huge decline in the physical-fitness level of kids. And those are the kids who are actually getting coaching.

We are complacent in this country about sport. We have spent years arguing over something as futile and elitist as the Bertie Bowl. Where is the debate about sport in schools, where is the beginning of a sports culture that embraces all children?

We can argue about infrastructure and Roy Keane and drink companies sponsoring top-level sport, but unless we get a system in place that values sport and what it can do for us, there will be nothing left to argue about in a couple of generations time.