Dear prime minister (Sunak or Truss): please sort out sport in schools

Forget Santa. If you really, really want something for Christmas this year, be it better social care or lower energy bills, the correct procedure is to write to Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. Last month Lotte Wubben-Moy inspired England’s European Championship-winning football team to post an open letter to the two Conservative leadership candidates, asking for football to be made available for all schoolgirls. After the women’s gold and men’s bronze in the Commonwealth Games the England hockey teams followed up with their own wishlist.

Both letters requested a guaranteed minimum of two hours a week of PE; England Hockey has also asked for team sports to be placed at the heart of PE lessons, with improved facilities and more PE teachers for primary and secondary schools. They were not the first. A joint letter from the chief executives of the Football Association, the Lawn Tennis Association, the England and Wales Cricket Board and England’s rugby union and league chief executives also asked the next prime minister to prioritise PE.

The lobby for more sport in schools is not new but it is seizing the moment. In July the Youth Sports Trust’s chief executive, Ali Oliver, pointed out that this year witnessed the UK’s largest recorded increase in childhood obesity, “all at a time when we have seen huge cuts to time on the curriculum for physical education and a decline in school sport”.

Unusually today’s problem is not one of funding. PE provision is on the wane despite “sport premium” grants of up to £16,000 being available to primary schools in England, with £320m promised to the scheme for the coming year. Sport England has provided £13.5m towards training secondary school teachers in the subject and about 75% of schools have