Active Education Australia AGM update
We are pleased to announce the re-election of Rebecca Johnstone (nee Sandlant) and Dr Jacqui Peters to the AEA Board. We thank all nominees for their willingness to contribute to the future of AEA.
A recent article in The Guardian landed with a thud in education and sport circles in the UK, sharing survey data that revealed millions of adults still carry the scars of bad experiences in physical education (PE) with them from school.
For those of us who have built careers around the philosophy that movement and physical activity changes lives for the better, it’s an uncomfortable but necessary read. It’s also a timely reminder for those of us working to encourage and promote physical activity and sport in Australian schools.
At Active Education Australia, we live, breathe and love sport and physical activity, and have seen first-hand what active participation in sport and physical activity can do for a young person’s confidence, health and sense of belonging. But the article makes a strong point; the things we love aren’t necessarily loved by everyone, and for a significant number of students, PE is remembered less as a highlight of school life and more as a source of anxiety, embarrassment or exclusion.
Breaking down silos
A clear thread running through conversations in the UK is the disconnect between education, sport and health sectors that should be working in lockstep. Too often, each operates in its own lane, with its own priorities and its own metrics of success, while young people fall through the gaps between them.
The Guardian article points to examples like Sport England and Sport NZ as models where this cross-sector coordination is starting to work better and moving past viewing physical activity purely through a sport-participation lens and treating it as a shared public health and wellbeing responsibility.
This resonates strongly with what we see in Australian schools every day. Genuine progress depends on education, sport and health stakeholders pulling in the same direction, rather than each pursuing physical activity outcomes in isolation.
Long-term, meaningful experiences over short-term wins
Another idea worth highlighting is the importance of shaping positive experiences over the long term, rather than chasing isolated wins or one-off participation spikes. This is exactly the conversation we have with schools, week in and week out.
A single “fun day” or a single successful athletics carnival doesn’t shift a young person’s relationship with physical activity. What can, is a sustained, considered approach to how movement is woven into school life every day, so it builds confidence and enjoyment cumulatively rather than asking students to take a leap of faith every time they walk onto a court or field.
Making room for the “unsporty”
The UK article also references The Big Map, a UK platform connecting young people with physical activity opportunities in their communities. A couple of its core principles could be particularly relevant here in Australia:
We’d also add a third point that alternative pathways need to be visible and accessible, not buried as an afterthought behind main programs.
Community connection and local context matters
We’ve had productive conversations with schools about the value of mapping community connections, helping students find pathways into local clubs, programs and activities beyond the school gate. For students new to a school or a country, who don’t yet have the networks or local knowledge to find these opportunities themselves, that mapping can be the difference between staying active and disengaging completely.
We’ve also seen schools take this further. One school built its own local directory, drawing on feedback directly from students and families, to point students with disability toward clubs and programs that have actually delivered positive, supportive experiences for them.
It’s a small, practical response to a real gap: opportunities for students with additional needs can be genuinely harder to find, and word-of-mouth, curated locally, can do a lot of the work that generic directories can’t.
Where to from here?
None of this is a criticism of sport, or PE of course, but more of a reminder of our goals. We don’t want to get every student into a team lineup but to make sure every student has a fair go at finding a form of movement that works for them, delivered in a way that builds them up rather than knocking them down.
It’s a conversation we’ll keep having with schools, and one we think the broader Australian education and sport sector should be having too.
We are pleased to announce the re-election of Rebecca Johnstone (nee Sandlant) and Dr Jacqui Peters to the AEA Board. We thank all nominees for their willingness to contribute to the future of AEA.
The AEA team connected with educators, coaches and school leaders through a range of professional learning and conferences around the country in Term 2. From Brisbane to Hobart, Perth to Melbourne, real impact came through the conversations, connections and learning shared along the way.