The Delivers Debate

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the relatively new, yet emerging issue of who should be teaching children physical education and school sport in primary schools? Traditionally in most western school systems, including countries such as England, America, Australia and Canada, physical education curriculums and programmes of study have been designed, developed, taught and evaluated by qualified teachers (Kirk, 2010). In primary schools this has been the generalist class teacher, professional educators who have not necessarily specialised in physical education (Blair and Capel, 2011 and Sloan, 2010). However, in recent years research has shown that physical education in primary schools has also been taught by people other than the class teacher (Stewart, 2006, Blair and Capel, 2008, 2011; Griggs 2008, 2010, Powell, 2015, Sloan, 2010, Williams, Hay and Macdonald, 2011 and Williams and Macdonald, 2015) typically non-professionals who have coaching qualifications from National Governing Bodies (NGB) and specialise in aspects of youth sport (Blair and Capel, 2008, Griggs, 2010). Extra-curricular school sport has again traditionally been delivered by qualified teachers in some countries for example England, but in others such as America coaches have been used to support and deliver extra -curricular sports teams.