Gerald Griggs

For sale – primary physical education. £20 per hour or nearest offer

With the pressures of time and finance schools find themselves under, such as the need to meet ever-increasing Public Service Agreement targets for pupil participation in physical education (PE) and school sport, the need to provide extended school hours and the need to cover planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time, sports coaches are being increasingly used in primary schools to fill the void. How exactly this current situation has emerged remains unclear. In order to shed light on this issue, sports coaches (n = 23) returned self-completion questionnaires before engaging in follow-up interviews, semi-structured in nature. The paper discusses key themes emerging from the data including a lack of teacher engagement in extra-curricular provision, the cost of covering PPA time, a willingness of teachers to ‘give up’ the teaching of PE and the apparent confidence exuded by sports coaches.

Physical Education: primary matters, secondary importance

Considerable literature has been written over the last decade which indicates that the National Curriculum for Physical Education in England and Wales is being delivered ineffectively in primary schools. This paper discusses the key issues currently faced within primary PE and identifies why within Physical Education, primary matters appear to be of secondary importance, despite research indicating that such a stage of schooling holds the key to lifelong physical activity and proficiency in more complex activities such as sport. It is argued that to create a more successful model of PE and sport within the UK there needs to be a shifting of priorities and resources into the primary sector and the creation of a ‘bottom-up’ model, rather than continue to pursue policies that are ‘top-down’ in nature.

‘Just a sport made up in a car park?’: the ‘soft’ landscape of Ultimate Frisbee

Consideration of the sporting landscape within which an activity takes place is an aspect that is often taken for granted but close inspection can reveal a wealth of information that is easily found, waiting to be decoded (Cosgrove 1989). Such information is important because it allows the values ascribed to the landscape to become more clearly visible (Lewis 1979). This study examines the sport of Ultimate Frisbee and uses a modified framework devised by Meinig (1979) to analyse different ‘views of the sports landscape’. An ethnographic approach was used and data were gathered through participant observation, the conducting of interviews and the examination of documentary evidence. Findings indicate that since the formation of a new governing body in the UK, greater standardisation of the sporting landscape has become apparent, however, spatial, temporal and constitutional boundaries within Ultimate Frisbee remain ‘soft’ and continue to be indicative of the sports origins and ‘the alternative sports movement’ of the 1960s (Bale 1994).

Principles of Play: a proposed framework towards a holistic overview of games in primary physical education

The playing of games has been a long standing tradition in physical education. Yet despite its history, the teaching of games within primary physical education lessons remains something of a weakness. This is most evident through a continued focus upon skill acquisition and a lack of fostering of a real ‘tactical understanding’ of game play. Despite attempts to rectify this issue through the development of instructional models, a lack of conceptual clarity remains. This paper proposes a framework that goes some way to rectify this ambiguity by proposing to focus upon what are referred to as ‘Principles of Play’. It is recommended that this approach should become the focus when conceptualising what constitutes primary games lessons.

‘This must be the only sport in the world where most of the players don't know the rules’: operationalizing self-refereeing and the spirit of the game in UK Ultimate Frisbee

A recurring theme throughout the literature pertaining to the development of sports and games is the construction of rules or laws. However, it is well known that, in reality, there is much more to ‘playing by the rules’ and in practice sport participants are generally considered to be both playing according to and in the spirit of the rules. This distinction is termed ‘formal and informal fair play’. Using an ethnographic approach data were gathered in the Ultimate Frisbee community in the UK from 2004–7, through participant observation, the conducting of interviews and the examination of documentary evidence. This paper reports upon the ‘inner workings’ of the sport of Ultimate Frisbee, specifically within the UK, and provides an insight into how, in this sport, the constitutive rules work in practice, which is of particular interest given that it is self-refereed. Of further interest, too, is the application of constitutive rules within a pervasive ‘ethos’, which is referred to in Ultimate Frisbee as the ‘spirit of the game’.

‘When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a Frisbee’: the emergence of aesthetic appreciation within Ultimate Frisbee

The focus of this study examines the repeated references and celebration of more aesthetic elements in Ultimate Frisbee by both performers and spectators. This aspect was an emergent theme from a broader study and first became apparent when first considering how the landscape provided an aesthetic backdrop manifest in aspects such as location as well as music. An ethnographic approach was used and data was gathered through participant observation, the conducting of interviews and the examination of documentary evidence. An analytical outline proposed by Carlisle (1974) provided a clear structure within which expressive and evocative elements, intellectual beauty and dramatic aspects were identified and examined. It is posited that the raising of this ‘aesthetic attention’ within Ultimate allows people to reconnect with aesthetic aspects during a purposive sporting activity.

‘A splendid effort!’ Print media reporting of England’s women’s performance in the 2009 Cricket World Cup

The representation of female athletes by the British print media has been an area for close scrutiny since the mid-1990s. This article examines the representation of England’s Women’s performance at the 2009 Cricket World Cup. Using a qualitative content analysis of 29 articles from seven newspapers over the duration of the tournament, results show that the main themes emerging were: description of play, performance, celebration, media coverage and women’s sport. These results are discussed in the context of changing trends since the 1990s. Concurring with previous authors we acknowledge that trends have changed in terms of what is reported but not in terms of how much is reported.

Hazing and initiation ceremonies in university sport: setting the scene for further research in the United Kingdom

In recent years, the pervasive practice of student initiation ceremonies into university sports teams has become widely reported in the British media. Such initiations have been likened to the practice known as hazing, which is prevalent in universities across the USA. Although there is some research that has considered how and why hazing occurs in American universities, less attention has been paid to the initiation ceremonies that regularly occur in British institutions. This article provides an overview of some of the literature that has examined the practice of hazing in the USA in order to set the scene for much needed research in the UK.

Physical Education in the UK: disconnections and reconnections

Within the UK, physical education finds itself, as a curriculum subject, in a contested space with felt pressures from competing discourses and policy areas. This paper contests that over time within this nexus, physical education has become disconnected in four specific ways: from the wider movement culture, from other curriculum subjects, within the curriculum between different age phases and between training and teacher needs. The paper discusses each of these disconnections and, importantly, offers suggestions about how reconnections might be found.

The photographic representation of female athletes in the British print media during the London 2012 Olympic Games

The London 2012 Olympic Games were widely reported as the ‘Womens Games’ but was this reflected in the photographic representation in British print media? This study focused upon photographic representation of athletes in the British print media during the London 2012 Olympic Games. The original dimension of this investigation is the triangulation of gender with location, position and camera angle of photos. From a feminist perspective, content analysis was used to compare the amount and prominence of the coverage devoted to female and male athletes and photographs during the Games findings indicate that media coverage of female athletes continues to lag behind that of male athletes in quantity of photos. However, there are signs of increased gender equality in the location, page prominence and camera angle of photos of sportswomen compared to previous studies on the media representation of female athletes at Olympic Games.