In France, 14% of school time is devoted to physical education and sports: this is significantly more than in other developed countries (around 7% on average). However, at the age of 11, only 9% of girls and 17% of boys practiced, in 2018, the physical activity recommended (sixty minutes per day) by the World Health Organization, school and extracurricular time combined. . Well below the European average (19% of girls, 26% of boys).
As Paris prepares to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games (JOP), this paradox is of concern. Emmanuel Macron has declared the practice of sport a “great national cause” for the year 2024, and would like France to become a “sporting nation”. The State is clearly counting on the school to carry out this ambition.
At the start of the 2020 school year, the “30 minutes of daily physical activity” (APQ) program was launched in primary schools, before being generalized in 2022. A second measure has been tested in 700 middle schools since September (around a hundred had already taken the step in 2022), which consists of adding two hours of sport per week, in addition to the compulsory physical and sports education (PE) course. The objective is to allow students who have “dropped out” from sport to (re)discover physical activity.
At the Ministry of National Education and Youth, we admit to being faced with difficulties. Primary school teachers say they lack time, training and ideas to carry out the thirty minutes of APQ. The Minister of Sports and JOPs, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, assured, at the beginning of September, that only 10% to 15% of schools have not implemented the half-hour, but this figure is not confirmed by the Primary education sports union, nor by teaching unions.