§ Mr. SpringTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment what estimate he has made of the average number of hours spent on PE training during teacher training courses. [82083]
§ Ms Estelle MorrisIt is the responsibility of initial teacher training (ITT) providers to decide what proportion of time should be spent on any particular subject in the courses they run. No information on the amount of time spent on PE, or any other subject, is held centrally and no estimates have been made by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.
Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools did, at the request of the then Secretary of State, carry out a sample survey of 20 ITT providers between October 1996 and December 1997 to provide more information on the preparation of trainees for primary teaching, who were not PE specialists, to teach PE. He reported that on average postgraduate trainees had 23 hours of PE training and that undergraduates had 32 hours: which is a similar proportion of time to that allocated to other National Curriculum foundation subjects.