Roadmap for physical education in schools

By Confidente Reporter

LAST week the Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture (MEAC), the Ministry of Sport, Youth and National Service together with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and other relevant stakeholders conducted a workshop to create a roadmap for the Integrated Physical Education and School Sports (IPESS) programme.

Physical education and school sports should be an intrinsic part of a school learner’s overall development and forms part of their healthy lifestyle.

The IPESS programme builds on the ‘sport for development’ concept that has already been rolled out and implemented successfully across the nation.

The stakeholders that came together in the workshop pooled their creative resources to develop marketing, media and communication strategy to engage learners, teachers, school officials, parents and the private sector, amongst others to stimulate and raise the interest and participation in physical education and school sports.

In recent years the emphasis in schools has been only on academic development, whilst schoolchildren of all ages have seen their physical education and school sports activities reduced to incidental activities, leaving the learners with no outlet for their energy, but more importantly depriving them of the essential development that physical education and sports bring.

Development such as life skills, teamwork, learning how to deal with adversity, social development and interaction, game play as well as physical development and acquiring skills, will lead to a healthy lifestyle.

The stakeholders that took part in the workshop to find ways and means to engage the learners, teachers, parents, local and regional councils represented some of the most important youth and sports organisations in Namibia, namely the Namibia National Students Organisation (NANSO), Namibia Schools Sports Union (NSSU), United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Physically Active Youth (PAY), Basketball Artists School (BAS), Technical Basketball Academy (TBA) and a  non-governmental organisation from Omaheke called Gobabis Youth Development Academy (GYDA).

This programme is focused on creating a holistic approach of engagement with the youth, and a few school learners were asked to be part of the workshop as their input and feedback is important.

The workshop’s brief was to find a way in which to roll out the IPESS programme in the coming months across the 14 regions and to engage all the relevant stakeholders to participate in sporting and physical educational activities.

After a full day of brainstorming and collaboration between the representatives of the different organisations, ministries as well as NGOs, the exciting ideas will be worked out.