Sir John Major’s Comments on the Olympics – 8 August 2012

The text of Sir John Major’s comments made in an interview on the Olympics, which took place on 8th August 2012.

INTERVIEWER:

[What is the legacy of these Olympics?]

SIR JOHN MAJOR:

The first legacy will be to make sure that all the buildings, all the facilities we now have are properly used.

The second legacy is to make sure we take advantage of all the young people who now want to enter these sports, and bring them into sport.

And the third legacy, something which is absolutely crucial to my mind, is that we actually look again at getting much more sport back in school. We are short-changing the kids. They have a right to a physical education, as well as an academic education, and over the last forty years that’s fallen away.

INTERVIEWER:

[What’s happened to cause this?]

SIR JOHN MAJOR:

Sport was way down on the list, that was one of the reasons I established the lottery because sport and the arts were never going to get very much money from the Government. The whole country loves both of those things, and it needed funding, and the lottery has done that.

One of the things I bitterly regret that I wasn’t able to do was to utilise money to put a full-time sports teacher in every secondary school and in every little cluster of primaries, because I think it’s going to be very difficult to persuade other teachers just to take sport. I don’t think that’s going to happen, so I do think that we do need to put teachers in the schools, and I think it’s an important national priority.