The Polish government has allocated over 300 million zloty (€69 million) to help make school sports facilities available for use outside school hours, including evenings, weekends and holidays. The money can also be used for hiring coaches to work at such facilities.
The education and sports ministers, who have jointly created the “Active School” (Aktywna Szkoła) programme, hope it will encourage young people to take up sports and will benefit local communities.
👉WF to za mało! Potrzebujemy więcej ruchu jako społeczeństwo!
👉Dlatego program Aktywna Szkoła otwiera szkolne obiekty sportowe dla wszystkich zainteresowanych aktywnością sportową poza godzinami lekcyjnymi oraz w weekendy!
👉Zachęcaj bliskich i znajomych do wspólnego ruchu!… pic.twitter.com/S90spntiki— Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki (@SPORT_GOV_PL) June 11, 2024
“To meet the needs of school principals, who often face financial problems, and of local authorities, who, squeezed financially in recent years, are also not in the best situation, we have created a programme worth more than 300 million,” said sports minister Sławomir Nitras.
“The programme aims to make school sports facilities such as playing fields, sports halls, gyms and athletics tracks accessible to all,” he added, speaking alongside education minister Barbara Nowacka. “We want every citizen to know that the facilities at the school can be used.”
So far, more than 2,500 schools have signed up for the programme since registration was launched in April. Nitras yesterday appealed to people who “see padlocks on the fences of playing fields in the afternoons or at weekends” to ask their mayor or school principal why they have not applied.
The Polish government is making it harder for children to get a doctor's note excusing them from physical education classes
It is also introducing a pilot programme to regularly test children during such lessons, including monitoring their body mass index https://t.co/YtjKzR0mA0
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 19, 2022
The sports minister also noted that the money will allow schools to hire more people to run sports activities after hours and pay them better wages.
The programme allows the rates for coaches working in school sports facilities to increase to 60 zloty (€13.83) per hour, said Nitras. He claimed that last year the pay rate was 20 zloty per hour (though that would have been below the minimum wage).
He underlined that increasing children’s activity is necessary to ensure their physical health later in life. A European Commission study from 2022 showed that only 2% of adults in Poland exercise regularly, which was the joint-lowest figure in the European Union.
Only 2% of Poles say they exercise or play sport regularly – which is the joint-lowest figure in the EU – and almost two thirds never do so, new @EurobarometerEU data show https://t.co/Pf4htZI9SH
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 22, 2022
Nowacka, meanwhile, stressed that “active living” is one of the remedies for some of the problems faced by Polish youth, such as alienation, loneliness and poor mental health.
Data suggest a worsening mental health crisis among children and young people in Poland, especially since the pandemic. The last two years have seen record numbers of suicide attempts among minors.
A survey of almost 185,000 school pupils in Poland has shown that almost a third say they have no will to live and almost one in ten have attempted suicide.
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Main image credit: Education Ministry (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)
Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.
