ASCL comment on changes to PE funding

22/05/2026
Pepe Di’Iasio, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, comments following the government’s announcement of changes to PE and school sport funding, including scrapping the PE and Sport Premium and setting up a PE and School Sport Partnerships Network.
 
“We are worried about the removal of an established funding stream to provide PE and sport in primary schools and its replacement with an initiative which – to put it mildly – is extremely complex and lacks clarity about how it will be delivered. It appears to be a funding cut dressed up as an initiative to boost PE and sport in schools when it may actually have the opposite effect, certainly in primaries. We note that there is transitional support planned for primaries as the new scheme comes on stream but the question will be whether it will ever work as effectively as the far more straightforward model of simply funding schools directly.”