I [Toni O'Donovan] attended the Association for Physical Education's (AfPE) conference today with Steve Harvey where we organised some practical activities to explore ways of organising competitive activities in PE.  We planned this session when considering the UK coalition government's statement in December 2010 setting out their radical plans to put competition at the heart of pe.  This puzzled us as all of the research suggests that competition has been an enduring element of physical education since the emergence of sports-based physical education in the 1950s. 

We have had an interest in competition for a number of years given our mutual focus on sport education and tgfu.  Working with pre-service teachers we noted their concerns about children's approaches to competition which were focused primarily on winning and losing.  Although they identified that competition was important in building communication and team work skills, some suggested that they needed to get the focus on winning and losing 'out of children'.  These pre-service teachers discussed designing competitive opportunities in a 'watered down' fashion and we also noted that we frequently saw competition in school substantially modified - occasionally no score was kept or competition was only offered to the more able students.  Given the contemporary political context and that competition has been an enduring feature of physical education we felt it might be interesting to explore some ‘healthy’ forms of competition organising a team game tournament and a student team achievement division for attendees who included practicing teachers and lecturers and individuals from sports development and local council environments (albeit that the activities were somewhat curtailed by the rain).  

The conversation highlighted that we had hit on something challenging/engaging and it was evident that they identified with some comparable concerns about competition in PE.  It was great to hear examples of the way they organised competition in schools, considering student ability, and motivational issues but also we heard about the importance of not losing sight of student learning in the organisation of competitive activities.   As one teacher commented to us as she left “you’ve challenged us to think about this today and we’ll all take something back to our practice, although it might not look like you imagined at all”.  We were pretty happy with an outcome where participants were going away to think about this and to try a few things out but their questions also left me with some puzzles.   Why is competition such an emotive and challenging concept?  What is the balance between competitive activities and non-competitive activities?  And who benefits most of competition in its traditional and contemporary formats?