Ariki Tibble School Sport Team Leader Sport Bay of Plenty

It's a common misconception that the purpose of developing a child's fundamental movement skills is about developing future professional sports people.

The truth is very few people ever get the opportunity to be involved in sport at the truly elite level.

For the majority of the population, developing fundamental movement skills at a young age is really about building one's confidence and capability to choose to be involved in sport throughout a lifetime.

We know a child that lacks skills to participate also lacks the confidence to get involved and cannot build capability as a consequence.

A common story I hear from sports-minded teachers is reporting requirements for national standards are such that it's getting more difficult to provide a comprehensive physical education programme for today's primary-aged children.

The Sport Bay of Plenty Go4it Fundamentals programme is a regional intervention that schools subscribe to, which ensures every child in the school receives at least nine hours of fundamental movement skill training.

Half of those nine hours are delivered by teachers, and the other half by qualified sport deliverers. The idea is for this training to supplement the schools wider physical education programme.

In 2014 we have more than 6200 children from 40 Bay of Plenty schools involved in Go4it programme, which indicates both the need and demand for this type of intervention.

Of course, in an ideal world an intervention such as this wouldn't be necessary.

Fundamental movement skill development would be a natural outcome of a child's experiences at home, at the local park, in class and in the playground.

Sport New Zealand recognises schools are run differently than they were 20 years ago - and attention needs to be given to the role sport can play in the education of a child.

In light of this it's commissioned a team to undertake the School Sport Futures Project.

The project's purposes are to identify and implement strategies to bridge gaps in our current approach to physically educating our young people.

In June, three staff from Sport New Zealand visited our region to talk with principals about the future of school sport.

This was an opportunity for our local principals to share insights from the coalface to inform strategy at a policy level.

On the whole the meetings were very solution-focussed, with a number of innovative ideas tabled.

The project is still in progress, so we'll wait to see the recommendations that come out of the report in the not too distant future.