All primary and secondary schools will be required to have sports clubs and committees to manage the teaching of physical education, according to a new government policy aimed at entrenching games as a critical component of the curriculum.
Schools will also be required to have teachers trained and regularly retrained to teach physical education under the new guidelines.
Although physical education is currently taught in schools, it is taken casually by learners and teachers because it is elective, non-examinable and rarely enforced.
But a new physical education and sports policy for basic education by Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha seeks to make the subject compulsory and taught like other regular disciplines.
According to the document the emphasis on physical education is meant to align schools with the new Competency-Based Curriculum, which has entrenched sports as a learning area and career pathway, as well as prepare learners for “a lifelong active lifestyle.”
