30 minutes of sport per day in primary school, a promise with mixed results

Since the start of the 2022 school year, 30 minutes of daily physical activity are mandatory in elementary schools.

“We made 30 minutes of compulsory sport for all primary school children”assures Emmanuel Macron in a video published on has “do at least 30 minutes of sport per day”, like schoolchildren. Has this measure of 30 minutes of daily physical activity in primary schools, announced by the Head of State in June 2022, become a habit for students? According to figures provided by the government, the measure had difficulty being implemented.

Last September, according to the Minister of Sports, 85% of primary schools applied these 30 minutes of compulsory sport. But this statistic hides very disparate realities, according to Guillaume Dietsch, associate professor of physical education and author of‘A political history of EPS. “There, we are on a system which is not a compulsory school discipline. We are not on physical education and sports, so it is very different I would say, depending on the place, but also depending on training for school teachers”he analyzes.

“Fidgeting” more than sport

Because today, primary school teachers have extremely little training in physical education and sports. Logically, they therefore invest less in the subject and even less when they lack resources, regrets Benoît Hubert, from Snep-FSU, the National Union of Physical Education, himself a PE teacher in the Ardennes. “In the rural area in which I live, for example, the schools barely benefit from a small macadam interior courtyard… So we called it ‘fidgeting’, because ultimately we move away from the classroom, we stay in class and we do some movements, he says. And there you have it, we did the 30 minutes, we ticked boxes but it’s not satisfactory.”

The unions continue to advocate instead a strengthening of PE at school. Because counting the journeys and the locker rooms, the three official hours of weekly sport are very rarely three actual hours.