With no PE teachers in 1,800 schools, govt's one-hour sport period still a dream

A recent Government Order, issued by the School Education Department, said that there will be one-hour compulsory physical activities for the students studying from Class 6 to 12 on daily basis apart from regular physical education periods, which is twice in a week.

Accordingly, the one-hour session will be divided into a 15-minute activity before the daily morning assembly prayers and 45 minutes after class hours. The government move to induct physical activities is to reduce the stress of the students.

However, the flip side is that more than 1,800 government and government aided schools do not have physical education teachers to conduct sports activities.

A senior official from the Tamil Nadu Teachers Recruitment Board told DT Next that at present a total of 1,865 physical education teachers posts are still vacant across the State. He said the Board is on the process of recruiting persons to fill the vacant posts.

Tamil Nadu Physical Education Teachers and Physical Education Directors Association State President S Sankaraperumal added that the recruitment of physical education teachers was stopped since 2012.

He said the schools, which do not have physical education teachers, have converted sports activities’ session into regular classes.

"Every week there should be two periods for physical education classes from Class 6 to higher secondary level," he said, adding that one period will be theory and another period meant for physical and sports activities.

"As physical education is very important for the students, our association have given several representations to the Directorate of Physical Education wing to immediately fill all the vacant posts of physical education teachers and as well as physical directors. But there is no response till now", he added.

He also urged the State government to appoint a monitoring committee in each district to check and take action against the schools, which do not conduct physical education programme.

"Apart from the schools, which do not have physical educators, several other government institutions do not conduct physical education periods and instead convert that into regular classes for better results in the board exams," he claimed.