Sir Mo Farah leads calls for Government to give children greater access to sport

The document, delivered to Number 10 by four-time Olympic gold medallist Farah on Wednesday morning, urges the Government to “bring forward a new national plan to guarantee every child daily opportunities to be physically active.”

The Youth Sport Trust’s 2024 PE and School Report found that only 47 per cent of children aged 5-18 are meeting the UK’s chief medical officer’s recommended daily activity levels – a number that drops to 19 per cent of children aged one to five.

“We have to do something,” Farah told the PA news agency. “If you don’t do something now, kids don’t have a choice. But we have a choice and by us not reacting to this it’s huge.

“(My message) to Government is I want to see changes. We’ve got to see changes. If we don’t make these changes, we will just continue to have a problem with mental health, obesity, problems with the NHS.

“We need to react now and be able to give kids an opportunity to be active and give them the chance to play. That is the key.”

The distance runner two years ago revealed he had been trafficked to the UK as a child before eventually becoming a four-time Olympic and six-time world champion.

Now a father of four, Farah added: “Sport teaches you to get in with others. It teaches you to be disciplined, it teaches you to things you don’t learn every day in class.

“I couldn’t speak a word of English. I was child trafficked to the UK. I struggled. The only way out was sport and sport has helped me become the man I am.”

School PE is at the heart of the athletes’ proposed reforms, but the Youth Sport Trust found less than a third of teachers (30 per cent) and parents (31 per cent) are currently aware of the recommended minimum one-hour-per-day requirement.

One in five children in England are overweight or obese by the time they are five years old, while ParalympicsGB data revealed just a quarter of the 1.5 million disabled children – 15 per cent of the school population – in Great Britain say they regularly take part in sport at school.

Girls also continue to be less active than boys, while those from low-affluence backgrounds remain especially vulnerable to missing out.

Nine-time Paralympic champion wheelchair racer Cockroft told PA: “We sit there and we question, ‘Why is the NHS in trouble? Why are obesity numbers higher than ever? Why are all these children depressed? Why do they not have the friendship groups that we used to have?’

“The answer is sport. Sport is the answer to pretty much every problem this country has right now when it comes to children.

“I was one of those children. I was sat on the side in PE lessons. I was the one that just wasn’t involved. Obviously there was a ‘reason’ behind it, because I have a disability, but that’s not a reason at all.

“Thirty years ago, that was a reason. More so now than ever, there is no reason for that to be happening. We just had a record-breaking Olympic and Paralympic Games and everywhere you could watch it wherever you wanted.

“We had new heroes come through, we have new idols for these kids to look up to and yet we still have these frightening numbers.

“Without those kids getting involved in sport, we have no Olympic or Paralympic champions of the future.”

The full list of signatories also includes Dame Sarah Storey, Sir Max Whitlock, Georgia Bell, Nathan Maguire and Bianca Williams.