Ask most primary school teachers what stops children from being active, and you won’t hear “laziness.” You’ll hear about the girl who says she’s “not sporty” before she’s even tried netball. The boy who sits out PE because he doesn’t want to be picked last again. The child who loves moving but has never once enjoyed a game with rules, a scoreboard, or a whistle.
PE has its place. It’s structured, it’s compulsory, and it does the important job of introducing every child to the basics of movement and sport. But structure is also its limitation. It’s a lesson, not a choice- and for children who’ve already decided sport “isn’t for them,” a compulsory lesson rarely changes their mind. In situations like these, the power of a lunchtime club should not be underestimated.
The power of nobody making you
There’s a particular kind of motivation that only shows up when nobody’s making you do something. Children who choose to walk through the door of a lunchtime club are already halfway to enjoying themselves, because they’ve made the decision themselves. There’s no register being taken, no raised eyebrow if they don’t join in enthusiastically enough. There’s no sense that this was decided for them by an adult with a lesson plan. It’s theirs.
That sense of ownership is often the missing ingredient for children who’ve quietly written themselves off as non-sporty. Not because they lack ability, but because every experience they’ve had with sport so far has felt like something they haven’t chosen.
The permission to fail
Lunchtime clubs tend to be smaller, more mixed in terms of age and ability, and less tied to any kind of assessment. A child can try a cartwheel and land on their back without their whole class watching. They can drop the ball, forget the routine, or simply stand at the back for the first few sessions figuring out if they even like it, and nobody minds.
Not every child wants a ball
Dance, gymnastics, cheerleading, martial arts, yoga, even performance-based activities that barely register as “sport” in the traditional sense — these all demand fitness, coordination, discipline and teamwork, just dressed up differently. A child who has spent years being told they’re not sporty might discover, given the chance, that they’re a natural at learning choreography, or that they love the structure of a tumbling sequence far more than they ever loved a five-a-side match.
Cheerleading is a particularly good example of this. It’s physically demanding — strength, flexibility, timing, trust in teammates — but it rarely feels like “sport” to a child who’s been put off by competitive team games. Clubs like Aqua Elite in Bromley have partnered with local schools to build lunchtime and after-school sessions specifically around introducing this to primary-age children, often as a child’s first real taste of structured physical activity that doesn’t look anything like PE. For a school, partnerships like this costs very little in staff time but opens up an entirely different world of opportunity to students.
The novelty factor
School life runs on routine — same timetable, same subjects, same faces, week after week. A new lunchtime club breaks that pattern in a way that gets talked about in the playground before it’s even started. “Have you heard we’re getting a dance club?” travels fast among nine-year-olds, and that buzz alone can pull in children who’d never sign up for something familiar.
Novelty wears off eventually, of course. But by the time it does, some of those children will have found something they didn’t expect to enjoy — and that’s really the whole exercise.
None of this makes PE redundant, and it isn’t really an argument against it. Children still need the shared, structured experience of learning to play as a team, follow rules, and be coached properly — that’s what PE is for. But if a school’s only strategy for getting children moving is 45 minutes of compulsory sport twice a week, it’s missing the children who’ve already decided that sport isn’t their thing.
Lunchtime clubs work precisely because they don’t ask for a decision to be “sporty.” They just leave the door open and let curiosity do the rest. Some children will wander in, try something, and wander straight back out again — and that’s fine too. But every so often, one of them stays. And that’s usually the child who spends the rest of primary school telling anyone who’ll listen that they’ve found their thing.
Caitlin