Thaindian News

London, Aug 10 (IANS) Defending a decision to scrap two-hour-a-week allotted for sports in British schools, Prime Minister David Cameron has said the schools were using the time on activities like Indian dance.

Cameron, who has come under fire for ditching the requirement, said some youngsters spend two hours performing Indian dance, the Guardian reported Friday.

Critics have called for the sports time to be reinstated as Britain achieves record success at the London Olympics.

“The trouble we have had with targets up to now, which was two hours a week, is that a lot of schools were meeting that by doing things like Indian dance or whatever, that you and I probably wouldn’t think of as sport, so there’s a danger of thinking all you need is money and a target,” Cameron said.

“If that was the solution, we would have solved the problem by now.”

He said pupils should be “doing as much sport in schools as possible”, and again denied the government was selling school playing fields.

Speaking to ITV1’s Daybreak, he paid tribute to the National Lottery for funding elite sport and to the former Conservative prime minister John Major for setting it up.

Cameron said: “That’s one of the things that has helped deliver the gold medals, and when people say, ‘Look at all this money spent on swimming or riding or supporting individual athletes - is it worth it?’, my answer is: ‘Absolutely yes’, because it’s those athletes, that success, that inspires children and young people to want to be the best.”

“Not everyone can be (10,000m gold medal winner) Mo Farah, but everyone can see what he’s overcome and think: ‘I’ve got to find the best things in me and make the most of those’,” the Guardian quoted the prime minister as saying.