Should sports day be optional?

Wow. I really hope you don’t have children, for everyone’s sake..

Thankfully my work has been nothing like the stupid spectacle of school sports days.

Yes definitely they don't do academic tests once a year to see who wins top spaces in maths, English etc as everyone knows kids have varying abilities so why force sports days on kids who don't enjoy them. This is said as a parent of 3 kids. One who excels at sports, one who isn't sporty and excels academically and one who is still a bit young to be sure but looks to be very academic so far. I hated sports days as a asthmatic.

Declining anything challenging in case you fail is not a good life lesson.
It isn't declining in case of failure. Failure is a guarantee - it's the spectacle of having to perform the failure in front of all my peers - can't you see the difference? I have not been unadventurous since school, but sports day taught me nothing except institutions can construct cruel and unusual punishments for no good reason and they are best dodged if possible.

But most of life has fuck all to do with being first or last at anything. As I said before, being ridiculed for being shit at sport wasn't good training for doing things outside my comfort zone at all. It wasn't in any way helpful for my future life, because never in my life since has it been compulsory for me to demonstrate how shit I was at something in front of a large audience of my peers. Also, any stuff I've done outside of my comfort zone has been for my benefit - which doing school sports never was.
If coming last is so great why do sports managers get fired and footballers deselected - no-one tells them they are performing an important service by making the better teams/players look good - they just get told to fuck off.

No one should be ridiculing anyone at a school sports day.
There's nothing wrong with being last anyway. Someone has to be last otherwise no one can be first.
Better to participate and be last than refusing to take part in case you lose. Declining anything challenging in case you fail is not a good life lesson.
Speaking as someone who came last every year despite being the oldest in my class!

Even when I was a school we all know the kids in set 5 English and Maths were a bit thick. But generally it was the set 5 kids who were the bullies so didn't need to worry about it too much - they would bully people for being nerds. You don't really get the same in sport with the slow runners bullying the fast runners.

I think YABU. I hated sports day too but we have to do stuff we don't like at school. I have to do stuff I don't like at work. That's life.

Everyone has to do stuff they don't like. It's not like that they don't know whose in the lower groups for maths etc. You can't just not take part in a maths test because you don't like it, no can I pull the kids out of art because despite being over 12 they can draw a recognizable stick man. The children need to have the opportunity to be able to shine at different things.

No life is about doing things you don't want to do, but that you should do because it's the best thing in the long run. Sports day is the perfect example. We give kids too many outs these days and the result of the newest generation in the workplace is a cohort of individuals who lack resilience and confidence, with little appetite for risk. I disliked sports day but there are a lot of positives I took from getting through it and surprising myself with my own abilities.

I very much doubt that this is the norm now, then.

Yep - just a line or two, not whole songs.

No it shouldn’t be optional, but it should be different to the traditional version.

The pressure should be on schools to make it enjoyable for everyone, including- in fact especially- those who are not naturally sporty. I believe that ought to be the aim of school sport/PE generally.

It should be perfectly possible to design a sports day that isn’t competitive or at least has plenty of non competitive events. One that has physical tasks without it mattering who comes first or jumps highest.

My DC school has started being more inclusive. It is an arts and sports day now. The kids with disabilities or who dislike sports are allowed to either do a competitive activity or a creative one. So last year the competitive activity was team that builds the tallest Lego tower (everyone gets same box of blocks) wins a prize. Other kids can just individually do art, draw the people doing sports outside or inside if they prefer quiet and imaginative drawing. They did allow children to do some sport and some art- the children with long Covid for example can choose to only do the egg and spoon race and rest of the time go inside and relax and draw or stay outside and cheer on their house. You only have to sign up to races you want to do.

The day they make sports day optional is the day I die!

Bit dramatic.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but its already optional in some schools. To my knowledge, no one has perished because of this.

At my child's school everyone attends sports day, but they are not forced to compete. Most children do choose to take part in at least one race, those that don't will support and cheer on their friends, and are often given little jobs to do by Teachers. They also take this approach with school productions, children are encouraged to take part and the vast majority do but those who really don't want to are given a backstage role such as doing the lights/music, making props or posters or helping paint the set. I support this way of doing things 100%.

My DD is Autistic and has poor gross motor skills. She has to do PE twice a week, which she finds stressful, difficult and at times embarrassing. But we tell her she needs to do it as PE is part of the curriculum and exercise is important. I get the arguments about "resilience" on this thread but I am of the view that being publicly humiliated by having to compete in front of the whole school, and their parents is not something my DD should have to deal with when day to day life is already challenging for lots of reasons. I have never really bought into the idea that children being embarrassed in public is character building or teaches them a life lesson. I imagine it could easily put them off exercise for life though. The sporty kids absolutely deserve their chance to shine, but my DD and others not competing doesn't take anything away from them.

Forcing kids to compete in sports day or perform in a school play doesn't prepare them for adult life. As an adult, no one would force me to get up in public and sing a solo or compete in a public sports competition against my will. If my employer did try to make me do something like that and told me I needed to work on my "residence" I could probably take them to a Tribunal. I never understand why people think children should be held to a higher standard than adults.

Same. In fact, high school sports day was probably one of my favourite days of the year! We all got bussed down to the athletics centre and those of us who weren’t doing anything used to bring magazines and we’d sit round on the grass reading and doing each other’s hair!

Even then though, the places for events had been selected in class but the PE teachers used to try and threaten you’d be made to do an event, even if not selected in class if they thought you hadn’t “tried hard enough”. No. Just fuck off.

I genuinely can’t think of a situation in my adult life where there are elements of competition that I’m forced to participate in. There’s job interviews but I’ve never been to one where they’ve said “Luton/Jim/Sarah, your answers were a load of crap so we’re going with Bill for the role”, you don’t get the job but very often you don’t even see the competition. Same with exams, no one else knows what you got unless you tell them.

I used to belong to a gym and worked with a PT to lose weight. Had 1-2-1 sessions. They got an assault bike and he made it part of my workout one day. At the end of the time, he showed me on the whiteboard a list of peoples names and the calories they’d burned in 3 minutes and how I could improve and that I should have done better than xxxx.
I told him in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t give a flying fuck what anyone else did, I was there to lose weight for me and was less than interested in trying to ‘beat’ anyone else.

I'm not and never have been competitive. I’ll play board games but really don’t care if I win or not.

I think marshals/assistants/water bottle filleretc should be roles with sports day.

I sympathise OP I hated it at school - my school days were back in the 70s/80s I never remember a parent there at senior school in the 80s, I vaguely remember some parents at the infants 1970s style sack and egg and spoon type affairs. I think I forgot my PE kit when I was about 5 or 6 and had to do the entire day in just brown pants. Understandably this really did put me off for life!

I HATED primary school sports day with its forced participation but I remember High school sport days as more akin to the Olympics - all the heats etc had been done as part of the normal Pe classes so the only kids racing on the day were the good ones - rest of us still had to go and watch - house pride and all that.

Fuck me, must've been a small school, would have taken about 25 years at DD's schools.

I don’t think it should be optional but it should be inclusive eg. For those who don’t want to run maybe a football or netball game instead where the spotlight is less on them.

Everyone sang individually? I'm not sure that's a common model these days then, tbh. Which is good.

Well, that was certainly the case when I was at school - everyone had their own individual lines and it was pretty clear that Jane struggled more than Tom or that Fred was being prompted by someone, or that Emma got more lines than anyone else every single time.