Scotland’s Activity Policy Still Stops at the School Gate

Two academics told the Scottish Parliament that the country already has strong physical activity policy, yet 24% of adults still barely exercise. Public Health Scotland links 3,185 deaths a year to inactivity, more than 80% of them among people doing under 30 minutes a week.

Dr David Meir of the University of the West of Scotland put the sting in one line: Scotland has excellent policy. The interviews behind that line say the join is what fails, from one-year grants to school halls that cost too much to open after the bell.

Parliament Asked Two Academics to Explain the Stall

Dr David Scott of Abertay University’s Department of Health, Sport and Wellbeing and Meir wrote the 51-page SPICe briefing as a Scottish Parliament Information Centre fellowship. SPICe published it on 11 September 2025 as SB 25-40, after an evidence review (SB 25-03) on 10 January 2025.

They ran 20 interviews with 23 people in government, sport and public health. Nobody is named, under the ethics deal. The job was to test what still blocks people from moving, and what Holyrood could do differently.

Scott said the structural problems are persistent, from short-term funding cycles to the split between national policy and local delivery. “Addressing these issues requires more than good intentions; it demands coordinated, long-term action,” he said.

Meir was blunter about the paper trail. “There is also an understanding that when it comes to physical activity Scotland has excellent policy,” he said. “In too many instances however, opportunity is limited by the challenges of funding and resource required for successful policy enactment and sustained development within practice.”

24% of Adults Still Barely Move

The briefing went to MSPs in 2025. The next official read of the same problem, the Scottish Government’s State of the Nation analysis published on 24 March 2026, put 24% of adults in 2024 in the very low activity group, meaning less than 30 minutes of moderate activity in a week. That share has sat between 20% and 24% since 2014.

ADULT ACTIVITY IN 2024

The Scottish Health Survey 2024, published on 21 October 2025, matches the 62% MVPA figure and records 6.4 hours of sedentary leisure at weekends. Among adults who missed the guidelines, 39% said their health was not good enough, 27% said they could not find the time, and 16% said they were not interested. Younger adults blamed the clock; people 65 and over blamed their health.

Sport itself is sliding even while the MVPA band holds. In 2023, 49% of adults said they took part in sport, back to the levels of 2014 and 2016, and 71% said they walked for recreation. Only 30% met the muscle-strengthening recommendation in 2024.

Children still look more active on paper because school time is counted. In 2024, 68% of those aged 5 to 15 met the child guidelines when school activity was included, and 59% when it was stripped out, the low end of the range since 1998. Girls fall off a cliff at secondary: 67% of 11 to 12-year-old girls met the guidelines including school, against 43% of 13 to 15-year-olds, a 24-point drop. Boys in the same years went from 69% to 64%.

National Policy Stops at the Council Boundary

The briefing traces a 25-year paper trail. Let’s Make Scotland More Active landed in 2003. A More Active Scotland followed in 2018, with a World Health Organisation target of a 15% relative cut in adult and adolescent inactivity by 2030. The Physical Activity for Health Framework arrived in October 2024 and asked every sector, from schools to street design, to treat movement as a system, not a leisure extra.

The people Scott and Meir interviewed did not say those documents were bad. They said they do not reach the pavement. One of the report’s own conclusions is that existing policy approaches have failed to reverse inactivity. Physical activity is one of Scotland’s six public health priorities, and the authors still found “a disparity between that policy and its enactment at the local level.”

Scottish policy in this area has always been applauded around the world. It’s great policy. Have we made a difference? The answer is no we probably haven’t, but we’ve got great policies, so the gap to the local level has always been the key thing

Research participant RP14, SPICe interviews, 2025

Scotland has 32 local authorities, each free to set its own focus and funding for sport and activity. The authors defend that local say. They also say national objectives need money attached if a falls-prevention class that works in one council is ever to run in the next 31. Active Schools is the model they keep pointing at, a national scheme delivered locally, already in every council.

There is a second vacuum they will not let sit inside health policy. Community sport, they write, still lacks a dedicated national policy, and there were “no signs from the Scottish Government that developing such a policy is a priority” when they filed the briefing. Sport, in their view, is being treated as a subset of activity policy when clubs, volunteers and local identities are doing a different job.

Why School Halls Sit Dark After the Bell

The 2018 delivery plan claimed 79% of primary and 98% of secondary school sports facilities were already available to the local community. Seven years later the SPICe interviews still call the school estate “a currently underutilised resource from a national perspective.” The buildings are there. The bill to open them is not.

WHY THE HALLS STAY SHUT

• Janitor costs: One participant said the hall could be used, but the cost of a janitor is unachievable if you are trying to keep prices down in a deprived area.
• School-by-school rules: Even inside one council, schools run different access policies, so a club cannot assume the next campus will let it in.
• Old PFI contracts: Public-private partnership deals still have years to run, and staff do not know what access will look like when they expire.

A fourth, quieter problem sits in the staffroom. One participant said the teachers they work with do not have the confidence to offer physical activity as part of the curriculum. Education Scotland’s curriculum review, the authors argue, is a chance to treat the whole school day as movement time, but only if initial teacher training and on-the-job support actually change.

Active Schools is the one national-local machine that already exists. A 2026 sportscotland evaluation, with partnership deals running to March 2027, recorded 5 million visits in 2024/25. The Scottish Government puts over £12 million a year into the programme and partners add over £4 million. More than 400 managers and coordinators cover all 32 councils. More than 1,000 schools had at least one school-to-club link that year, and two thirds of those links were football or rugby.

That last split matters if the target is the inactive, not the already-signed-up. A pathway that is mostly football and rugby will not pick up the older woman who told the health survey her health is not good enough, or the 13-year-old girl who dropped off the register between primary and third year.

Some campuses do open the gates. In late September 2026 North Lanarkshire finished a new multi-use games area at Westfield Primary in Cumbernauld, with a 100-metre oval, a sprint straight and markings for football, netball, basketball and tennis. Education convener Michael McBride said pupils would use it in the day and the wider community after hours. The SPICe authors want that to be the rule, not a ribbon-cutting.

Annual Grants Keep Clubs on a One-Year Clock

Ask the 23 people what would change participation fastest and the answers keep landing on time, not slogans. One called the annual grant cycle the biggest challenge in the pile. Another said there is no generational funding that would let anyone shift the culture of how people get into sport.

25 YEARS OF ACTIVITY PLANS

1. 2003: Let’s Make Scotland More Active sets the first post-devolution activity plan.
2. 2018: A More Active Scotland adopts the WHO aim of a 15% relative cut in inactivity by 2030.
3. October 2024: The Physical Activity for Health Framework asks schools, health, planning and communities to work as one system.
4. 10 January 2025: Scott and Meir’s evidence review tells Parliament that big new money is unlikely and that real-terms council cuts will keep biting.
5. 11 September 2025: The interview report says short-term funding is still the block, and that the new framework will fail without long-term cash.
6. 28 January 2026: Ministers announce an extra £40 million for 2026-27, half of it tied to a summer of events.
7. 3 March 2026: Meir tells the Health, Care and Sport Committee that sport still needs better data and closer ties with universities.

A policy official in the interviews said the one-year cycle eats the time that should go on strategy, because programmes have to be signed off again before the financial year ends. The authors want an incremental shift to long-term, nationally funded, locally delivered money. They also want monitoring built into those grants, because they found “a distinct lack of trust with the evidence base” and no shared view of what should be counted.

Without Volunteers the Whole Machine Stops

The briefing’s most unsentimental line is about unpaid labour. Volunteers, the authors write, are the bedrock of Scottish sport, and without them the system would cease to function. The 2024 health framework, they add, is itself reliant on keeping volunteer numbers high. That is a thin place to rest a public-health target.

They want a national programme of support and training that makes the work attractive, not another round of thanks. Clubs already run on coaches, committee members and officials who invoice nobody. When a one-year grant lands late, it is those people who keep the session on the calendar, or cancel it.

Targeted help is the other half of that argument. Participants kept returning to deprivation, older adults, disabled people, geography, LGBTQI+ groups and gender, and to the fact those categories overlap. One said the sector builds programmes for the masses, “but it’s not the masses that need those programmes.” Another described running targeted work because a universal offer is not fair when cost or disability keeps people at the door. The authors want ministers, in the short term, to pick which inequalities get extra resource, with sporting bodies in the room.

Holyrood’s Next Cheque Was Another Summer Programme

Four months after the briefing, on 28 January 2026, the Scottish Government put an additional £40 million into sport for 2026-27. Half of it, £20 million, went into core funding for sporting organisations. The other £20 million was built around a summer of events: Scotland at the World Cup for the first time in 28 years, and Glasgow hosting the Commonwealth Games from 23 July to 2 August 2026.

THE JANUARY 2026 SPORT UPLIFT

• Core budget: £20 million extra for sporting organisations through sportscotland.
• Summer of Sport: £15 million in free activity for children and young people, timed to the World Cup and the Games.
• Learn to swim: £2 million in year one for a universal primary offer that ministers said would continue beyond 2026.
• Football and community: £2 million for a Celebration of Football fund and £1 million for a Health in the Community campaign in low-activity areas.

Health Secretary Neil Gray, speaking after an Active Schools session at St Brigid’s Primary in Glasgow, said the summer programme would harness the excitement of those events and that every young person would get the chance to learn to swim. Forbes Dunlop, chief executive of sportscotland, said the money would help partners build on that momentum “for the long term.”

The core uplift is the piece that answers Scott and Meir most directly. The £15 million summer pot is the piece that looks like the cycle they warned about: a big, time-limited push tied to medals and broadcasts. By October 2026 those events are over. The 24% figure is not.

Public Health Scotland’s 17 September 2024 study remains the death count behind the argument. Of 62,941 deaths in Scotland in 2022, it found 3,185 deaths attributable to inactivity, with cancer and cardiovascular disease accounting for around one third. Over 80% of those deaths, around 2,500, sat in the very low activity group. The same study counted 11,474 disability-adjusted life years, years of healthy life lost, more than 80% of them in that same group, and 37% of them from ischaemic heart disease.

Meir’s last ask in the Abertay release was that parties put specific, achievable sport and activity objectives in their election manifestos. When he returned to MSPs, that was not the line he led with. He asked for better numbers.

This week Dr David Meir, @UniWestScotland called for closer connections between sport and academia and improved data capture to better understand Scotland's sporting and physical activity landscape.

Watch in full: https://t.co/sG9FpdGhEk pic.twitter.com/PTiUXeDTiU

— Health, Care and Sport Committee (@SP_HealthSport) March 5, 2026

On 3 March 2026 he told the Health, Care and Sport Committee that sport and universities still needed a closer working relationship, and that Scotland still could not see its own activity system clearly enough. Adult rates were still inside the band they occupied in 2012. The halls, unless someone pays the janitor, still go dark after the bell.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of published research, official statistics and government announcements on physical activity in Scotland. It is for information only and is not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a personal exercise prescription. Readers with health conditions, or anyone planning a new exercise routine after a period of inactivity, should speak to a GP or other qualified health professional before changing how they train. Figures for deaths, activity rates and funding are those given by Public Health Scotland, the Scottish Government and the named universities in the sources above, and later surveys or budgets can revise them.