Eighty per cent. That’s the share of UK secondary schools still putting fitness testing into the PE curriculum, from a survey of 260 of them across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
What’s even more interesting is that sixty-two per cent of those PE teachers either agreed that fitness testing can damage pupils’ psychological health or were not sure if it did or didn’t. Four out of five are running it. Fewer than two in five are confident it’s doing no harm.
But there is more to it than simply dropping fitness tests. The important thing is helping children develop skills, confidence and a positive relationship with movement.
What Physical Literacy Means
The term goes back to Margaret Whitehead, who proposed it at a conference in Melbourne in 1993 and set it out properly in print in 2001. Her grounding is philosophical rather than physiological, and the core argument is that we experience the world through a moving body rather than in spite of one.
England got its own definition in September 2023, when Sport England published a consensus statement developed with the Youth Sport Trust and an expert panel led from Liverpool John Moores University. The wording is short: physical literacy is our relationship with movement and physical activity throughout life. The model behind it sets out four elements, described as how we move, connect, think and feel.
That’s quite a different unit of measurement from a score on a bleep test. A score tells you what a child could do on a Wednesday in October. A relationship tells you whether they’ll still be doing anything at all at thirty-five.
One caution before you read on. When researchers surveyed 193 stakeholders across English education, community sport and coaching, most said they were already doing physical literacy work, but when probed, much of what they described was not physical literacy at all. It seems the term has travelled faster than the actual understanding of it.
Four Out of Five Schools Still Test
The best UK picture of what is currently happening in schools comes from a mixed-methods survey of 260 secondary schools, run out of Loughborough with Monash (Harte et al., 2024).
Eighty per cent include fitness testing in the curriculum. The sit-and-reach and the multi-stage fitness test, better known as the bleep test, are the two most commonly used. Fifty-nine per cent of teachers support including fitness testing in all schools, so this is not something being done reluctantly.
Three findings from the survey are worth looking at if you work with children. They include: Seventy-five per cent of departments compare pupils’ results against norm-referenced standards, which means a child’s score is presented next to what a child their age is supposed to be able to do. Sixty-eight per cent of teachers thought boys respond positively to fitness testing, against 47% for girls, a twenty-one point gap. And over half were not sure their teacher training had prepared them to deliver fitness testing at all.
That last one is quite the concern.
The Lesson Where Children Move Least
There’s an irony in fitness testing. Researchers put accelerometers on 143 secondary students and compared how much they moved during fitness-testing lessons against ordinary PE lessons.
In testing lessons, pupils spent 15.31% of lesson time in moderate to vigorous physical activity. In other PE lessons, 26.42% (White et al., 2025). The lesson built around measuring fitness was the least active lesson of the week, because most of it is spent queuing, resetting cones and waiting for a turn.
It’s an Australian study, so the lesson structures differ, but the mechanism is the same. Any session designed around individual measurement has the individual not moving.
Who Pays the Price
The same study went looking for emotional effects and found something quite specific. Lesson type on its own did not predict whether students felt positive or negative afterwards.
Physical self-concept (how a person sees, understands and evaluates their own body and physical abilities) was directly related to how students felt after fitness testing. Students with poorer physical self-concept tended to report less positive emotions. However, poorer physical self-concept did not necessarily mean that students experienced negative emotions about the test.
So the fitness tests seem to have a greater impact on children who are already least confident. Work from the Loughborough thesis behind the UK survey found much the same pattern in reverse: students with a high-quality motivational profile reported significantly greater enjoyment of testing than those with a low-quality one. Some children love test day, but they’re not really the ones we need to be concerned with.
The Counter-Argument
An experiment on the psychological harm of school fitness tests didn’t find it. A pilot study put 51 students through two traditional fitness-testing classes with repeated measures before and after, and found no significant differences in body image, self-esteem or mood across the full sample. Only in the over-fifteens did self-esteem and attitudes towards testing decline. One of the authors is among the best-known critics of fitness testing, which makes the null result more credible rather than less.
Next, a 2026 paper in Pediatric Research argues the opposite case entirely, describing school fitness testing as an underused opportunity for paediatric health surveillance that should be modernised with better data handling and wearables rather than abandoned.
And finally, the Centre for Social Justice published a report in May 2026 on inactivity among under-elevens in England. It found that only 18.7% of six to nine year olds have mastered all four of the basic movement skills of running, jumping, throwing and catching. Among its recommendations are national standards in physical development with baseline and end-of-primary fitness assessments, and Ofsted judging physical development directly. That is a call for more measurement, not less, from people looking at the same problem.
The UK sector does not agree with itself.
What Predicts a Lifelong Mover
Scores from fitness tests at school, don’t give us much to go on. So what does? For this, we can take a look at a study from New South Wales, where children’s movement skills were assessed in 2000 and the same participants were followed up six years later as adolescents.
Object control proficiency in childhood, meaning kicking, catching and throwing, predicted adolescent time in moderate to vigorous activity and in organised activity, accounting for 12.7% and 18.2% of the variation. Children who were proficient at object control had a 10% to 20% higher chance of taking part in vigorous activity as adolescents (Barnett et al., 2009).
A companion paper from the same cohort found childhood object control was associated with adolescent cardiorespiratory fitness, accounting for 26% of the variation. Which contains a nice irony, since the results came from the bleep test.
Two things to consider here. It was object control that predicted, not locomotor skills. Hopping, galloping and jumping did not carry the same signal. And a later paper from the same group found that perceived sports competence partially mediates the relationship in both directions, which means how good a child believes they are sits on the causal path alongside how good they actually are.
This is the scientific core of the physical literacy argument. Building skills in catching, which builds confidence, leads to higher levels of activity.
More Evidence is Needed
The best systematic review of school-based physical literacy interventions covered 12 interventions across seven countries with 1,427 participants. It found strong positive evidence in the physical domain, mixed results in the affective and cognitive domains, no evidence at all in the social domain, and no evidence of a positive effect on children’s actual physical activity levels (Jerebine et al., 2024).
Basically, if the case for physical literacy is that it produces more active children, controlled school trials have not yet shown it.
And a flagship UK trial tells a similar story. MOGBA randomised 229 children across nine schools in the north of England to a nine-week games-based movement programme. Movement competence, the primary outcome, came out at an effect size of 0.18 with a confidence interval from minus 0.02 to 0.38 and a p value of 0.071, which is positive but not significant. Perceived game-play ability did reach significance at an effect size of 0.30. There was no effect on in-class physical activity or muscular fitness (van Rossum et al., 2025).
Perceived competence improving while measured competence did not quite get there is consistent with everything we’ve looked at so far, and it is still a long way from the claim we’re trying to make. No study has ever put a physical-literacy-led programme head to head against a testing-led one. So can we say that physical literacy beats fitness testing?
Inside Three English Primary Schools
A four-month ethnography published in March 2026 followed three primary schools in Bristol, observing lessons, break times and staffroom conversations rather than measuring outcomes (Walker et al., 2026).
Across all three, PE sat second to the core curriculum. Movement breaks were used infrequently, and mostly for pupils with special educational needs rather than for everybody. The schools with a broader underlying assumption about what counted as physical activity offered more variety and integrated it better.
In the two schools that outsourced most of their physical activity provision, there was less coherence across the week and less confidence among school staff to help pupils be active, which then impacted on how play was supported at break and lunchtime.
From this we can see that provision that’s delivered once a week by an outsider can struggle to influence the wider school day. But when coaches share their thinking, involve staff and help teachers feel more confident about movement and play, their impact can last beyond the session itself. That is the kind of partnership schools value.
England Near the Bottom of Europe
One more finding, published in March 2026 in The Lancet Regional Health Europe. Experts from 40 European countries rated how far each national PE curriculum aligns with physical literacy principles, using a validated fifteen-indicator survey.
Estonia, Wales, Finland and Norway came out highest. Romania, Croatia, Cyprus and England came out lowest.
England published a national physical literacy consensus statement in 2023 and still sits at the bottom of the European table three years later. Wales, working to a different curriculum, is near the top. But publishing a definition, on its own, changes very little.
From Testing to Teaching
Pulling all of this together, the defensible position is not that measurement is wrong. It’s that what you measure, how publicly you report it and what you do next decide whether fitness testing builds a child’s relationship with movement or corrodes it.
| What a Testing Week Does | What a Literacy-Led Session Does | What the Evidence Behind It Says |
|---|---|---|
| Scores are public and compared against age norms | Progress is against the child’s own baseline and kept private | 75% of UK departments use norm-referenced comparison, and public testing needs active teacher buffering to manage shame |
| Most of the lesson is spent waiting for a turn | Children move for most of the session | MVPA ran at 15.31% of testing lessons against 26.42% of other PE lessons |
| A number is recorded and the lesson ends | The result comes with a next step the child can act on | The feedback gap is identified as the core motivational failure of school fitness testing |
| Everybody does the same task the same way | Task, equipment and difficulty are offered as a choice | Across intervention studies, the deliverer’s openness and willingness to offer choice counted for more than the content |
| Cardiorespiratory fitness is the target | Catching, throwing and kicking are the target | Object control in childhood predicted adolescent activity and fitness. Locomotor skills did not |
A note on the last row, as it seems counter-intuitive. The skills that predicted a physically active adolescent were the ones you would find in a playground game rather than on a fitness test.
Bringing It Into Your Coaching
Testing fitness is great for gathering statistics, but maybe not for adherence, especially later in life.
Measure, by all means. Baseline something at the start of a block so you and parents can see change. Keep the result between the three of you, compare the child against their own.
Build sessions around catching, throwing and kicking more than around laps, because that is where the longitudinal evidence points. Offer a choice of task difficulty in every game so a child can succeed at something without being handed a modified version in front of everybody. And design sessions for the child who thinks they’re rubbish, because they are the one whose thirty-year activity habit is what you’re working towards.
If you’re working with schools, leave capability behind. Show teachers what you do and explain the why. The Bristol ethnography suggests that is the difference between a school that gets more active and one that only moves when you’re leading the session.
Remember, nobody has proved that physical literacy programming produces more active children. What the research does suggest is that poorly delivered testing can undermine confidence and enjoyment, particularly among children who already feel least capable. That is enough reason to reconsider how school sessions are run.
References
Barnett, L.M., van Beurden, E., Morgan, P.J., Brooks, L.O. and Beard, J.R. (2009). Childhood motor skill proficiency as a predictor of adolescent physical activity. Journal of Adolescent Health, 44(3), pp.252-259. Click here to review the full research article.
Harte, N.P.A., Alfrey, L., Spray, C. and Cale, L. (2024). The if, why and how of fitness testing in secondary school physical education in the United Kingdom. European Physical Education Review, 30(3). Click here to review the full research article.
Jerebine, A., Arundell, L., Watson-Mackie, K., Keegan, R., Juric, P., Dudley, D., Ridgers, N.D., Salmon, J. and Barnett, L.M. (2024). Effects of Holistically Conceptualised School-Based Interventions on Children’s Physical Literacy, Physical Activity, and Other Outcomes: A Systematic Review. Sports Medicine – Open, 10(1), 105. Click here to review the full research article.
van Rossum, T., Miller, A., Rudd, J., Issartel, J., Goodway, J.D., O’Connor, D., Foulkes, J., Kavanagh, J. and Morley, D. (2025). The MOGBA randomized controlled trial: Evaluation of a complex movement skill intervention for 8-12 year old children in primary school Physical Education. PLoS ONE, 20(7), e0327136. Click here to review the full research article.
Walker, R., Emm-Collison, L., House, D., Kent-Saisch, S., Salway, R., Porter, A., Howard, A., Reid, T., Beets, M., de Vocht, F. and Jago, R. (2026). Primary school physical activity culture in the UK: findings from a four-month rapid ethnography in three schools. Frontiers in Public Health, 14, 1787666. Click here to review the full research article.
White, R.L., Babic, M., Bennie, A. and Taylor, N. (2025). Student experiences of fitness testing in physical education: The role of self-concept. Health Education Journal, 84(6), pp.637-648. Click here to review the full research article.
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