PE teachers need more training to help pupils with asthma
13 November 2008

A new report from Asthma UK Scotland has painted a bleak picture of school life for pupils with asthma, with PE classes in particular being cited as the biggest source of anguish and frustration.

Asthma UK Scotland talked to pupils across the country for a new report entitled ‘In Their Own Words’, which was commissioned by NHS Quality Improvement Scotland as part of a wider review of services for children and young people.

Amongst the quotes from children and young people contained in the report are:

• ‘I just do whatever I can but I get really breathless and I say to the teachers but they don’t let me stop. They say “Keep on running” and everyone just starts laughing at me ’cos I’m really breathless.’
  
• ‘They make you feel as if you’re disabled and you can’t do things that everybody else can.’
• ‘They sometimes think they’re helping. It’s like “Oh no you shouldn’t play that you have asthma”. But that’s not helping. I want to do it and I feel left out.’
  

Gordon Brown, Public Affairs and Communications Manager at Asthma UK Scotland, said: ‘The message that consistently came out of our focus groups was that many PE teachers simply do not seem to understand what it is like for a young person to have asthma. They either push pupils to take part even though that pupil is in obvious discomfort or are so fearful that any kind of exercise will affect the pupil’s condition that they unnecessarily limit their participation.

‘We appreciate that teachers have a busy workload which is why we want to support schools as much as we can. Our Alert to Asthma scheme, for example, has helped hundreds of teachers have a greater understanding of the condition.

‘We also recognise that some of the responsibility lies with the pupils themselves and that is why we will be working with children and young people to show them the benefits of physical exercise and to get them to focus on what they can do rather than what they can’t.’