Munster Council ‘doing work of 62 PE teachers’

The Munster Council of the GAA is doing the work of 62 full-time PE teachers in the province, according to a new report.

Independent consultants Focus Consulting have also found that GAA clubs across Munster are providing almost half of children’s recommended weekly exercise requirement.

The report, which was officially presented to the Munster Council last night, found there are about 58,000 underage players across the six Munster counties who are getting coaching from 10,500 trained coaches, all of them volunteers, and there are 2,400 weekly underage sessions for kids under eighteen.

“For every euro we invest in coaching, we feel we’re getting a return of €12.04; so for an investment of €1.4m in coaching we estimate that we’re generating a value of almost €19m,” Enda McGuane of the Munster Council said.

“That’s both a notional value of what parents attribute to coaching sessions and an estimate of the man-hour impact on schools. In simple terms, what we’re doing in schools across the province equates to work that would require 62 PE teachers to deliver. That’s 46,000 hours of physical activity.”

McGuane added that parents value the health and social aspects of GAA training, according to the survey, with the health benefits.

“When parents are asked about what they value in GAA coaching, the first things that they refer to are the health benefits and social aspect of involvement; it’s not about the child making it to the intercounty team.

“If you look at the average number hours that kids are supposed to engage in healthy activity every week, then what the GAA is providing amounts to an average of 42% of the recommended weekly exercise requirement.”

McGuane outlined the reasoning behind the Munster Council decision to commission the report.

“It’s not just looking at things from a financial perspective — are you having a positive impact on kids, are you retaining them as players for longer? That’s where we started from with this process. There are a lot of different sources of data and we just wanted to put them all together. Focus Consulting would have done work before in the sports field for us, so they tried to put together a methodology to measure that for us.

“We were interested in working out the number of hours the GAA is putting in, equating that with the pay of a teacher and then you’d have a valuation put on that. What was more difficult was the value parents put on a coaching session at the GAA club. Obviously that’s free, and we wouldn’t be charging people for that, but we surveyed parents at Cul camps and so on to get an idea of that.

“We also wanted to get a handle on what clubs were and weren’t doing and trying to get an estimate on the number of hours being delivered across the 531 clubs in the province.”

The report can be viewed online at munster.gaa.ie and McGuane added that feedback from clubs would be welcomed.