Youth Sport Faces a Pivotal Crossroads
In playgrounds across Britain, a new sound is echoing—rubber balls ricocheting off glass walls, the soft thwack of rallies more familiar in southern Europe than South Yorkshire. Padel, long a fixture in Spanish suburbia and now the fastest-growing sport in the UK, is finding its footing in an unlikely arena: the state school PE curriculum.
Once considered a leisure pursuit of well-heeled clubs, the game—played in doubles on an enclosed court—has crossed the threshold into mainstream youth sport. As of mid-2025, more than 950 padel courts have sprung up across Britain, many on land once reserved for ageing netball courts or unused football pitches. And at the centre of this movement lies a question fundamental to the future of British sport: how can schools reconnect young people with physical activity in a world of dwindling attention spans and fierce competition from screens?
At the Department for Education, that question has grown more urgent. New data from spring 2025 confirms that 38 per cent of children aged 5 to 16 still fail to meet the NHS’s recommended hour of daily activity. The figure rises steeply in inner-city areas and among teenage girls—a pattern that successive governments, despite strategies and slogans, have struggled to reverse.
The rise of padel offers no silver bullet, but it may present the most credible alternative in years. Easy to learn, highly social and refreshingly egalitarian, it requires no towering physique or elite background to compete. And for schools grappling with engagement crises, stretched budgets and old-world facilities, padel has quietly become a lifeline.
From Camden to Coventry, local authorities are moving with speed. The LTA’s Schools Padel Initiative, launched in late 2023, now partners with 42 schools nationwide—28 in the independent sector and 14 in the state system. Its early results are compelling. A pilot report published this April showed a 28 per cent rise in weekly PE participation among Year 9 pupils, with teachers citing the sport’s “instant fun factor” and students praising its “easy rules and non-judgy vibes”.
James Wilkinson, a certified LTA padel coach working with schools in Yorkshire, believes the sport has struck a cultural nerve. “It’s not aggressive, it’s not technical, and everyone’s involved,” he says. “For a PE teacher, it’s a dream—fast setup, quick wins, and no benchwarmers.”
Facilities, of course, remain a sticking point. While a standard padel court occupies just 200 square metres—less than half that of a football pitch—the upfront cost of building one can still give bursars pause. Estimates from operators such as Game4Padel and Rocket Padel put construction costs at between £30,000 and £45,000 per court, including surface, fencing and lights. Yet the economics are increasingly favourable.
Academy trusts across the Midlands and North have begun adopting dual-use models, leasing court space to the public outside school hours to recoup costs. Horizon Education Trust, which operates four schools in Leicestershire, opened a three-court padel facility this spring under such a model. Trustee accounts seen by this paper show the courts generating between £1,200 and £1,800 in monthly income, depending on weather and weekend usage. That, say trust directors, puts the installation on track to break even in under three years—less time than it typically takes to recover investments in 3G pitches.
Sport England has taken notice. While the body’s capital funding scheme does not yet earmark padel as a priority sport, officials confirmed to TennisPadel.uk that pilot discussions are underway to include padel court builds within local authority school sport bids in 2026. In the interim, schools are drawing from Lottery-backed PE grants, local business sponsorships and—critically—partnerships with commercial padel providers.
Operators like Padium and Game4Padel have created “build-operate-transfer” agreements with schools, allowing them to retain school-time access to facilities while outsourcing maintenance, bookings, and insurance. In some cases, the company retains operating rights during evenings and weekends in exchange for covering installation costs.
What emerges is a delicate but workable partnership—private sector innovation meeting public sector necessity. For the schools, the value is not simply financial. It’s also strategic.
With government pressure mounting on school performance metrics around wellbeing and inclusion, padel provides measurable outcomes. Teachers at one West London academy reported a 15-point rise in student wellbeing surveys since the court’s installation. SEN specialists have praised padel’s non-contact nature and emphasis on coordination over brute force. And girls’ PE participation, in several mixed academies surveyed, has risen to its highest level in five years.
Elsewhere, curricular change is following suit. The LTA’s teacher training programme, certified by the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity (CIMSPA), has now upskilled over 650 educators in the basics of padel coaching. New PE lesson frameworks, co-developed with the Youth Sport Trust, are being trialled in Key Stage 3 this autumn, with modules that integrate padel into GCSE PE coursework under the sport’s racquet category.
Meanwhile, discussions with awarding bodies are advancing. A draft proposal shared with this publication by a curriculum advisor suggests that AQA and OCR may formally list padel as an assessed sport in their 2026 GCSE PE syllabi, pending regulatory review.
From a career pathway perspective, the timing could hardly be better. With padel included in the 2023 European Games in Kraków and under consideration for Olympic inclusion in 2032, a formalised school-to-pro pipeline is becoming viable. The LTA’s youth performance department confirmed that a national U16 padel ranking system will launch in 2026, with regional school qualifiers to feed into national trials.
Britain is not alone. In Sweden, over 1,500 padel courts now exist, many on school grounds. In Argentina, school tournaments fill entire weekends, often televised locally. And in Spain—the sport’s spiritual home—government subsidies support public schools to build and maintain courts, viewing padel not as an extracurricular afterthought but as a tool for national fitness.
In Britain, the momentum is building, but it remains fragile. Planning permission remains a frequent obstacle, especially in conservation areas or near housing, where sound reverberations and evening lighting raise complaints. Equipment sourcing, too, is a barrier. Padel rackets, balls and court surfacing are still niche in the educational supplier market, making procurement cumbersome for time-pressed administrators.
Resistance also lingers within some corners of school sport departments, particularly in traditional grammar schools or rugby-heavy regions. There, padel can be dismissed as a passing trend, a social sport unsuited to “proper” athletic development.
Yet such scepticism appears increasingly detached from the wider movement. The numbers are clear. The interest is real. And the appetite—especially among pupils themselves—is growing faster than many predicted.
For school leaders eyeing the coming decade, the question is less about whether to adopt padel, and more about when. For a generation raised on fast-paced, social and shareable experiences, padel may be the rare analogue activity that resonates. And for schools facing tight margins, tight schedules and tighter expectations, it may be the investment that pays off far beyond the final whistle.
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