Warning: polemic ahead

Oh hurrah. That 'political-correctness-gone-mad!' idea that competitive sport is 'bad' for children, teaches them to be aggressive and is divisive, has now been debunked and schools are going to bring back team games in PE. Hockey, netball, football and cricket will once again be inflicted on generations of schoolchildren in the hope that it will teach them to 'co-operate'.

I'm sure I don't just speak for myself when I recall the hideous torment that was double games on a Wednesday afternoon. No other aspect of the school curriculum created such a divide between those who were good at it and those who weren't. For the first few weeks of secondary school, we were split into groups based on alphabetical order, or birthdays, or something random, and then at half term, once the PE teachers had got to know us, the year group was summarily split into two large sections, the sporty ones, and the not sporty ones. And thus we were condemned to years of half-heartedly running around in pleated skirts and shiny gym knickers unsuited to the northern drizzle, in the hope of winning some game we weren't really very enthusiastic about. (We didn't have any showers, and we usually wore our PE kits all day, so the motivation to exert yourself physically was minimal.)

Once a year, they brought out the 'fitness records' or whatever they were. Basically, you had to do all kinds of mind-numbing exercises and then measure our heart rates to prove that the people in the sporty group were fitter than the rest of us. Did anyone else have to do bleep tests? When you had to run back and forth across the gym, wheezing and aching, terrified your body was going to give out, but too scared to stop in case people laughed at you and classed you with the 'fat girls'? I suppose the furtive glances I shared with my friends ('I'll give up now if you will') could have been a form of co-operation. And then, those of us who were soon to be berated for being unfit and told to take more exercise, had to sit around and wait while the healthier among us finished.

And then, when we were in Year 10, something amazing happened. The drudgery of team sports was limited to half of each term and the rest of the time we went to the leisure centre in town. There, we were allowed to do six weeks of aerobics, of line-dancing, of self-defence, we could use the gym if we wanted. For the first time, I felt like I was enjoying physical activity (aside, I suppose, from all the time I spent running around outside as a child). It seemed to have a purpose: it felt like it was doing me some good and might, in the case of self-defence, be helpful at some point, or, in the case of line-dancing, allowed me for the first time to feel like I wasn't completely useless at anything involving more than a basic degree of co-ordination. Gone was the huge division between sporty and non sporty. PE became, dare I say it, fun.

And, looking back on my experience of sport in school, I can reflect that it wasn't all boring and punishing. While playing tennis 8 to a court seemed counter-productive (prioritising technique over actually running around and burning off calories), playing rounders in the summer always evoked enthusiasm for running around outdoors in even the most sedentary and high-minded of us; Swedish netball, usually reserved for an end-of-term treat, was often far more energetic and competitive than the usual variety, for the sole reason that we weren't supposed to take it so seriously; the country dances we learned for the first year Christmas party had a tangible purpose; trampolining was positively enjoyable.

Ultimately, those who have an interest in and talent for sport will pursue this outside of structured school PE lessons. They will join teams and clubs, have specialist coaching, train in their spare time and meet like-minded people. School PE should be as fun and inclusive as possible, less about refining your backhand or improving your footwork, and more about encouraging young people to take pleasure in exercise and find ways that they can look after their health on their own. It is only seven years after stopping school games that I am beginning to address the need to do this, so scarred was I by the experience. I bought a mini-trampoline and went salsa dancing. I hope to go again next week. The enforced discrimination and ritual humiliation of school PE had, on me and probably on many others, the exact opposite of the intended effect. Give primary school children an hour to run around playing games. Have school gardens that pupils are responsible for the upkeep of. Introduce aerobics, dancing and martial arts in place of hockey and rugby. Play rounders and quik cricket instead of tennis and athletics. Do not condemn the children who most need physical exercise at school to years of feeling inadequate and excluded.