Ruthlyn James | Jamaica’s inclusion readiness has a missing engine: the physical education teacher

Across Jamaica, we keep describing an inclusion goal while under building the one workforce that can stabilise it daily. We talk about Vision 2030, equity and access. Yet the practical reality inside classrooms is a nervous system crisis wearing a behaviour mask.

More children are arriving at school unable to inhibit impulses, sustain attention and regulate emotion. These are not simply conduct issues. They are executive function and regulation challenges, and they are showing up in academic failure, chronic conflict, and discipline escalation.

The problem is not that Jamaica lacks discipline structures. The problem is that we are using discipline structures to treat neurodevelopmental dysregulation.

Executive functions are the brain’s management system. They govern inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, planning, sequencing, and emotional control. When these systems are inefficient, a child may understand the rule and still fail to enact it consistently. A dean of discipline may see repeated rule breaking; clinically, that same pattern may reflect weak inhibitory control and poor self monitoring. When we respond only behaviourally, we intervene downstream, after the brain body system has already lost organisation.

REGULATORY STRUGGLE

Child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Ganesh Shetty has repeatedly warned that many children with emotional and behavioural disorders are not receiving the interventions needed to function successfully. He has noted that as many as 15 per cent of children may experience mental health challenges, underscoring the scale of unmet developmental need across the island. His concern reinforces what many educators are now observing daily: behaviour is often the visible tip of a deeper regulatory struggle.

Occupational therapy has long been trained to examine this brain body connection and how it affects participation across environments, including schools. OT frameworks explicitly include cognitive and psychological functioning, motor performance, sensory integration and social interaction delivered not only one to one but also through group and systems level consultation.

But here is Jamaica’s structural reality. The occupational therapy workforce remains extremely small relative to national need. Whether the number sits in the single digits or slightly higher, the policy meaning is unchanged. A clinic-only model cannot carry the regulatory load of an entire school system.

So the question becomes: if the island does not have the volume of occupational therapists needed to treat regulation at scale, what does a smart country do?

A smart country builds regulation into the timetable using the workforce that already touches the nervous system every day.

That workforce is the PE teacher. And we are currently underusing it.

BIOLOGICAL REQUIREMENT

Physical education is far more than sports readiness and rule-based gameplay. At its neurodevelopmental core, structured physical activity is one of the most powerful regulators of the developing brain. Purposeful movement strengthens neural pathways responsible for attention, inhibition, emotional control, sequencing and behavioural organisation. During well-designed physical activity, the brain releases dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, neurochemicals that support mood stability, motivation, sustained attention and cognitive flexibility. Movement is not a luxury for children. It is a biological requirement for healthy regulation and learning readiness.

Yet across too many Jamaican schools, PE is still treated as peripheral, squeezed into PEP readiness, or reduced to unstructured play on large dusty fields with minimal intentional design. That visual may be familiar across the island, but it does not represent what our children now need. Effective regulation through movement requires planned intensity, graded resistance, rhythmic organisation, clear start-stop control, and intentional recovery periods. It requires teachers who understand how to use movement to build self-inhibition, body awareness, emotional modulation and executive functioning.

Jamaica already trains physical education teachers through institutions such as The Mico University College and G.C. Foster College. These programmes include biomechanics, sports psychology, teaching methods and elements of adapted physical education. The foundation exists. What is now required is modernisation of purpose.

A regulation-focused PE framework would intentionally equip teachers to design nervous system warm-start routines that prime attention before seated learning, deliver structured resistance activities that support arousal regulation, embed stop-start games that strengthen inhibition, and use rhythm and pacing to support emotional control. Within such a model, adaptive physical education becomes a central inclusion tool for students with ADHD and autism, not a marginal add-on.

READINESS SUPPORT

Critically, physical education must not quietly disappear after the lower school years. Regulation demands do not end at Grade Six, and they certainly do not disappear in adolescence or conveniently stop at third form. In fact, the executive function load of secondary school increases sharply. PE should remain a protected developmental subject throughout the full secondary pathway.Movement-based regulation is a readiness support, not merely an examinable subject choice.

When PE becomes a regulation platform, guidance counsellors and deans of discipline gain a true upstream partner. Instead of responding only after conflict, the system gains a daily stabilisation mechanism that reduces the frequency and intensity of dysregulation events. This is the revolution policymakers should care about. PE as preventative discipline strategy.

If Jamaica is serious about becoming inclusion ready under Vision 2030, the physical education teacher must be recognised as a frontline regulation professional within the school ecosystem. This requires deliberate investment. A PE teacher should not be a luxury staffing decision or an afterthought for basic or primary schools. The role should be protected, expanded and funded.

Investment in regulation capacity at the school level is not an added expense. It is a preventative strategy that reduces downstream costs in behavioural intervention, academic failure and school exclusion.

The physical education teacher can no longer be reduced to Champs!

His whistle was never designed merely to start races and stop games. That whistle, in the hands of a properly equipped educator, is a powerful regulatory cue. We have been standing beside one of the most cost-effective regulation tools in the education system. That misreading can no longer afford to continue.

Ruthlyn James is the founding director of Adonijah Group of Schools Therapy and AssessmentCentre. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.