SCRAPPING a multi-million pound school sports scheme could affect the health of the region’s youngsters, the Government has been warned.

The coalition axed the £162m-a-year PE and Sports Strategy, saying the move would cut bureaucracy and free schools to organise sport themselves.

However, critics say School Sport Partnerships (SSPs) – established under the strategy – meant hundreds of thousands more youngsters took up competitive sport.

A campaign has been launched to retain the strategy, which represents about £5.5m of funding and 200 jobs in the North.

Diane Snowfill, from Sedgefield SSP, in County Durham, said: “I was totally devastated.

I anticipated cuts, but not the complete dismantling of a fantastic infrastructure that had taken ten years to build up, especially with the Olympics and Paralympics only two years away.

“We could very quickly go back to the Nineties, when schools had very little PE on the curriculum.

“The range of sport on offer could diminish within a term and, with fewer opportunities, children are going to become inactive again.”

Daran Crofts, who works on the scheme in Stockton, said: “It will have a devastating impact.

It will take us back years.”

Dr Peter Warburton, director of sport at Durham University, said the scheme was the best he had seen in school sport in 30 years and said scrapping it would have catastrophic implications for primary school PE.

In Sedgefield, the number of five to 18-year-olds taking part in at least two hours of sport a week rose from 23 per cent to 90 per cent in five years.

Over the same period in North Yorkshire, 36 per cent more children were taking part in at least two hours of sport a week. Across the Tees Valley, the number has risen from 42 per cent to 92 per cent in three years.

The Government said SSPs were neither affordable nor likely to be the best way to help schools achieve their potential.