Coalition to boost club links as students shun sport on leaving school The Football Association has pledged that 2,000 clubs will be linked to secondary schools by 2017, rugby union has a target of 1,300 clubs, cricket 1,250 clubs, and rugby league and tennis 1,000 clubs each. Schools will also receive funding to throw open facilities to the wider public in their communities. The change of policy has taken 18 months to devise and follows huge cuts to education funding for school sports, but Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt defended the timing and substance of the new policy. "The one-million target was not going to be delivered whichever government was in power, so we have acknowledged that a top-down, target-driven approach was not going to work," he said. If we don't deliver significant increases in the number of people in sport at 16, 18 and 24 then this policy will have failed, but the existing target was not going to be delivered. Even when Labour was ring-fencing money for school sport the funding was in decline, so we should not pretend that everything was rosy. Sport England will be responsible for delivering the new policy despite failing to hit previous targets. Governing bodies will face financial penalties if they fail to deliver improvements in performance.