Rumours of government support for British chess

Ellen Milligan reports on Bloomberg:

The British premier this month plans to announce proposals to build interest in the game by expanding instruction in schools and installing 100 chess tables in public parks, people familiar with the matter said. The announcement is due at a ceremony featuring an over-sized set on 10 Downing Street’s lawn, they added.

Sunak will also earmark £500,000 ($640,000) of funding for the English Chess Federation, they said. The grant to help send teams to international tournaments would be the first time the UK government has financially backed its national squads. 

Number 10 declined to comment, but the great British chess advocate Malcolm Pein has tweeted a link to the article, saying:

Thanks to @10DowningStreet and @DCMS for the support and once again to all who have been working on this. International chess, chess in schools and park chess to get government support for the first time. 

So this looks like seriously good news for British chess, which has failed to win funding in the past because Whitehall declines to regard it as a sport, which is what many other countries do.

Despite this, as Ellen Milligan says, we were once a formidable chess power. In the 1980s England's men were second only to the Soviet Union, but are now ranked 13th in the world. I once wrote a post here looking at the reasons for this decline.

The Bloomberg report places this move in the context of Rishi Sunak's wish to improve numeracy, and the idea that playing chess has wider educational and educational benefits was popular a some years ago.

As I wrote on the Guardian website at the time, Armenia even made the game part of the school curriculum for all six year olds. But since, notably by the Education Endowment Foundation, has generally failed to find much evidence of these supposed wider benefits.

So let's cherish chess for what it gives us in itself, not as a means to something else.