Many disabled children are still 'sent to the library' during school PE lessons, the former Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson has warned.
She told the House of Commons Education Committee: "Certainly towards the end of my career and even now what we're seeing is in some sports less disabled children competing now than when I was 12, before the world Paralympic was invented.
"My sport, wheelchair racing - there's very few girls competing.
"Still an awful lot of disabled children are sent to the library because teachers don't feel equipped or able, in many cases, to integrate them properly into lessons."
The 11-time Paralympic gold medallist said that some sports have fewer disabled children competing now than when she was a child.
She accused the Government of failing to take sport seriously and claimed many mainstream schools did not know how to teach sports to disabled children. "I think (sport) is always seen as something lovely and when we have a successful Olympics and Paralympics, you know, the athletes get turned out," she said. "But because it's hard to do I think it gets sometimes ignored in the years in between."
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