BBC Scotland broadcast a programme last night, called The Medal Myth, which they trailed as being about John Beattie looking at why our sporting success at elite level isn’t translating into a healthier population.

“Our top athletes are winning more medals than ever, but the general population aren’t becoming more active,” said Auntie Beeb.

The theory was that mega-events such as the London Olympics and Glasgow Commonwealth Games would inspire a generation to become healthier. Beattie – who apparently doesn’t read The National but I won’t slag him off because he always was one of my rugger faves – was apparently going to hear “from elite athletes and ordinary folk about why that hasn’t happened and what it might take to get us off the sofa”.

This column was written before the programme was broadcast, but it apparently featured a BBC investigation showing that an “overwhelming majority” of Scotland’s publicly-funded elite athletes are drawn from middle-class backgrounds.

National sports agency sportscotland did not have the demographics to prove or disprove this assertion, so the BBC did its own research and found information on 383 of the 525 athletes funded with public money in Scotland.

According to the BBC, the research “discovered that almost nine in 10 went to either fee-paying schools or a state school in a wealthy area”.

In other words, more public money is going to people from better-off backgrounds than to competitors from those places that we used to call working class.

That is surely a cause for worry.

The BBC yesterday quoted Professor Leigh Robinson of Stirling University – an expert in sport policy – as saying: “I think anything that comes from the public purse should have generally wide public merit good and I’m not convinced that elite sport does that.

“I’m not entirely sure that elite sport is something that’s accessible to the public in general or indeed leads to benefits that are available to the public in general.”

In response, sportscotland’s chief executive Stewart Harris said: “We’re working to get more opportunities.

“We’re working to try to get in every sport a pathway which goes from school to community to performance, if they have the talent and ambition, if they want to go there. I think actually the spend and the resource is actually in a pretty good place right now.

“Ninety-five per cent of the sport budget in Scotland is spent on school and community, five per cent is spent on performance. So I think the balance of it, if you take the system, then I think ... as a society in Scotland with the resources we have available, we’re in a good place with that.”

So here’s the quandary for all of us who believe in a fairer, more equal society but who also want to see Scots being successful at Olympics and Commonwealth Games (forget football, for not even if every future penny earned in the North Sea was invested in our so-called national sport would we ever win the World Cup).

How much should we spend on what I’ll call high-performance sport, as opposed to grassroots activities?

It’s difficult question to answer, but on balance, I think sportscotland have it about right.

I know the 2012 Olympics and 2014 Commonwealth Games were supposed to inspire us all to get up and take part in sport. They were all about bringing about a revolution in the way we view sport, with the theory being that the health of several generations would improve as a consequence of seeing heroic performances in Team GB and Scotland vests.

The implication of the BBC programme, as far as I can tell, is that the great transformation just has not happened, and certainly the evidence from across Scotland, and indeed the whole of the UK, is that the masses did get up off their sofas and run, skip, jump, swim, box and throw their way to fitness. Yet I would argue that it is far too soon to examine the legacies of London and Glasgow, especially the latter, for there is surely no doubt that the 2014 Games at least raised consciousness about sport and health.

Which is where a brilliant teacher comes in. Even before the Glasgow Games, Ellen Wyllie at St Ninian’s Primary School in Stirling came up with the ‘daily mile’ project in which schoolchildren run or walk together for 15 minutes each day.

Wyllie saw the results immediately: “The children are fit and healthy, they come in energised, ready to learn and focused, apple-cheeked and bright-eyed.”

All because a teacher made running and walking into something that is fun.

Thanks to that one teacher’s initiative, dozens of schools across the UK are now joining in the “daily mile” and anecdotal reports are convincing that the youngsters’ health is being improved by the day. Elite performance sport did not achieve this seeming miracle – good teaching did it. And I would argue that it is in our schools that the future of sport in this country really lies.

Back in the mid-1980s, when teachers downed tools and stopped doing out-of-class coaching for many sports, a whole generation of pupils suffered.

Now, our teachers face even greater demands on their time, due to pettifogging bureaucracy.

They should be freed up to do what they want to do – teach. And yes, if they can help kids become healthier by playing sport, they should be encouraged, not discouraged as so many are. What this country needs to do it start seeing sport not just as an adjunct of health and education, but as a priority in its own right.

Sport as a political entity is currently tagged on to Health Secretary Shona Robison’s remit, with Aileen Campbell as the Minister for Public Health and Sport under her.

They’re good operators and do a fine job, but I want to see a stand-alone Ministry for Sport that draws together resources from education, health and industry, so that there can be full-time focus on getting it right for every person.

Until we have a Sports Minister with a seat in the cabinet, I for one will not believe Scotland is taking sport seriously enough, no matter how many medals we win.