He is animated and loud, banging his fists against a table. Anyone looking in through the windows of his Hampden office might imagine that this grandfather had lost his marbles, but the staff who work around him know this behaviour is par for the course.

The SFA’s director of football development is talking about what he sees as the essence of this country’s sporting problem: too little physical education in primary schools, no “physical literacy” among our children. Few things get Fleeting more worked up than this.

He passionately believes that various football, sporting and wider social problems flow from the fact Scottish children are not physically educated at primary age. Without that, the damage is done. Between eight and 12 are the “window” years for optimum physical education. When children have core balance and co-ordination it is far, far easier to improve their technique and Scotland lags behind other nations.

While others at the SFA, including chief executive Gordon Smith continue to lobby for greater government investment in facilities – the £15.7m Regional Football Centre in Glasgow’s Toryglen is wonderful, but where are the rest? – Fleeting worries that this country does not even construct its children properly.

“Our kids don’t have the same physical development as kids on the continent, and I’m talking here about the most basic balancing skills,” he said. “That’s where we have a problem because if we don’t start with a quality product, we won’t have a quality product at the end of it. In the old days, our kids learned physical literacy through kicking a can, climbing trees, falling down and picking themselves up, stealing apples and getting chased. All those wee running, jumping, throwing and catching games. We don’t do as much of that any more.”

Instead, today’s children live more sedentary lives than previous generations, preoccupied with computer games, Facebook and so on. Perhaps schools could drag them to their feet through more physical education (PE) lessons? According to Fleeting that is where the problems are compounded.

“Our PE provision in primary school is horrendous and I’m talking about for kids from five years old,” he said. “The amount of PE kids get at school doesn’t meet any requirements. In Edinburgh, they’ve apologised for the fact that they won’t reach their target until 2012 – and the target is provision of one-and-a-half to two hours per week in primary schools. How horrendous is that? How does that look for the Scottish nation when we’re in the top 10 for stabbings, drug-taking, heart-attacks, drinking, and yet we still don’t think that PE in primary schools is a priority?

“If we could get every primary kid in Scotland from P4 onwards to have an hour’s physical activity every day we could change the face of Scottish culture, not just Scottish sport. We need a radical change of Scottish culture. I’m fed up reading about the health of this nation. It sticks in my craw, the heart-disease rate, the alcoholism, all that negative, negative crap you get. It bursts my head. We have to have something to latch on to, to change and make a difference.”

What he hears from the schools is that their hands are tied. They must provide 25 hours of curriculum time in a week and that doesn’t leave enough for PE on a daily basis. Clackmannanshire is the only local authority in Scotland with a PE specialist visiting every primary school. Fleeting cannot understand why the school week cannot be extended to 27-and-a-half hours.

“Scotland has probably one of the lowest number of hours in school per week of any country in the developed world. We have passionate parents, teachers, individuals in this country who want to see radical change. At the SFA we’re doing community programmes, midnight leagues, volunteers in schools, soccer schools and Player Pathways [a long overdue initiative to have children playing four-a-side games], but we can’t get a grasp on education because we can’t control that.”

Smith yesterday briefed the media on the search for a new Scotland manager, but took time to outline to The Herald the SFA’s position on youth development and facilities. He has lobbied for the government to fully engage with football, in return for huge social and cultural benefits for the country as a whole.

“We need to increase athleticism in the country, work with the government to create a culture of health and fitness, sort of like you see in Australia,” said Smith. “In football the second most important thing is working on technique. Managers tend to say ‘stop trying to be clever, stop trying the fancy stuff’ instead of encouraging skills to develop. And the third thing is having a winning mentality. We want managers, coaches and parents to back off from talking about mistakes, etc, and concentrate on how much kids are putting into it, and their appetite and aptitude and so on.”

And then there are facilities. Or, more accurately, there aren’t facilities. Henry McLeish, the former first minister, has been commissioned to compile a wide-ranging review of Scottish football – he will report on “grassroots” early in the New Year – and Smith hopes the government may receive the findings and be shamed into a greater level of investment.

“I’ve told Henry McLeish to go to Norway, check out the facilities there and ask how much they get from their government to pay for ‘3g’ synthetic surfaces. The Scandinavian countries are much more interested in it than we are and we need these facilities in order to encourage kids to play.

“Here, politicians nod their head at you and say ‘yeah, we’d love to do that’, but what we need is comparative thinking. We need to say: ‘Norway, four million people and here’s how many 3g pitches 
the government pays for in a year – how many do ours pay for?’

“I know the Scottish Government has problems, a lack of budget, and to find sporting money is hard. But something like developing physical literacy would save the country a lot of money in the long-term.”

Instead, poor-quality pitches and spartan “facilities” do absolutely nothing to lure children away from their computers and out into the rain, win and cold to play football.

Fleeting, whose daughter Julie is Scotland’s most-capped footballer, added: “If I was running a kids’ team, I’d get them to put on coats, hats, gloves and trackie bottoms in cold weather. But we don’t do that. We throw them out with a strip on and short sleeves and ask the weans to play. I’m a father and now a grandfather and I just wouldn’t put my kid out to play in that. When it’s too windy, it’s too windy.”

Despite the chronic under-investment in facilities, the weather and the lack of physical literacy and PE in schools, Fleeting insists participation levels are encouraging. Tens of thousands of children pass through the SFA’s hands every year, as do 13,000 adults via its coach education programmes.

The “Player Pathway” initiative is a big one: Andy Roxburgh was unable to push through a similar initiative in 1982, but it is finally about to be imposed throughout the land. “A kid in Wick will play his recreational football the same way as a kid in Dumfries: four-a-side for six-to-eight-year-olds, seven-a-side for nine-to-12-year-olds, and then 11-a-sides for all.”

It is long overdue. Without “physical literacy”, though, there is only so much that Scotland’s football children will ever learn.