Are we Deluding Ourselves about Autumn Term Sport?
The Autumn term is still three months away. That is a long time in a pandemic. Three months ago, the coronavirus had barely been heard of, and didn’t have a name. It is therefore speculative, at best, to try to predict what might be happening in school sport in October.
Most schools are making fixture arrangements as usual, though hope that these might be fulfilled is generally declining. However, there is a danger that they are still hovering in the background, and therefore potentially limiting what schools might achieve through physical activity before recognisable competition is restored.
How realistic is inter-school sport in the Autumn Term? What would have to happen for it to be restored, even in a very limited form?
Most schools are currently planning for a return to school in September which will be unrecognisable from any previous year. Discussions of “blended” learning, which might combine some face to face teaching with online provision suggest that schools will be a long way from operating classes as normal. Most are unlikely to have all pupils in school at the same time. Requirements to have “bubbles” of small numbers of children with a degree of isolation will severely limit the organisation of games in any form. This is currently being experienced by those schools that have some year groups returning this term. Restrictions on specialist teachers moving between bubbles further limits the impact of coaches.
Of course, these restrictions might be lifted by September, though urgency to get schools fully operational is likely to require ongoing measures to limit virus transmission. Any such conditions are likely to make school sport impossible.
Schools are not in charge of their own fate here. All of the sports in which they compete are regulated by National Governing Bodies. Most of these are currently busy publishing stages which track what might be possible at different levels of government distancing restrictions. These plans are a very long way from the full version of any game being restored any time soon. Rugby Football, as the game of choice for the autumn term in many schools, has the most forbidding hurdles on its route to return.
Even when NGBs lift restrictions on playing the full version of each sport, it is unlikely that schools will instantly restore their fixture programmes. Having carefully controlled their own environments to prevent disease - and tolerated complex and intrusive measures to do so – they are unlikely to risk compromising this security by sending pupils on crowded buses into an environment over which they have no control. To play in front of parents of unknown health records. Boarding schools will be extremely difficult to operate in a distancing context, and the greatest disaster they would face is a visiting player introducing the virus into their environment. They are unlikely to readily embrace that risk for the sake of a hockey match.
It is equally likely that parents will be nervous of allowing their offspring to hurry back into the environment of inter-school competition. The sport experience could be reduced to its bare constituent parts: teams could travel changed, go directly to pitches, spectators could be forbidden and post-match hospitality abandoned. Even shorn of all its trappings, school sport is still the opposite of the controlled and restricted conditions that will prevail in all other aspects of the educational situation next term.
This is not a reason to abandon hope of school sport. It will return at some stage, firstly in a very limited form, and then incrementally restore itself to something close to its previous form. No one knows when. What is known, is that a lot needs to happen at government, NGB, school and parental level before this capability and confidence can return.
However, schools should not allow the declining prospect of competition to restrict their ambition for what might be achieved through physical activity next term. Rather than hoping against hope for a netball match, there is an opportunity to focus creative energy on developing those areas of provision that demand modernisation. Industry leading programmes of physical literacy, wellbeing and leadership do not depend on the possibility of getting on a bus to play local rivals. Attention could be profitably focused on these areas, which could then be in better shape when competition can be added. Schools know how to prepare teams and operate match days. Other areas are less well developed. The post-pandemic programme would therefore be potentially better than that which preceded it.
The challenge is to do what is possible, and do it outstandingly well. The alternative is to tread water with an uninspiring programme of activity and hope that school sport makes an implausibly hurried return. That seems increasingly unlikely.