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PADSIS Research into Reward Models for School Sport

Posted Wednesday, 7 December 2022

School sport requires a significant workforce to ensure a vibrant co-curricular provision. The historic assumption of staff contribution based upon goodwill and generous discretionary effort is in terminal decline. There are pockets of good health, but the general trend is a downwards one. This results partly from changing attitudes to...

Re-Considering Saturday School Sport

Posted Wednesday, 2 November 2022

Saturday fixtures have existed in schools as long as sport has been a feature. Initially a way of filling time in boarding schools, they were enthusiastically embraced by day schools, and have an unbroken history going back more than 100 years. They survived intact when many schools abandoned Saturday morning...

Book Review - ‘Batting’ James Knott and Andrew O’Connor

Posted Wednesday, 2 November 2022

This is an extraordinary book. Its sub-title describes it as a ‘comprehensive modern guide’, and it certainly delivers on this promise. It is the most thorough analysis of all aspects of batting; in an age when coach education is less frequently delivered in book form, this may never be rivalled...

Staffing the Future of Saturday Sport

Posted Thursday, 6 October 2022

Saturdays have changed significantly in independent schools in the last 30 years. Morning school has become a thing of the past, except in the fullest of boarding sectors. Its loss was little bemoaned. However, other dimensions of Saturday school – principally sports fixtures – remain intact. There may be more...

Where have all the Graduate Assistants gone?

Posted Monday, 20 June 2022

Where Have All the Graduate Assistants Gone? School sport has wandered into a workforce crisis. At a time when programmes are wider, more extensive and inclusive than ever before, the coaching population is more limited, especially on Saturdays. Many of the staple constituencies, including classroom teachers and part-time coaches, have...

Are you trying to do too much in the Summer Term?

Posted Friday, 17 June 2022

The Spring Term has always been an uninspiring time for school sport. Dark nights, cold and wet weather, frosty mornings and mock exams. It has always been a season demanding dogged persistence from teachers and coaches and anticipating better times ahead. Those better times used to be the Summer Term...