Have a Good Term, and How Will You Know?

It’s that time of the school year.  Pupils in smart new kit, balls straight out of the packaging and over inflated by Gap year students.  Shiny new gym mats and goal posts.  Even the First Aid bags are fully equipped, and the cones in colour

co-ordinated piles.   Ambitious plans for new initiatives, fixture programmes and the optimism that emerges from a well spent summer holiday and the fact that no teams have yet been fielded – or lost.

A lot of time, energy and money will be expended before the Carol Service marks the end of the Autumn Term.  But will it be worth it?  Will the results justify the hours of effort, the inconvenience, the meetings, the bus journeys and the unwelcome emails for the hard to please parents?

How can success be measured?  Conventional measures of games won and lost, goals scored and conceded are limited, but easily understood by parents and in line with the way Sky Sports presents competitive success.  However, there is something fundamentally unsatisfactory in defining success relative only to someone else’s incompetence.

What other results are there?  Is it possible to establish measures and targets for the wider dimensions of the programme?

Measuring participation is relatively straightforward, in percentages of pupils taking part in various activities.  But how good is good?   The start of term offers the opportunity to establish targets for the number of games, the number of children involved in the week’s competitive programme, the number attending practice sessions, the number of matches cancelled.  Even the number of times the bus leaves on time.  If Virgin Trains can have 84.5% of all services depart within 10 minutes of the advertised time, probably schools can measure this as well.   Requests to miss matches or practices establish a crude measure of pupil commitment.

What about variety?  Measuring the number of pupils regularly involved in each activity is straightforward, and deciding the optimum range of sports on offer should emerge from experience. 

Can engagement be measured?  The number of non-participants?  The number of pupils who choose not to be involved in any physical activity?  Pupil satisfaction survey?  Involvement in mass participation events?

And what about health and fitness?  Participation levels in non-competitive, health based activity?  Average length of visit to fitness facility?  Number of pupils choosing to take part in conditioning based activity?  Number of pupils who can run a mile without stopping?  Performance on fitness tests?

What constitutes success for the games programme will be specific to individual schools.  It will reflect what they have come to value, and what they see as important for their pupils at different ages.  The targets will be relative to ambition, culture and previous years’ achievements.  It would seem self evident that these priorities should be defined, agreed and published in advance, and some attempt made to establish targets for each measure.  Each passing year provides more robust data on which future projections can be based. 

A characteristic of leadership is to start with the end in mind.  The vision of the desirable future state of the organization needs detail and targets to bring it to life.  The role of the leader is to define these.