The Biggest Challenge Facing Games in Schools

Games have been a prominent part of school life for 150 years. During that time, their position has been relatively inviolate. Other subjects have come and gone, every timetable minute has been scrutinised and coveted, but the position of games has remained relatively unchallenged.

Through most of that time, the challenge for games education, and the teams that provided its public face in inter-school competition, was performance. Teaching skills and strategies, putting the most athletic performers into dominant positions and building plans to outwit the opposition; these were the challenges for coaches. The supply of candidates for selection was assumed; although the quality might be variable, the quantity was fairly constant. An unchallenged system of compulsory participation ensured that.

The twenty first century has seen this foundation starting to crumble. The Iron Curtain of compulsion has come down, and schools are reluctant to levy pressure to play upon the unwilling. A combination of safety, ethical, business and legal reasons have created a cocktail of forces that have eroded the conscription of team members. All schools offer choice and variety in their programmes – the only differences are the stage of education at which they emerge. By the second half of their secondary school career, most pupils are engaged in the physical activity (or lack of it) of their own selection. 

This has led to a subtle shifting of priorities, which some schools have been slow to recognise. The biggest challenge is retention of players through their teenage years. All schools can engage a large majority of their youngest pupils; the number who remain as committed and enthusiastic team games participants in their Sixth Form years’ varies enormously.  

There are various factors that determine rates of attrition. The most significant is the culture of the organisation. Where this is strong, and it is cool to be involved in games, participation rates remain high. This is little to do with facilities, or even playing standards. It is a combination of apparently minor factors built over a period of time, many of them intangible.

Schools, and teachers, can be slow to recognise this priority, and to see the correlation between the way that junior programmes are operated and the impact on retention.  The key factors are coach behaviour and playing opportunity. Loud, autocratic coaches who give undue priority to the early developers, and allocate opportunity unequally, may be unwittingly accelerating attrition. The result of this may not be fully evident for another two years. Good school coaches are not just the ones that win matches, they are the ones who win retention as well.

A programme that recognised the implication of retention, and designed overt strategies to minimise it, might look different in the pre-teenage years. But it might also lead to engaging a lot more sixth formers within school sport – and beyond.