It's half term in the summer. The weather has been no better or worse than normal. And the traditional programme of activities has meant that cricket, tennis, athletics and rounders have squeezed themselves into a few short weeks, carefully evading and reluctantly accommodating various forms of public examinations in IB, AS and GCSE.

Fewer boys than ever play cricket regularly in schools. In a sector which always enjoyed attaching adjectives from the world of music, Cricket has always been a Major sport. Now though, it is infrequently a majority sport: does that mean a transition to the...

The most significant development in school sports provision in the last twenty years has been in facility enhancement. In a previous era, all schools had playing fields and a single badminton court gym equipped with ropes, beams and a host of other little used and understood features. Then an arms race broke out. It started with sports halls, extended to plastic hockey pitches and then exploded to include every possible facility known to man, regardless of relevance. In an epidemic of "see you one and raise you one", boasts of improvements have come to be measured in tens of...

There has been much recent consternation about the future of potentially dangerous sports in schools, largely fuelled by Professor Pollock’s widely articulated assessment of the dangers of physical contact. Her campaign appears confined to an attack on Rugby Football, in defiance of the science that shows that, before the age of 15, this game is no more dangerous than Hockey and Netball.

As a result of this, a hundred years of compulsory participation in team games is under unprecedented threat, with few schools escaping the attention of a growing pacifist lobby of parents. There are no schools who would...