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 – long, sunny days accompanied by the more relaxed pace of Cricket, Athletics and Tennis. After a miserable British winter, this can finally provide a climate conducive to sport for an energised population of staff and pupils. It reinforces the conviction that school sport really is solar-powered.

However, the...

School sport has become increasingly dependent upon part time, external coaches. Few people think this is a great idea, but it is a simple, and cheap, expedient when the minimum number of staff required to operate the programme cannot be met by a school’s own resources.

Schools who built their programme on an assumption that classroom teachers were able and willing to coach games are particularly vulnerable to this shortage. This model is creaking in many schools. It is a perfect storm. At the same time as parents demand a higher standard of coaching at all levels, and schools...

The history of education in the UK is firmly rooted in single sex provision. The only secondary education in the 19th century was for boys, and the opportunities which emerged for girls in the early 20th century were deliberately separate. When maintained secondary schools emerged, many were single sex; even when comprehensivisation brought co-educational schools, provision for physical activity and sport remained resolutely distinct – often with separate facilities, and certainly with gender-specific staff. There were -emphatically – sports which were for boys, and others than were for girls.There was no overlap. Almost all mixed independent schools were boys’ schools...