Broadening the Success Criteria of School Sport

Sport in British-type schools emerged, predominantly, in the second half of the 19th century. It was built on a foundation of compulsory team games for all, and a strong conviction that these developed desirable personal qualities. From the earliest days, there was competition between schools in a small number of sports for one team per school. Results reflected on the wider perceived status of participating schools.

For another 100 or so years, the ways of measuring success remained largely unchanged. Although facilities improved, programmes remained based on the primacy...

In a previous era, 18 year old school leavers, usually from the southern hemisphere, provided a source of unskilled, cheap labour to the sports departments of schools. This was never especially satisfactory, but the contribution of classroom teachers to games coaching in those days generally meant that there wasn’t a shortage of staff. A limited programme, based on compulsory team games, required a smaller coaching force - and a more limited skill set.

Incrementally, many schools started to replace their gap year ‘students’ with a better qualified, older and more experienced constituency of sports help. These were university leavers,...

Organised sport in schools emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. There had been some Cricket and Rowing before that, but anything resembling a regular programme of compulsory sport owes its foundation to structural initiatives at Rugby School in the 1830s. Team games were the flagships of the programme, principally football and cricket, but there were other additions which were prominent and influential. These included fives and cross-country running. And boxing. It is significant that pugilism was part of school sport since its inception. Games such as Netball and Tennis came almost a hundred years later.

Equally significant is the longevity...