School rugby programmes have to be run by the community

 

Allan Miles’ excellent blog piece on the only two choices in school rugby programmes – go pro and become an academy, or remain a school with all that implies: - https://coachtalk.wordpress.com/2025/04/22/the-real-cost-of-the-schoolboy-rugby-dream/ - set me off again.

I went through some old stuff, looking for something I wrote a while ago about the downside of outsourcing part of the educational process, which I remember equating to a community opting out of its responsibility to raise its children.

I found the blog and was thinking of doing a little bit of cut and paste plagiarism. After reading it, though, I think it can stand with republication in full (with the odd bit left out). It was written back in 2020, nothing’s changed since then, really. Here it is.

American author Peter Block is an authority on the power of the community and he advocates for communities to take responsibility for the raising of their children. He argues that our children aren’t raised by communities anymore. Instead, we pay outsiders to raise our children – teachers, counsellors, coaches, youth workers, nutritionists, doctors etc.

We also pay service providers to treat and comfort the ill, for our safety and to take care of the elderly: all things, according to Block, that were taken care of in the community once. In the process we fall prey to smart marketing and advertising and we are manipulated into wanting things by those who are making money from the system.

Modern schooling is part of that. People chase after success and achievement and are prepared to pay for it, sometimes very dearly. It’s apparent everywhere in education, including sport. Few will argue with the principle that school sport is part of the educational process and, therefore, part of raising a child. I would argue that a school is part of its community and through its sporting programme the school, together with the community it serves, has a responsibility to guide children on their path to responsible adulthood.

A school cannot abdicate that responsibility, neither can it outsource it. You can bring in coaches and conditioning experts and buy the best equipment. You can professionalise your rugby programme, and that will bring positive results, and that’s fine. But if paid-for elements of the consumer system take control of the process you are heading for disaster, and the road to hell, in this case, is paved with the good intentions of the new media that praises to the heavens the professionalisation of sport at school level and calls for more and more of it.

A professional programme will produce excellent young players and some of them will go on to become professionals. Only a fraction will make it, though, and at some stage you have to question the amount of money spent on them and wonder about the rest of the players in the school. As a school community, you have a responsibility to raise all your children, not just the stars.

In any organised game the whole point is to win. You’d be wasting everyone’s time, and it would be an insult to your opponents if you went into competition without trying to be victorious. Teachers and coaches wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t prepare their teams with the goal of winning games in mind.

The question of course is how far you are prepared to go. Winning matches is certainly the aim, but do you make winning your dominant value? Honourable men, remember, are prepared to die for their values. That’s ridiculous, of course, but when you make winning the value by which you live, then you have no choice but to do everything you can to win. You have to win at all costs.

Schools are educational institutions, nothing else. Rugby at school level is part of the educational process and it falls under the principal. It doesn’t matter if there’s a trust that’s funding bursaries, or if the old boys are paying the salary of the coach, the principal is in charge and takes responsibility for everything that involves the school.

And the principal is expected to make education the priority. That’s not optional, it’s his or her job. Every decision has to be educationally accountable – is the action taken in the best interests of the learners? There’s no room for debate in that. It’s educationally sound to insist that all boys sent out onto the rugby field are well-taught, well-conditioned and have the necessary skills. The principal can demand from the coaches that the teams are motivated and have a desire to win. But the principal cannot demand victory and if his side loses despite all of the above being done properly, then he should accept it and promote the lessons that come with it. But when winning becomes the dominant value, educational considerations are often abandoned, along with the spirit of the game. 

More skilful, better-conditioned players are obviously a good thing and if a school’s high quality rugby programme sets a player on the path to a professional career, then that school has done its job in terms of vocational preparation and it has reason to be proud. Achieving these things requires a professional approach and as long as that approach is educationally accountable, every step of the way, then you cannot fault it.

It isn’t always, however. Often the professional, rugby academy way of doing things is described as putting the player and his holistic education first, but you don’t have to dig too deep to discover that the real objective is producing players who can help the school’s teams win matches. It’s part of the win at all costs outlook and some principals, I’m afraid, aren’t always entirely honest about it. They will speak about educational values but are quite happy to allow all sorts of things to happen, as long as their teams keep winning.

When the school commoditises sport provision and pays money to people from outside of the community to run its rugby programmes it is usually doing so because it feels it has to win. The school’s value is tied to the performance of its 1^st rugby team, so winning becomes all important.

The raising of the children by the community has been taken over by the professionals and because it’s a case of win at any cost, the costs, financial and in educational principles are not important.

There are all sorts of mean-spirited, unethical, and downright illegal practices that follow, all in the name of winning. Scorched Earth recruitment practices, early specialisation, over-training and substance abuse are only some of those.

If we were really committed to educational values in school sport we should hand the raising of the children back to the community, with the school playing a central role in that, and send the professionals to the professional game where they belong.