We need leaders in our schools

So the IBE matric results were released on Friday and, no surprise, the posh schools all got 100% university entrance passes; their matrics averaged over two As apiece and there were so many who got seven, eight, nine, or even 10 distinctions, that those who earned an old-fashioned full house of six look like the most desperate bunch of under-achievers.

The announcement led, on a slow news day, to discussions on the phone-in radio shows and lead stories on the newscasts. I was in the car all day, so I heard most of them.

And, of course, I’ve got my two cents worth of opinion on the matter.

The obvious question was what the results from the state schools are going to look like when they become known next week, and from there it was a short step to asking the big one: Why is there such a chasm in achievement between the schools who released their results this week and those who will do so next?

I generalise of course: not all independent schools produce great results, and not all of them are well-resourced and expertly managed. And there are many state schools who have 100% pass rates, and who churn out top achievers, including some who operate under appallingly poor conditions.

In trying to unpack all of this the obvious place to start is at the chasm in resources. Some of those independent schools charge a million rand for five years’ worth of schooling, and they have parents who are willing and able to pay it.

They have the buildings, fields and facilities, and attract top teachers. So do the best of the state schools – former model C institutions that look like, and operate exactly as the best of the private schools do.

And when you speak about inequality, you are talking about our past. Uneven resourcing of education was the cornerstone of apartheid education and 22 years of democracy hasn’t dented that legacy.

The radio hosts and their callers spoke about what to do to close that gap and, understandably, they got nowhere.

It’s about money of course, and if anyone knew how to get rid of the inequalities then this, along with many other problems, will go away. But we don’t of course, and so people spoke of making the private schools reach out to the underperformers, lifting them, and of redistributing the good teachers (that’s one that Gauteng MEC Lesufi comes back to from time to time).

What no-one did – even though it’s the obvious thing – was talk about leadership.

What do the high performers, public and private have in common? They function – on every one of the 200-odd days in the school year. And they do so because school management insists on it.

In the case of the private (and many state schools) it’s easy. Principals are well qualified and well paid. They are assisted by councils or governing bodies made up of experts in various fields who are efficient and motivated, and they have the resources to put plans in place.

Getting everyone to do their jobs properly is not so difficult there – it’s what happens in successful organisations everywhere. But what happens in those under-performing schools? Who is the principal, and what does he or she do? There’s no money, and the teachers are demotivated and often incompetent. The support from the community and the governing body is often non-existent.

Under those circumstances getting teaching and learning to take place every day is not so easy, and looking at the results, it clearly isn’t happening.

Yet a number of schools who operate under those circumstances do produce extraordinary results. You’ll find, I’m sure, that at every one of them there is a leader, and a management team, that has risen above the challenges, and that insists on everyone doing their job – teaching children, every day.

Identifying that common factor is far easier than doing something about it. Clearly it’s the state’s job to do that. They have the taxpayers' money, and the education departments have the reach to get into every school. They aren’t doing the right things, though. The results show that, and the shocking statistic is that, of the 25 000 schools in the country, proper teaching and learning only happens at about 5 000 (and that includes the private schools).

So, those who care realise they have to do something about it themselves and aid projects in education have sprung up all over the place. I went to a conference a few years ago where, for three solid days, I heard about the wonderful things organisations were doing, and about the money that corporations were spending, trying to help.

Not that many of them seemed to have much lasting impact. As with much aid, many projects were short-term and unsustainable and impossible to scale up.

And few of them focused on leadership. I wondered at the time why the educational experts weren’t trying to replicate what was happening at those under-resourced schools that were doing well.

There are obviously those who are working on it. And the best of those, I’d wager, are looking at the principals. Find a way to get more of those effective, no-nonsense leaders into more schools and support them, and we will at least be making a start.

The educational authorities should be running in-service training for principals and, most importantly, induction and orientation programmes for new appointees.

They have other priorities, I know, and the scale of the problem is intimidating. That’s why I salute those aid programmes who have recognised that you have to have effective leaders, in every school, and are tackling the problem from that end.

The kids who achieved multiple distinctions worked hard for them – their privileged circumstances didn’t do it for them on their own. But they were at schools led by men and women who recognised that their job was to make it all possible. And they did their jobs.

Let’s get the leaders right, one school at a time – that’s my two cents worth.

We have to do this better

I have never denied the justification for, and the need for urgency in, the implementation of transformation in sport.

The playing fields were decidedly uneven in the past and that’s reflected in the race composition of representative teams. Those who run sport have to change that, and the mere passage of 22 years since the introduction of democracy was never going to do that on its own.

Action was needed, and it still needs to be taken. Positive, pro-active action – affirmative action.

What I have railed against at times when I’ve felt the need to toss in my two cents worth over the 20-odd years that I’ve been writing about this stuff, is the practice of enforcing race quotas on representative teams and then using the number of black faces in team pictures as an indication of the success of the process.

True affirmative action is about identifying potential and developing it. Quota-based selection is a political move.

Sure, creating role models is an important part of growing sport in areas where it has never been allowed to grow because of past injustices, but wouldn’t it be better if those black role models were there on their own merits, instead of being the manifestation of compliance issues.

The sports federations aren’t innocent in all of this. Enforced quotas shouldn’t still be an issue in 2016, and they wouldn’t be if proper affirmative action had been implemented much earlier on.

And racism, I’m afraid, still plays a role in selection. That’s why so many still see quotas as justifiable after all this time, and why they sometimes are.

I know it’s all a bit of an academic discussion – and it’s easy to say things like “if we have to lose matches now to ensure a more representative future, then so be it”. Or “if the odd deserving white player loses out, that’s nothing compared to the many deserving black players who never had a chance in the past.”

I’ve subscribed to those views in the past, and brought them up them in discussions to justify the current policies.

It’s not so easy, though, when one of those excluded white players has a face, and you are looking straight at it as he, after being named in the B team, stands there watching A team players who everyone present, including the selectors, I’d wager, know are not as good as he is, being called up to receive their caps.

That happened to me at the awards dinner at the conclusion of the Coca-Cola Khaya Majola Week on Tuesday, and I found my journalistic neutrality wither and die in the face of the anguish that child was clearly suffering,

OK, I’ve met the boy before – interviewed him and wrote about him – so I don’t hold a totally unbiased view. He’s a super kid, and a great cricketer who I am confident will go far in the game. He didn’t deserve what happened to him, just as those who lost out in the past, didn’t.

We managed to confront one of the selectors afterwards, who mumbled something about the balance of the team and told us to ask whose position was player in question directly contesting, but even my old blind friend on his galloping horse knew it was all about the racial composition of the team.

We have to do this better, because what happened in Bloemfontein on Tuesday night was neither sporting nor educational, which makes you wonder how the entire concept of selecting teams based on performances at a week like this can be justified at all.

It’s not an original story, but that’s my two cents worth on it, anyway.

Khaya Majola Week final day

It was decided by someone, somewhere, a few years ago that the Coca-Cola Khaya Majola Week should revert to being a festival, with no overall winner in the end.

That’s what it was for many years until, in 1995, it became a limited-overs knockout tournament, in two sections with cross-pool playoffs, semi-finals and a final, a winner’s trophy, and classification games all the way down to last position.

All the good reasons why they ran it that way then apparently disappeared and it was decreed that the week would follow the philosophy of Coca-Cola’s other youth interprovincial week, the rugby Craven Week – that there is no winner and that the two teams that play the best rugby (cricket, in this case) will meet in the so called “main game” on the final day of the week.

At the Craven Week, for years now, no-one is buying the friendly, no winners or losers line, and the victorious team in the main game is called the champion team, even in the SA Rugby press releases.

The same goes at this week, really. Gauteng were called the defending champions, coming in, and they will be going home having relinquished the title they have held for the past three years.

I’ve always rather liked the Corinthian spirit in sport, but even I have to confess that times have changed and that, these days, no-one’s really interested in a competition where there is no winner.

So, why not go all the way and bring back the cup? One reason, I suppose, is that the Khaya Majola Week features all thee formats of cricket: declaration games, T20s and 50-a-side limited overs.

That’s to let the players express themselves in different ways and it would be impossible to arrive at official finalists at the end of a mixed week like that.

Still, however they got there, and official or not, we have two new finalists this year in Free State and Northerns, and no-one who was here would argue that they don’t richly deserve to be in the big game today.

They were a joy to watch and they have some serious future stars in their ranks. Note down the names Schreuder, Van Tonder, De Swardt, Visser, Msiza. For my two cents worth, we are going to hear about them again in the years to come.

It’s the final day in Bloemfontein – I’m not staying for the often anticlimactic SA Schools game tomorrow – and I will leave with my view that the best tournaments of this type are always held in the smaller centres very much intact.

On day 3 at the Khaya Majola Week

It was Nat minister Piet Koornhof who was reputed to have said, “those are my principles, but if you don’t like them, I have others”.

I was reminded of that in Bloemfontein on Sunday while we were watching Boland play Western Province in a T20 game at the Coca-Cola Khaya Majola Week.

I noticed, well actually I already knew but checked the official brochure to make sure, that there were boys from the same school playing for both provinces on the field.

Yes, believe it or not: there were three players in the WP team who had Western Cape Sports School listed as the school they came from, and two in the Boland team who also hailed from there.

I noticed that we had officials from both provinces sheltering from the fierce Free Sate sun under the same shady tree we were, so I popped the not so innocent question “is it true, that boys from the same school play for different provinces down in the Western Cape?”

The response was illuminating, and might not have been as frank if the people involved in the ensuing discussion had realised that they were in the presence of most of the media contingent who are at the week this year.

Apart from the obvious animosity between the cricketing structures of the two provinces, which bubbled along underwater, and stuck its head up and out from time to time, it was clear that the imposition of the political Western Cape province on top of the Boland and Western Province cricket unions – both of them over 100 years old – has not been a smooth process.

What it has meant is that the official educational provincial boundaries are those of the Western Cape province, and the cricket unions don’t really exist as geographic entities.

So, it was short move (and, in education departmental terms, a legal one) to say, let’s allow our specialist sports school to supply players of colour to both unions.

And Cricket South Africa is clearly allowing it to happen because they want the talented young black African players they have identified to attend a school with a good coaching structure.

Because that’s what it is, it emerged from the discussion on Sunday. Both unions have placed talented players (black African players, in particular) on bursaries at the Western Cape sports school.

And while WP has 1^st choice (an issue that clearly does not sit well with the Boland guys) on the players at the school – it is in Cape Town, after all – each union is investing in players for its own future and can select them for weeks such as this one.

“It’s a special arrangement, one made specifically for the purpose of developing top cricketers of colour,” is how one of the officials described it.

I guess you can’t really knock an agreement that has been made with transformation and development in mind, but I’ve been sounding off on points of principle for a while now and if you allow boys to be chosen from schools outside of their province in one instance, how can you prohibit it in others?

It’s a bit like saying, “those are my principles, but if you don’t like them, I have others”.

Well, that’s my two cents worth, anyway.

Two days to go at the Coca-Cola Khaya Majola Week, and it’s been fabulous in Bloemfontein, as I knew it would be.

Khaya Majola Week Day 2

The second day of this Coca-Cola Khaya Majola Week will stick in my memory as the day when the form book was chucked out of the window and the tournament’s overwhelming favourites, Gauteng and Western Province were both beaten.

In Gauteng’s case, it was their first defeat at this week since the last game of the 2012 week in Potchefstroom when they went down to Western Province.

They were well beaten by Eastern Province on Saturday and the defeat proved a point that I’ve been making – an unbeaten team faces big psychological challenges in maintaining their winning run.

EP are always one of the top teams, but Gauteng, with their SA under-19 players, and the current man of the moment, Wiaan Mulder, in their ranks, were firmly expected to win.

But they still had to go out and win it. Their bowling and fielding was not great – they let EP get to 226 – and then their top order collapsed and only Mitchell Van Buuren, with 70, made an impact with the bat.

So they lost for the first time in three years, although their chances of playing in the week’s prestigious main game haven’t altogether disappeared yet.

Western Province were Gauteng’s opponents in all those finals and they also came into the week with a crackerjack side and were expected to sail through. Their loss to Easterns on the second day proved another sporting point: no matter how good you are, your opponents still have every right to produce an excellent performance.

In this case, Easterns batsman Louis Oosthuizen hit a brilliant century, to help his side chase down a good WP total and there went WP’s chances of finishing unbeaten.

By lunchtime on day three, the fortunes of the two sides had taken very different routes. WP lost again – to their neighbours Boland, in a T20 game, while Gauteng bounced back by thrashing SWD by 117, with Wiaan Mulder smashing 104 off just 59 balls.

There should always be lessons to learn in sport and, for my two cents worth, the points to emerge out of this are: unbeaten runs always end; you don’t win games by simply turning up – your opponents are also there to play; and should you lose, there’s always the next game to redeem yourself in.

Gauteng did that, Western Province? Not so much.

Day 1 at the Khaya Majola Week

Days one and two of the Coca-Cola Khaya Majola cricket week have, for the past few years, been given over to “time” cricket, which means good old-fashioned declaration cricket, with a twist.

The variation is the introduction of a club cricket practice that deems the taking of five of the second innings wickets of the team chasing victory as “all out”, giving the bowling team outright victory.

And, if the team batting second falls short of the 1^st innings target, or alternatively passes it, then “match drawn, team A, or B, won on 1^st innings” is the official result.

If you didn’t quite understand that, then don’t worry, no-one really does, not the umpires, not the players, and certainly not us in the media who have to write it all up in the form of summarised scores at the end of each day.

It’s all part of Cricket South Africa’s practice, over the past few years of including all three formats of the game – declaration, T20 and limited-overs – in their interprovincial youth weeks.

The idea is that the players need to experience all three formats in a pressurised environment as part of their preparation for cricket at a higher level.

Day one produced no outright results, and four 1^st innings wins in the 8 games played. My impression – shared by many – is that the schoolboy captains just don’t have enough experience of this type of cricket to make strategically effective declarations, so these game are almost always going to end up as draws.

If you want my two cents worth, I would say that the boys need to experience this aspect of the game, but maybe a two-day game would provide a better opportunity for them to develop the skills required.

Gauteng came into the week with three consecutive “main game” victories under their belts, and the label of favourites. They encountered a good KwaZulu-Natal attack, on a damp track and were 14/3 down in a flash and looked set to relinquish that record.

Their SA under-19 players, Wiaan Mulder and Mitchell Van Buuren then stepped up and produced a gutsy, patient, fight-back to get their side back in the game. Then, when the pitch became easier, they cut loose. Van Buuren got 106, Mulder 53, and then Muhammed Mayet replaced Mulder and made 57 – effectively taking the game away from KZN.

Much is expected of Mulder and Van Buuren, and they delivered. There are quite a few other SA under-19 players in Bloem this week and they experienced mixed fortunes on day one.

Free State’s Raynard Van Tonder, Gauteng’s Wandile Makwethu and Ruan de Swardt of Northerns all failed with the bat, but Keenan Smith of EP took the only five wicket haul of the day, while Jesse Christensen of Western Province Matthew Breetzke of Eastern Province were all among the runs.

I’ve been at this tournament more times than I’m prepared to admit to and, after just one day, I can safely say the Bloemfontein week is going to be as good as any.

It’s been heart-breakingly dry in the Free State this summer, so it was always on the cards that the cricket was going to bring the rain and, sure enough, Bloemfontein experienced a massive thunderstorm on Thursday night.

That meant some of the fields were wet on the opening morning, but plans were made and the games went ahead. The flow of information to the media centre was seamless, the people are friendly and the meals are excellent.

And, out in the sun, the boys are already putting in the performances – one century and 12 half centuries on the 1^st day.

I’m one of a horde of people who give up the week before Christmas, every year, to attend this event. Today showed, again, why we do it.

My Top 10 for 2016

My departure from Independent Newspapers on a, nominally, voluntary severance deal, while not really a surprise, did come rather suddenly, which meant my end-of-year routine was thrown a bit.

In the bustle and uncertainty – it seemed for a while that they had come to their senses and recognised that dropping a publication as popular with readers as the Saturday Star SchoolSports supplement was madness – I let the last edition slip by without my customary review of the year and the listing of my top 10 school sporting achievements

The resurrection of SchoolSports never happened. So, in the interests of tying off 2016, here’s my two cents worth on the top events in Joburg I attended during the year, in no particular order:

     1. Let’s start with the usual suspects, and the first of those has to be St Benedict’s College, winners for the 23^rd consecutive year of the boys competition at the SA Schools rowing championships.

     Their prowess is very much based on their strength in depth, which means they work harder than anyone else, and while they carry on doing that then, frankly, you can’t see anyone toppling them any time soon.

     

     2.  In similar vein, Northcliff High School took the Joburg co-ed schools A league athletics title for the 20^th year in a row. They have an obsessive culture of winning that no-one has been able to emulate.

3. St Mary’s School, Waverley are probably, pound for pound, Joburg’s top sporting school (they are at the top of the pile in just about every other school activity as well). Their achievements are summed up in two photographs they send me to publish each year: the girls who receive provincial colours, and those who make national teams.

They are both half-page affairs and in themselves they make the highlights list. In the process St Mary’s won the hockey Pullen Trophy; were narrow runners-up in their own national hockey festival; won the girls school athletics, tennis and squash leagues and were runners-up in the swimming and at the SA Schools rowing champs.

4. St Stithians Girls College could well challenge St Mary’s prowess in the years to come. In 2016 they emerged as real contenders in water polo. Under the coaching of SA men’s polo captain, Pierre Le Roux, they were runners-up at the St Peter’s Festival in March, and then went on to win the Clarendon and the Saints Invitational Tournaments in the second half of the year.

5. Four of my highlight spots go to outstanding individuals. The first is Patrick Duvenhage of King Edward VII School, whose high school athletics career ended this year without him ever being beaten in the discus or shotput. In the process, he broke every record in the books of those two events, and was ranked number one in the country through the age groups.

He has played a big part in KES’ prowess in boys schools athletics over the past five years and they’re going to miss him.

6. Jeppe High School for Boys are similarly going to miss Wandile Simelane. He has been one of the stars in their successful 1^st rugby team over the last two years, and made the SA Schools rugby team for the second year in a row after the Craven Week this year. He then went on to play for the Golden Lions under-19 team at the end of the season.

He was, quite simply, the most exciting back on display in schoolboy rugby this year and was the most talked-about wherever he played, including on the biggest stage – the Coca-Cola Craven Week.

7. The third individual shiner hasn’t quite completed the outstanding feat that caught my eye, but those in the know confidently expect him to do so at the Khaya Majola Cricket Week next week. He is Ruan “Patches” De Swardt of Pretoria’s Affies.

He was in the SA Schools Colts cricket team at the end of 2015, and then made the SA Schools team at the Craven Week this year. If he is named in the SA Schools team at the cricket week next weekend. He will be only the 12^th to make both sides, and the first since Adrian Penzhorn of Maritzburg College did so in 2002.

8. The fourth of those individual over-achievers is Wiaan Mulder. The St Stithians cricketer also has another chapter still to write – he will captain the Gauteng team at the Khaya Majola Week – but he already has a List A century and a “fifer” to his name and they are whispering “the next Jacques Kallis” about him.

He was player of the tournament at last year’s Majola Week, and at the Coca-Cola Schools T20 Challenge, and led the SA under-19 team to Bangladesh earlier in the year.

You have to believe those who are predicting that he will be in the national side sooner rather than later.

9. In the process, Mulder steered St Stithians College to the greatest cricketing era in the school’s history. When they lost to Affies in a T20 game in October it was their first defeat in three years – a 71-game unbeaten run – and they have won every honour that a school team can.

The number of their players making Gauteng provincial teams in the various age groups, alone, is worthy of my highlights reel.

10. The final spot in this random listing has to go the King Edward 1^st eight crew. I never saw them win the Schools Boat Race in Port Alfred last week, but I was there when they shocked friend and, especially, foe, by winning the premier race at the Gauteng Rowing Championships at Roodeplaat a few weeks ago. It was a return to prominence by a school that has taken a back seat in recent years and that they put one over their better-resourced private school rivals is, for my two cents, worthy of the year’s highlights package.

Speak to you from the cricket in Bloemfontein next week ….

It's cricket week time

The Christmas holidays always kick off with a flurry of inter-provincial action, with the two big summer school sports, cricket and waterpolo, holding their national tournaments, along with various other codes.

It's a very big deal for the boys and girls selected and in the case of the under-18 Cola-Cola Khaya Majola Cricket Week, anyway, it's one of the few occasions when school sport gets a mention in the mainstream sports media.

For the children, and for those who run the events, it's hard work, at a time when everyone else is on holiday, and my two cents worth is that we should be taking off our hats to all of them

The SA Schools Waterpolo championship, which is on at the moment is one of the biggest sports events on the calendar, involving boys and girls teams, in all the age groups, from under-13 to under-19.

I know both tournaments quite well. In my teaching days I was a waterpolo person and I attended SA Schools as a manager or coach 17 years in a row. In my next life, as a newspaper reporter, I have been going to the Coke Cricket Week for the last 20 years.

I'm going to be at the cricket week again this year, and it could quite possibly be for the last time, seeing I’m no longer a newspaper man. The sponsors have been generously sending me to the Khaya Majola Week for quite a few years now - Independent Newspapers decided to stop paying for feet on the ground in the days of their Irish owners already - and because, as quid quo pro, I perform some other non-media tasks for Cricket South Africa at the tournament, they insisted that I go along this year anyway.

And when I get there I know I will once again be dumbstruck at the hordes of grown up people who have given up a week of their hard-earned leave - the week before Christmas, no less - to organise and run an event for 17 and 18 year-olds, with no remuneration. In fact in many cases it will be costing them money to be there.

The Khaya Majola Week is run with military precision. A local organising committee has been working all year on the arrangements and Morgan Pillay, the week's permanent secretary will be keeping an eye on things, and using his charm and particular brand of emotional blackmail to get people to do extraordinary things beyond the call of why they got involved in the first place. 

Cricket South Africa’s manager of amateur cricket Niels Momberg's formidable presence is also always there, looming in the background, refusing to accept excuses, and not suffering fools gladly.

And the upshot is that, for the kids it’s a seamless week of fun in the sun. The fields are always immaculate, and alternatives miraculously appear if and when rain spoils the party; there are umpires; scorers; drinks and lunches and transportation to the many far-flung fields that a tournament of this scale requires.

And at the heart of it are the teacher volunteers. They spend hours running the game at their own schools and then find more time to attend trials, select and prune squads, coach and manage teams through pre-tournament friendlies and then give up their holidays. Luckily, very few of them are unionised, Sadtu wouldn’t allow that sort of abuse of its members.

They make up the numbers in every rank of the organising structures; local committee, organisers, lunch ladies, umpires and hostel staff where the boys are staying.

And the process, hangers-on like me are treated royally and, thanks to Morgan Pillay in particular, made to feel welcome and appreciated.

That’s what makes the Khaya Majola Week the envy of the other cricket-playing nations.

It’s a national treasure, and that’s my two cents worth.

A fresh start

Call me troubled, but I miss the opportunity to crack wise, now that Independent Newspapers has decided that I am surplus to their requirements and that my two supplements - the Star Workplace and the Saturday Star School Sport - do not form part of their future plans.

My two cents worth on that: the owners are perfectly right when they say there is no point in going on as an exclusively print media company, in the face of dwindling circulation and diminishing advertising revenues.

So, Independent is to become a multi-media publisher. Great idea, but there's no indication of how that is going to happen and, when it does, how it's going to help things. Everything I've read indicates that even the most famous newspapers around the world are still scratching their heads when it comes to monetising their online offerings.

And, since the media will always be about content, you still need a newsroom to produce that. Your competitive edge in the crowded online news market will be the quality of your content (as it is in every commercial endeavour), so how will getting rid of your best and most experienced journalists help your cause?

Sure, us grey-heads aren't that tech-savvy - although we can learn, I've started a blog, for goodness sake! But to replace the oldies with kids who are good with their thumbs and know how to simultaneously put the same Apple Iphone pictures on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram doesn't really make business sense.

They might be able to record an event on their phones and have a clip posted on Youtube while I'm still busy scribbling down notes and trying to focus my old trustworthy Canon, but no-one has been able to explain to me you make money out of posting things on all those apps.

I would have thought you need both: old-fashioned hacks like me who can sniff out the real story that's always there, and render it in readable English, and the tech-savvy kids who can promote the newspaper, generating circulation and advertising sales.

And that's not just me talking. A couple of centuries, collectively, of experience and knowledge walked out of Independent last Wednesday, including some of the best, award-winning, writers in the profession. Everyone I spoke to agreed with what I say.

But there was nothing voluntary about it. In my case my supplements simply did not appear on the new organogram, and when it came to applying for a new job (as everyone was required to do) my only option was to try for a "multi-media content provider" position four rungs down on the Patterson grading scale, advertised at half the salary I was earning.

That's the equivalent of firing me, no question, and most of the others who opted for VSPs were in the same boat.

So, it's a fresh start for me. I haven't given up on the idea of still producing a school sport supplement in print. Part of its value, I think, lies in scrap books. Everyone keeps clippings of their appearances in print, or those of their children, and you can't do that with online publications.

Websites have other advantages of course - they have a longer shelf-life; there aren't the same space limitations; reports can be updated; and it's cheaper to advertise there. So, a group of us are working on an online school newspaper which can cover sport, but also those other, equally important areas of school life like academics, cultural activities, community service etc. Watch this space!

In the week since my independence from Independent some have been kind enough to express disbelief and disapproval at the ending of what I used to do. I'm hoping the few who read this musing will pass it along to others who may feel that way.

If not, well at least I've had my two cents worth, and as, I now realise, one who is addicted to having my say put out for others to read, I feel a lot better.

Back soon.