planning, creating and developing a rugby programme at a non-rugby playing comprehensive school in the south midlands rugby desert.
On a cold, rainy night at Kingsholm, myself and three good friends stood exchanging possibilities in school rugby. There were many. It was relatively easy to point to examples of school rugby done well: Oxfordshire itself was saturated with well-monied programmes, within independent schools and large city colleges. Radley, Abingdon, Teddies, Cokethorpe, Magdalen; City of Oxford, Henley. There was no shortage of rugby, it seemed. Yet when we looked closer, these weren’t really in Oxfordshire – their fixture lists alone covered hundreds of miles across the south of England. Also, more pressingly for us, most of them were stuck behind a paywall. These combined, if you were 12-years-old and weren’t already within the rugby family, or weren’t already at an independent school, there is a high likelihood that you would have no idea that any rugby was happening at all! And indeed, everywhere else, it wasn’t. This is the rugby desert of Oxfordshire and Wiltshire – the corridor between Bristol, Bath and Gloucester, and Reading and London. Where rugby was happening, but nobody was seeming to care.
I have had the pleasure of working in one of three capitals for rugby in England. I’m referring to Leicester, Northampton, and, my bias, Gloucester. What marks all three of these out from others is a foundation of a working class community; Gloucester, in particular. Although neigbouring Cheltenham (where people do the nights out), the journey across the golden valley to Gloucester (where people return from the nights out) is a step into a very different city landscape. Kingsholm, Barton, Tredworth, Matson; these areas are low on the socio-economic scale. In Barton, central Gloucester, an estimated 37% of children live in poverty. In an environment like this, some might stereotype rugby as anathema to Gloucester – rugby union does not do well to present itself as much other than a sport played by upper-class, privately-educated gentlemen. However, quite unlike most places in England, rugby is the conversation. In my time within Gloucester Rugby, through their Community and Foundation, I was quite amazed (and jealous) at how much rugby was actually played in the community, even post-covid. Gloucester boasts almost 20 senior men’s clubs, most with junior sections, most able to field second teams, and, perhaps most amazing, almost every school (independent and comprehensive) fields a rugby team for every year group. Not even Bath or Bristol (three times the size of Gloucester) compares quite to the saturation of rugby in Gloucester. It was from this experience of rugby in circumstances that were quite unlike the Game’s stereotype that showed me that rugby is possible anywhere, with anyone. It just takes people.
I arrived in spirit and energy at King Alfred’s Academy (10 minutes drive from the Uffington White Horse) in late Spring of 2023. Wantage town and the neighbouring Grove village is a wet part of the country; in damper times of the year, its roads-flooded-per-square-mile must be one of the highest in the UK, as reported from a grumpy commuter. Football is the leading game, but there is historic rugby heritage in Grove RFC, who outplay their village surroundings up between Level 5, 6 and 7 of the community leagues. King Alfred’s (KAs) itself used to be spread across Wantage, but with the closing of East site, it now exists between its West site (near East Challow) and Centre site (at the gateway to Wantage town centre). As the largest and only comprehensive in the area, KAs welcomes over 1,600 students to its campuses. KAs used to be a sports college, and travelling around as I have done, I have been surprised at the array of ex-students who you bump into in funny places who studied there. From a Head Analyst at a premiership women’s rugby team, a senior player within the women’s Army squad, national age grade taekwondo champions, and others, KAs certainly does have a wide range of alumni. Despite its sport college days being far behind it, there are still a large proportion of post-16 students enrolled on sports courses. As a few people in the area told me, KAs was unique in comparable schools in its encouragement and promotion of sport and PE.
I began with a remit to build a rugby programme that stretched through the KAs pathway, from Year 7 to Year 13. It was an ambitious task. There were perhaps three big hurdles to take on: firstly, rugby hadn’t been played (i.e., a fixture) for at least two years across almost all age groups. Their “golden generation” team had last played in Year 10, and almost all had since moved onto other sixth forms, colleges, or apprenticeships. Secondly, there were no rugby posts (and hadn’t been since 2017). While I am a firm believer in rugby only needing grass, cones and a ball to be played, there is a lot of symbolism in the infrastructure of a sport being at a school. I remember my first time representing my old school in a rugby fixture away at Millfield and just gobsmacked at the amount of rugby posts that looked like the ones I saw on TV. It says that we play rugby. Thirdly, and in as deep a Wiltshire accent as you can imagine, nobody knew anyone (“nooobodie knoows nooo-wan”). Rugby, maybe more than most sports, is a networked game. It doesn’t just mean knowing who other Heads of Rugby are, but also who to contact about regional fixtures and competitions, DPP and Academy opportunities, touring, even referees for home matches. And quite simply, these links weren’t known by anyone at the school. These challenges almost certainly are ones faced by many comprehensive schools across the country, and are the taken-for-granted necessities of “rugby programmes”. What I hope to lay out below is how we took on these hurdles, found some unexpected others, and forged opportunities for players (new and old) to develop themselves and get playing the Game.
reflection 1. There is no such thing as “starting from scratch”.
The phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants” isn’t used enough. Even if you’re not a Sir Isaac Newton fan or in the top-10% of Oasis listeners in your Spotify Wrapped, we should all think about it more. It means being inspired by the people (specifically, the “greats”) before you. Newton used it when writing about his inspiration from the philosopher Descartes, Noel Gallagher used the phrase for an Oasis album title to celebrate their influences from The Beatles, among others. There is something powerful about referring to what came before you. It grounds you. It places you somewhere on Earth, in time and space. In many ways, it also shows you the way forward. The Maori call the story of where you came from (your “genealogy”) your “Whakapapa”. Someone who has developed an expertise in Whakapapa can not only trace their own history through generations in a linear sense, they can connect their story between generations in a lateral sense. Knowing where you are, historically, is both knowing what came before you, what created you, and where you are placed within those around you.
At KAs, I began to examine what came before. That meant not just looking top-down and what was what: the no fixtures, the no posts, the no connections, these things were obvious, but they weren’t in themselves critical problems. I needed to find out what rugby was like in the community. This meant finding the “doers”, the people who defined and drove the rugby community, among the players, coaches, parents and teachers. My first stop was the rugby club. At community clubs like Grove RFC, as with every club I have ever visited, there are always fantastic human beings who are passionate about providing opportunities for young people. Of the many, the ones that immediately struck me were the double act of Steve and Andy, passionate U14 coaches who had brought their boys up through the age grades; Steve was on his second run! The biggest clue for me that there was a community here was the boys they had grown: a full, raving compliment of front row props, barnstorming backrowers, and wicked fast wingers, all drawn together by nothing better than mate-ship. For me, good work in community rugby always starts with kids becoming mates. It is not much more than that. Create opportunities for friendship, show them a bit of rugby, and young people always, always, always, vote with their feet.
One of the pillars of our strategy for developing rugby was to capitalise on previous success, and ensure that those who were playing had nothing less than a quality experience. Cut to 13 months after our launch, over 30+ Year 9 students (boys and girls, many of whom with no previous experience of rugby) have represented KAs at school fixtures and competitions, including two visits to Kingsholm for a regional game and a regional final, as well as an inaugural visit to Rosslyn Park 7s. The jazzy things like stadium trips and sevens festivals are, as a mentor of mine says, inspirational for boys and girls to play and stay in the game. However, they are also not the whole story. They are supported by having a rugby family to turn to that got them there in the first place. If anything, what we managed to achieve with the group, important as it was, was icing on the cake.
Whakapapa isn’t just an “awareness” of what has come before. It is a way of knowing; knowing why the next step in the journey is important, what this next step means for the people within the group, and where further we can go. It’s weird to think that the experiences we created are probably memories that will far outlast me. I’ve been lucky enough to play at Twickenham twice, and I remember those days vividly. To create those experiences, to build the meaning of them for the boys who played in stadiums and at international sevens tournaments, it takes knowing what they have come from. While we may have lost that regional final at Kingsholm, it was a special experience for me personally to look across at those boys, huddled together post-match, as teams for the next final began their preparations and ours had duly finished. They were sad, obviously. But this felt like a peak in their journey. Almost all of them played rugby regularly at Grove RFC, that village-based rugby club, this was their first, “proper”, school rugby season, and here we were finishing up after a regional final in a stadium. Because we knew where we had come from, we knew how far we had gone, and how much further we have to go.
reflection 2. Time and space for reviews are vital.
Teaching in a comprehensive school is as manic as they say. There is maybe an hour of peace, and that is an amalgamation of various splotches of time across lessons when students are actually active. I normally sip my coffee at the start of tutor, halfway through a football or basketball match I have started, and at the beginning and end of lunch breaks. Frees during the day are spent planning, marking, and responding to internal admin (e.g., A has been suspended, B was isolated from last lesson, C hasn’t been completing class assignments). In a day, you will probably interact with a few hundred different students, each with their own needs, dilemmas, highlights and lowlights. Similarly, there are plenty of mini-incidents that require full attention; from supporting a young person to serve correctly in volleyball, to challenging disrespectful behaviour in a corridor, to laughing and connecting with a group you are beginning to enjoy teaching. There is no doubt that it is immersive. Most school jobs advertise for a willingness to participate within the school community; there is definitely no humanly way possible to avoid it.
It was through this day-to-day that it began to dawn on me. It’s actually quite a stupidly obvious observation! There is no time. In a previous life, much of what I did was liaise directly with teachers and school-based coaches. This may have been to offer support for talented students, advertise coaching packages or provide teacher CPD. There were lots of moments that I was a bit frustrated at the lack of urgency in responding to what I thought were quite inane emails. However, being in this, I belatedly discovered a heap of empathy. How could any reasonable teacher keep on top of “school” and “rugby” life? Everything I knew about developing rugby existed through my networks, through people I had taken the time to visit, meet with and attend development days with. For the vast part of my coaching career I have been coaching most evenings, quite happy to travel, and religious in planning. The threat now presented to me was that it was fairly impossible (without help) for a teacher in this context to keep on top of the school rugby world if they had themselves not been within it. The bubble of normal school – not school with dedicated games afternoons – was not being burst by the rugby network. If anything, everything about the rugby network (i.e., things seemingly being passed through who you know or networks you are already in) was restricting teachers from joining it.
As terms carried on, I found myself being drawn into the bubble. Of course, it is true that any group or place carries with it a bit of immersion. For example, if you work at a company, it’s not a surprise that after a while you start to see the world from the perspective of you being within that company. A crisis that happens in your industry becomes meaningful not only because it is a significant event, but because it is a significant event that could affect you. There is nothing unnatural about that. Similarly, when you work with people every day, you start seeing your life as inclusive of seeing those people every day. While normal, this can be a bit scary, especially if you feel that there are other things going on in your life that you might think are as important or more important thatn work (e.g., the job you are in is a stepping stone for you; you’re completing part-time study alongside work; you try to keep a healthy work-life balance where you are seeing regularly family and friends). If you’ve ever woken up from a dream about work, worried about work, wishing you weren’t thinking about work, you know what I mean! About the bubble of school life, a recurring anxiety was that I wasn’t in the loop as much as I thought I was.
What was a saving grace for me, not just here, but in lots of places I have been, was a rugby family of helping, supportive and loving people. I can never say enough praise for Jan (England Schools), Terry (Marlborough College), James (Radley College), among many others, who have spared time in their busy schedules to help, via phone, coffee or kind words. But also, within the KAs community, having passionate ambassadors for this project – in particular Chelle and Adam – who share the vision has been vital. We meet in a poorly-connected staffroom, surrounded by packet coffee and half-full milk jugs, to talk about the future of rugby at KAs. These little sanctuaries steal away from the mania of school life. For 60 short minutes, we talk about our project. There are lots of times where we might slip into school-talk, and its sometimes unavoidable. But there are precious minutes where we can see the good we can do and are doing.
Saving, reviewing, and protecting these moments is much of my purpose now. Before, when time was not so precious, I might have approached these with a little more entitlement and almost certainly taken them for granted. After all, who doesn’t have time to talk rugby? The answer is pretty much most people. Most people do not care, or have the time. So to install change, a fundamental step is getting the right people, behind a cause that matters, and, crucially, creating time and space to get out of the bubble. This has to be purposeful. Without review and reflection, we slip back into the bubble of day-to-day, fighting without cause.
reflection 3. It may not be probable, but it is always possible.
So many of the people we spoke to, when we started, looked at us with an eyebrow raised. I remember, semi-fondly, of an Open Evening we hosted right at the launch of the project where a parent – quite rightly – asked: “How can you have a rugby programme when you haven’t even got rugby posts?”. They were spot on. My experience so far in school rugby was that matches involved posts. They also involved painted lines, marking the shape of a rugby pitch. Perhaps even a few rugby balls. Oh, and jerseys too. We simply didn’t have any of that. I can’t remember how I answered their question, but I do remember the car journey home, questioning the decision I made to get onboard this project. How can we really say that we are even playing rugby when we haven’t got a pitch?
This is one of the many worries and anxieties I have had (some I definitely still carry) over the course of this project. It just didn’t seem quite possible. Yet, after a furious few months advertising for sixth form places in our newly-launched “Vale Rugby Academy”, we began the school year with 5 rugby players. Some will read that as only 5. I read that quite differently: 5 young men were brave enough to choose a programme and a group of people that were committed to develop them. And they are quite the group of young men. We’re excited to work with them. Since then, we have almost tripled our application numbers, and are delighted to have installed rugby posts (for the first time in over 7 years), founded the Vale Rugby brand, arranged new kit for our age groups, and have a locker full of equipment kindly donated by friends of the school.
How we got there was twofold. Firstly, it was step-by-step, person-by-person. A rugby programme is nothing without games played. It is about playing the game and representing something bigger than yourself. Behind the scenes, this meant that we needed to get enough members of staff from other schools onside to arrange fixtures, particularly for the older group. This is a unique challenge for comprehensive schools, as there are no regular block fixtures arranged, few festivals to participate in, and scrambled contacts as PE staff, who may briefly be in charge of rugby at a school, shift and swap with little handover. Despite this, we were fortunate that, through connections, we knew enough teachers to get matches happening, and had two age groups participating in National and Regional competitions by September. This also meant promoting the project to the young people at KAs. This is best attacked through enjoyable, quality training sessions that lead to fun, meaningful fixtures, however we also sought to do more than this and establish rugby on the community agenda. We did this, in short, through social media presence. So much of young people’s worlds are shaped by social media now, and we tried to use Instagram content (@valerugbypathway) as a connecting link between their phones and actual, genuine participation. If it was post-match photos, Instagram reels of filmed highlights, or interesting graphics showing statistics or the Team of the Week, we aimed to get rugby visible. If you looked, you would see that rugby was happening. That was our aim, and a platform that we used to build interest and subsequently participation.
We also leant heavily on our connections to give pathways for young people beyond school. Some might engage briefly with school rugby, but the best way to engage them was out-of-hours, in evening sessions away from school. Through a partnership with Grove RFC, we created a Girls Rugby team for Year 9 to Year 11, training on Tuesday nights come rain or shine. I was often surprised at who would be there on the Tuesday night and who wouldn’t be there on the Wednesday afternoon when we would run a school-based “club-feeder” session. Some of the girls genuinely found it easier to participate when out of school, away from the stigmatizing eyes of their peers. We also found opportunities for aspirational young rugby players at KAs. Rugby is not just a vehicle for enjoyment and time with friends, for some it can be a vehicle for purpose. We designed specific training provision for key pathway age groups (e.g., U14s and U16/17s), and connected them to opportunities with County and Premiership programmes. Through this, we managed to further the playing careers of 16 young people across the school, with DPP and County nominations. At many schools, it is just expected that better players find these opportunities. For us, we aim to create them.
finally
Doubt is perfectly natural, and I am no stranger to imposter syndrome. I often feel I am out of my depth when it comes to teaching, and I am learning more about managing the expectations of a teacher every day I arrive at school. However, just because this project is difficult does not mean it is not worth doing! We have directly supported over 120 young people through rugby (up from near none), and are looking to expand to support more. If I could advertise what we’re doing to anyone else out there thinking of doing similar, it would be that starting from the ground up is a chance to leave a mark, a legacy. A mentor of mine challenged me to think of my legacy when I began taking seriously my coaching, and I think there can be no better than creating opportunities for young people that weren’t there before. Get your hands dirty. Start a mission.
lifting the fog 