One of the priorities for any custodian of sport in a school is the difficult issue of quality control. With anywhere between half a dozen and a hundred coaches delivering sessions within a programme, ensuring that they are all of a minimum standard is certainly a challenge.

Is it therefore possible for a school to adopt a consistency of approach that goes across all sports, all age groups, both sexes and all ability levels? Would there be any value in this, or would it simply emasculate the creative capacity of individual coaches, and apply a restrictive influence...

Most teachers and coaches faced with the question of whether children best learn games by listening or doing, would have little difficulty in opting for the latter. Faced with this fairly unanimous conclusion, it would not be unreasonable to expect to find school games coaching dominated by high levels of pupil activity, and relatively rare bouts of teacher interruption. And to find Directors of Sport obsessed with driving up coaching standards, and seeking ever higher levels of pupil activity within sessions. At the very least, the measurement of activity levels, and contrast of talk levels, would seem fundamental to the...

There is an illogical irony in the boys Spring Term Games Programme of most independent schools. In the shortest term, in the worst of the winter weather, there are more competitive sports than any other term. This has created unsustainable overcrowding. Other terms also have a wide range of sporting activities on offer to pupils. However, the Spring Term is different. Most sports at that time of year are all aimed at the most able pupils, with the result that the same boys run from one activity to another. Practices are conducted at all sorts of unlikely times in order...