The battle to save schools rugby

Since the turn of the century, school playing fields have come to represent a battleground on which rugby union, we keep hearing, is losing the war.

A 2024 report by Sir Jon Coles, chief executive of national schools group United ­Learning, warned that rugby union faced an existential threat to avoid becoming a “declining ­minority sport” in the face of falling participation and parental fears over the safety of the players.

The two calls to action were to “attack new markets” which the Rugby Football Union (RFU) did to great fanfare with the launch of T1 Rugby, a non-contact version of the sport with the stated aim of gaining a greater foothold in non-traditional rugby institutions, specifically state schools.

The second of Coles’s action points was to “defend the home turf … take ­radical action to preserve the game in its heartlands”, specifically in the established rugby-playing – largely, but not exclusively – independent school sector. This is what Neil Rollings, a former director of sport at Sedbergh who now runs ICE (Independent Coach Education), has been doing quietly in the background over the past 12 months through the National Rugby Leadership Programme for Schools on behalf of the RFU.

Rollings is fully aware of the parental nervousness around the safety of the sport. His own data show the injury risk only really jumps from age 16, but the perception of rugby as inherently dangerous is fostered by coverage around concussion risk and Prem Rugby’s recent marketing drive to celebrate the sport’s big hits and brutality.

“I think it’s important to have a distinction between the age-grade game in schools and the freak show of the professional game,” Rollings said. “As a rugby person, you might look at the pro game through a particular lens. But if you’re a nervous mother, you probably look at that thinking, ‘I don’t want my little Rupert to end up looking like that’.

“I don’t think broadcasters do not help with this using words like ‘savage’ and ‘brutal’ and the people who came up with the marketing campaign around the big hits. If you only promote the physical confrontation then you are presenting a distorted picture of what the game is about.”

Rollings’s own findings challenge many of the existing assumptions about the health of the sport, particularly in the boys’ game. In a survey by ICE, it was found that 75 per cent of established rugby-playing schools have the same or greater numbers of boys playing the game than three years ago with 640 teams competing in the RFU schools’ competitions at under-15 and under-18 levels in 2026.

The numbers are down from 10 or 20 years ago, but a large part of that is because contact rugby can no longer be made a compulsory provision after legal advice. Certainly compared to other traditional sports such as cricket and hockey, union is more than holding its own.

“The numbers have declined, but aren’t still declining,” Rollings said. “A couple of years ago there was a sense that the school game was doomed, the youth game was doomed. But actually, when you went into schools and saw it happening, not just at the finals at Twickenham, but on a wet Saturday morning in Buckinghamshire, the boys who played it were as enthusiastic as ever, and the parents who supported it were as enthusiastic as ever. So there’s this sort of disconnect between this sort of concept of an existential threat and what you actually saw on the ground.”

Indeed there are areas and individual schools where rugby is thriving. In Cumbria, there was a 17.1 per cent increase in boys’ age-grade registrations from last season while Lancashire and Yorkshire boasted 7.4 and 5.6 per cent increases respectively. At Wirral Grammar School, head of physical education Allen Boyd notes their playing numbers are higher than pre-Covid, when many schools suffered a high fallout rate. His main challenge is finding enough volunteers among staff and parents willing to consistently sacrifice part of their weekend rather than finding enough players.

It is a similar story in Sussex. At Brighton College, alma mater of Harlequins fly-half Marcus Smith, who have doubled the number of sides they are fielding for most year groups, which is replicated across the county. “It is going from strength to strength,” said Nick Buoy, the director of rugby who has recently been elected to the RFU council. “We are getting 20 plus school teams in every age group and we have a tier one and tier two system [based] on ability, which has worked really well to get more children to play.”

What works in one part of the country will not necessarily work in another. Wirral Grammar play mainly state schools around Cheshire, Lancashire and parts of Yorkshire while the Campion, a leading comprehensive in Essex, play the majority of their fixtures against independent schools. However Rollings’s initiative is to establish a network in which examples of best practice can be shared and by delivering an approved rugby programme which can be replicated anywhere. “Our principle is that all these schools shouldn’t all have to solve the same problem by themselves,” Rollings said.

The second part of Rollings’s mission is to extol the benefits of a rugby programme to schools – and especially heads and governors – whose commitment may be wavering. The risk lobby, in his view, has dominated the airspace for too long. While accepting that risk will never be eliminated, Rollings emphasises that the sport has never been safer at school level, which is emphasised independently by Buoy and Boyd.

Strikingly, there has never been a scientific study examining the benefits of playing rugby specifically, but in an informal survey of heads, Rollings found 90 per cent agreed that the sport developed resilience, respect and camaraderie. “That’s incredible because there’s nothing that 90 per cent of heads agree about; they can’t agree about whether that is term dates,” Rollings said. “Since Tom Brown’s School Days, we’ve had this sort of conviction that team games are a good thing without any science behind it, except for a sort of generally held view that they develop certain qualities. A large part of what we’re doing is to try and put science behind the benefit.”

Campion are a fantastic case study in that respect. They became the first state school to win the RFU National Schools Cup in 2001 and narrowly lost in the semi-finals this year to eventual winners Northampton School for Boys. Yet far more than on-field success, director of sport Rob Squire is prouder of the cultural legacy the school is creating.

In Essex’s football-dominated heartland, Campion do not run a football team until year 11 with around 150 boys a year playing rugby. “Our students have enough access to football – we want to offer something different,” Squire said. “We feel very strongly that rugby can be a vehicle for social mobility. We are in a unique area in terms where we have a real mixture of populations in terms of socio-economic backgrounds. Some students are really struggling, some have privileged backgrounds. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing boys, who had never played rugby before year seven from deprived backgrounds, go get a scholarships to a Brunel or an Exeter to pursue their rugby.

“We’re realistic. There’s a good chance they will not become professional rugby players, but just by opening that door to higher education we truly believe it is life-changing. We are lucky that our headmaster here can clearly see the links with behaviours in school and our virtue system around attitude, humility, respect, gratitude – all of those softer skills that are so important down the line for employability, they are rife in rugby union.”

None of this is to say that there are not multiple pressing challenges. Budgets everywhere are being squeezed and at Campion, Squire says “everything we do is fundraised”. Much of the success of these schools is down to the passion and drive of individuals such as Squire, Buoy or Boyd – not to mention the hundreds of parental volunteers – with the tacit support of their school’s leadership. Changing one of those elements can cause a school’s rugby programme to wither.

The task for Rollings is to spread the gospel far beyond those who are already converted. “What we’re doing is trying to address this is better at promoting benefit to an audience that doesn’t intuitively understand benefit,” Rollings said. “The value of rugby has become a sort of masonic secret amongst people being positively influenced by themselves and the challenge is to convey that attraction beyond its Masonic inner circle.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]