Sport Jim White
RUGBY AND RISK
When, back in 1997, Sir Paul Grant was drafted in as head teacher of Robert Clack School, a fading giant of a comprehensive in Dagenham, he had an idea how he might turn things around. He insisted that every pupil – male or female – played half an hour of rugby before lessons began. His thinking was simple: it would burn up some of their anti-social excess energies and flush oxygen through the brain ahead of a day in the classroom. Whatever the rationale, it worked. From a failing school in permanent special measures, Robert Clack now sends half a dozen pupils a year to Oxbridge, and is consistently rated as outstanding by Ofsted. And its headmaster puts that down to one thing: rugby.
His, however, is not the kind of thinking that would much appeal to the chief medical officers and children’s commissioners who have recently written to the Government seeking the banning of tackling in school rugby. It is, they suggest, way too dangerous a sport for our youth to be engaging in full pelt. They want tackling to be banned until pupils reach sixteen.
There is no pretending rugby is a game without inherent danger. I watched my son play in a school match in which a member of the opposition broke his neck when the scrum collapsed on top of him. There was nothing minor about that, nothing insignificant about watching his mother weeping alongside him as he was lifted into the air ambulance. Rugby can do that. At any level, it is not a sport without potential consequences.
Which is precisely why at Robert Clack they embrace it with such relish. The school motto – ‘Forti difficile nihil’ (for the brave, nothing is difficult) – summarises its approach to danger. Get out there, get stuck in, embrace risk and the benefits will follow. And it is one extolled by the Rugby Football Union, which is rolling out a programme to introduce the game to a million state school pupils over the next seven years. If it works as this could be transformative idea.
Not that the doctors see it that way. Prof Allyson Pollock, from Queen Mary College, University of London, one of those behind the letter, is particularly alarmed by the RFU plan. She has collected evidence over twelve years which, she says, proves rugby players up to the age of eighteen have a 28 per cent chance of getting injured over a season of fifteen matches. With a million more children playing, she insists, that would add up to 300,000 extra injuries a year, including 100,000 concussions.
And there seems little room for compromise: the medical people want contact banned, the rugby enthusiasts say that stripping it of the physical challenge would emasculate the sport. It is especially dangerous, the rugger buggers claim, suddenly to introduce tackling at sixteen without allowing children to learn how to go about it properly. Not that the doctors are concerned. They would happily see rugby removed from the curriculum entirely, and with it every hint of risk of spinal and head injury.
The problem with that sort of approach is this: studies suggest that molly-coddling the young does not offer protection, it has the opposite effect. If children do not experience danger regularly at an early age, when they do encounter it they are less able to deal with it and more likely to succumb to serious injury. The counterintuitive truth is, if you wrap kids in cotton wool, they will break their leg the first time they stub a toe. But if you make them play rugby, by learning how to fall, learning how to take a tackle, learning how to get up after being flattened, they are far better prepared to recognise and meet danger.
Add to that the lessons of team-work, self-discipline, bravery and personal responsibility that come from chasing round a school playing field, and it seems obvious what we should be doing with our school children: ignoring what the doctor says and chucking them an egg-shaped ball.