There is another way’: how schools are tackling rugby’s head injury crisis

2 March 2024

Concern is mounting over dwindling playing numbers caused by safety fears as schools explore ways to depower rugby
Sam Peters
Sat 2 Mar 2024

Rugby union’s rapid and seemingly inexorable transition from “contact” into “collision” sport began around 1995 with professionalism and the change to its concussion and injury risk profile has led to serious questions about the game’s long-term viability.
Nowhere are these questions being asked more vociferously than in schools. While World Rugby, the sport’s global governing body, released figures last September reporting participation in rugby union is rising globally, this does not correlate with evidence from junior clubs and schools in England. There is mounting anecdotal concern over dwindling playing numbers caused by safety fears once they graduate from minis to playing contact rugby.“Headlines around injury in the professional game, the rise in popularity and provision of other sports, and the increasing challenges of finding appropriate fixtures has meant that rugby is now under threat in our schools,” says Sally-Anne Huang, the headteacher at St Paul’s school in west London.

“We have moved well beyond the point where we can bury our heads in the sand and hope that it can hold on to its traditional place in our culture.”

Some pinpoint the growing size of players, allied to the move towards collisions since professionalism, when the previously passive act of tackling was transformed into an offensive “hit”, often involving two defenders tackling one ball carrier, as a primary driver of parental concern.

“Whether you’re at schoolboy or international level there’s a premium on collision winning, that almost goes without saying,” the new England defence coach, Felix Jones, said recently.

A report authored and published by the Rugby Football Union on 1 February showed concussion was now the most frequently reported injury in schools rugby, as well as professionally. Added to an increased awareness of the long-term risks associated with repetitive head trauma and relationship between the exposure to “sub-concussive” blows linked to the neurodegenerative condition chronic traumatic encephalopathy, there is a growing unease about the impact professionalism is having on schools rugby.

“Professional rugby is not a good shop window for the school game, nor is its nomenclature always encouraging,” wrote Neil Rollings, chairman of the Professional Association of Directors of Sport in Independent Schools, in a 2021 report called Challenges for the Future of Rugby Football in Schools.

“Some parents will be enthusiastic for their children to emulate the size, athleticism and appetite for heavy contact that can be witnessed in the Premiership. However, a focus on big hits, macho confrontation and a celebration of abnormal size and power of players detracts from the assertion that rugby is a game for all shapes and sizes.

“It has led to a polarisation in the sport. The number of pupils persisting with the game until the sixth form, even in the biggest boarding schools, is smaller than at any time in history.”

Some in schools rugby are taking matters into their own hands, deeply frustrated by what they perceive to be ignorance to the damage caused at grassroots level by elite rugby’s fixation with physicality and brute force.

“The game has become too much about collisions. It never used to be and it doesn’t have to be in the future,” Clayesmore school’s rugby coach, Richard Dixon, says.

“There’s no good waiting for the professional game to do something about this. They have proved they won’t. So we’ll do it ourselves.

“There is lot of rugby now which is not about space, it’s more about collisions. We’re more interested in teaching our boys there is another way to do this. Use your brain. Create space, use space.”

Dixon recently caused a stir in the sleepy Dorset village of Iwerne Minster where the 550-pupil independent school is located, by inviting backroom staff from the Toulouse and Bath academies to conduct a coaching clinic on the grounds.

Within a few weeks of his first phone call to the Toulouse coach, Sam Lacombe, who Dixon had befriended on a series of summer visits to the Pierre Villepreux coaching school in Lubersac, southern France, the Oxford University graduate was leading a coaching clinic alongside the double World Cup winning former All Black Jerome Kaino.

Pupils from West Country schools including Monkton Combe, King Edward’s Bath and Clayesmore lapped up Villepreux’s “Plaisir du Mouvement” philosophy taught through the eyes of a modern-day rugby legend and observed by another staunch proponent of the evasion-based game, Lynn Evans.

“I am a huge believer in the importance of rugby and the values it can instil in young people,” Clayesmore’s head teacher, Jo Thomson, says. “It is a fantastic sport which teaches so many important life lessons. Some of our pupils absolutely live for the sport and I want it to continue.

“But the data is hard to argue with and, rather than bury our heads in the sand, we want to look for solutions to safeguard the future of this brilliant game.”

With the support of a growing band of, perhaps not coincidentally, female head teachers, including Thomson at Clayesmore, and Huang at St Paul’s, more schools are exploring ways to de-power rugby while continuing to promote the widely acknowledged benefits of participation including self-discipline, physical fitness and a sense of belonging.

Huang took over as head teacher at St Paul’s, one of the founding schools of the RFU, from the former England and Wasps winger Mark Bailey in 2020. With two rugby playing sons, she describes herself as a “passionate rugby lover” who nevertheless feels there is a mounting problem which needs addressing.

“Some might say that the risk of injury and our increasing understanding of the dangers of contact sports should be enough to consign rugby to the past,” Huang says.

“I fear we might be throwing the baby out with the bath water if we take that view too quickly.

“Anyone who has worked with young people who have enjoyed rugby will know that it offers a compelling blend of team work, discipline and confidence building that can make the most extraordinary difference to individual lives.

“Very few sports compare in terms of having your own role and needing to fulfil it well for the team to succeed. Very few teach discipline and respect, where getting it right technically and personally truly matter as they do in rugby.”

Last year Huang detailed her former head of sport, the former Harlequins and Wharfdale three-quarter Glenn Harrison, who won a blue for Cambridge University in 1994, to create the blueprint for an alternative format with a greater emphasis on safety and skill.

Harrison, a deputy head teacher St Paul’s, in tandem with Prof Keith Stokes on behalf of the RFU, delivered on his brief. Last term Tonbridge, King’s Wimbledon and Hampton schools joined St Paul’s in trialling the “Third Game” concept, so-called as it was originally imagined as a Third Game after non-contact touch rugby and the full-contact version.

“As it has turned out the game is still full contact,” said Harrison. “It was designed to keep the main elements of scrum, lineout, full-contact tackle, but to reduce the number of collisions and reward hitting space, offloading and passing earlier.”

 

With less emphasis on physical size, Harrison’s Third Game has a number of new laws with the jackal contest over the ball outlawed while the ball carrier is also penalised for unnecessarily colliding with a static defender.

To encourage more width to be put on the ball, seven points are awarded for a try scored in a shaded red eight-metre square “try zone” while No 8s were also not allowed to pick up from the base of the scrum.

Each ruck counted as a “phase” with each team permitted four phases of play before being penalised and a scrum being awarded to the defending team with the absence of the jackal also reducing head-to-head collisions and speeding up play.

In four hours of round-robin play, watched by the RFU’s long-serving head of medicine, Simon Kemp, and John Lawn, the RFU’s game development director, not a single injury was reported.

Although still in its pilot stage, Harrison is optimistic his Third Game trial, which appears to have the full support of the RFU, will be rolled out at under‑14 level from next season in a bid to end to scenes which one director of sport recently said saw “some Saturday afternoons with ambulances all over the school grounds full of children”.

While some schools continue to promote the undiluted collision-based game others are seeking out like-minded educational establishments who recognise the sport must evolve to survive.

“We want to play on the strongest possible circuit against like-minded schools who see the value in shifting the emphasis away from the collision-based game and style of play which can lead to an increase in injuries,” Harrison says.

“We’re looking to play against other schools who share our philosophy rather than just parachuting giants in on rugby scholarships for the last couple of years, distorting the playing field and potentially raising the risk of injuries.”

A spokesperson for the RFU said: “Rugby has established and been at the forefront of concussion and injury surveillance, education, and law changes using evidence to proactively manage player welfare. This includes the lowering of the tackle height in the community game this season to reduce concussion and head-on-head contact.

“However, we recognise that contact sport does not appeal to everyone and we are undertaking pilots with a group of schools to introduce rules that keep the ball in hand, encourage try-scoring out wide and eliminating jackling to create a faster, lower contact version of the game.

“These trials will continue to be evaluated with the aim of providing players and schools with new choices and different game offerings for the next generation of players.

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