What is increasingly looking like an annual health and safety assault on rugby has reared its head again, justified by that catch-all excuse for interference in schools everywhere: research. In their latest piece for the British Medical Journal, Professor Allyson Pollock and Graham Kirkwood call for “the removal of collision from school rugby and to end compulsion in the school game”. A bit like suggesting school ski trips exchange skis for some nice, sturdy walking boots.

I wouldn’t normally have raised an eyebrow, let alone a typing digit, at this one, but I realised it offers a wonderful case study for something that I am asked professionally about, and that is right at the top of current political and professional interests - using research successfully in schools.

One of my key pieces of advice to schools wishing to do this is to make every effort to understand where the researchers are coming from before you read anything. Why that matters is perfectly illustrated in the case of Professor Pollock’s most recent publication - Professor Pollock has been researching rugby injuries for a decade after her son suffered a broken nose, a fractured leg and a fractured cheekbone playing the game at school.

Before they make a decision to consider investing precious time actually reading any research, I also advise schools to take a good hard look at the sample size and where it comes from. I’ve seen lengthy research papers based on a handful of phone interviews with teachers, ones that use information gathered in one country and then apply it without question to another without even acknowledging the fact, while taking data from primary schools and transplanting it to secondary is almost considered acceptable it’s so common. Ignore any such research.

In the BMJ research piece in question, you will find this statement: “A New Zealand study also across all age groups combining injury insurance claims data with exposure data from a range of surveys found playing rugby (one game every three weeks) was 460 to 530 times more dangerous than cycling (a half hour trip three times a week)”. Now although New Zealand is, sadly, a country I have never visited and although I don’t know much about its education system, I do know, like most people, that rugby in New Zealand enjoys special status as a sport. I also believe that New Zealand is quite large and sparsely populated, so I guess 90 minutes on a bike every week might not involve the kind of hair-triggerskilfulul avoidance of cars, articulated vehicles and buses I engage in four or five times a week.

In my humble, but professional, view, as someone who is asked about how schools should make good use of research, in reality, rugby provides a model of how this has been done effectively. Ironically (EEF take note), rugby probably leads the way in how to use credible academic research in a school context.

The RFU’s SPIRE charity has been analysing injuries in detail through the CRISP reports from Bath University as far back as 2009 and these have informed an entire training programme the RFU runs for teachers and coaches. So I can just imagine how a whole range of professionals involved in moving from the CRISP research to the school playing field, feel about this statement from Professor Pollock’s article: “In the UK, teacher training in the skills of rugby are lacking as is concussion awareness training.”

To give you something to compare with the data offered from New Zealand by Professor Pollock, the 2015-16 CRISP report says this: “A single player would have to play 43 games to sustain one injury.”

A few years ago, when Monopoly money was being spent on building lots of new schools by a previous government not in waiting, a young architect I was working with told me about a fantastically “innovative” approach he’d come across by a London school, in terms of the way they educated boys. “You know what they do?” he asked, barely containing his excitement. “They do sport every afternoon!”

I knew that English public schools had been doing that for well over a century. Why? Because educationally, it’s actually quite a good idea. But I didn’t have the heart to tell him. 

One of the saddest things I’ve witnessed in my career was mentoring a PE teacher working in a London girls’ school who was never able to run a full lesson of any kind because around half her class would always be sitting out with some excuse note or other.

In the bigger scale of things, putting kids in school off sport for any reason whatsoever seems entirely educationally counterproductive to me.

I relished sport at school, broke my collarbone twice playing rugby and subsequently left a lot of skin on various stretches of road when I took up racing cycling. The right-hand side of my face is consequently held together by a clever arrangement of 16 tiny titanium screws, yet for years now I have watched my younger daughter do back somersaults on a 4 inch-wide piece of wood (she makes it safely around only about 75 per cent of the time) and I love every minute of it, as does she. Only this week she was telling me how much she had learned, not from the 20 hours of gymnastics training a week, but just from the hours spent talking to her two Russian coaches.

There is so much more to rugby and all sport than critics like Professor Pollock appreciate, but most especially when you are growing up.

So finally, a little more on statistics and foul play. Long after my racing career was over, I was quite pleased to discover my ineptitude on a bike might not have been all that unusual after all, since members of the professional peloton crash in about 1 in every 7 races.

Although I have to admit, the source for that figure was…Lance Armstrong’s autobiography.

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author.

To read more columns by Joe, view his back catalogue.

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