It sounds as though Chris Cohen has a great life. Head of PE at Heritage community school in Clowne, Derbyshire, he spends his holidays travelling the world at someone else’s expense. This summer, he visited Canada, the United States and France; he spent half-term in Tunisia and autumn in Australia. But while many exhausted teachers greet their school holidays by flopping on sun loungers, Mr Cohen takes up the reins of his “other job”.

He is chairman of the athletics section of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), disabled sport’s equivalent of the International Olympic Committee, and is one of the leading officials for disabled sport in the world.

“Most of my holidays are spent working almost full-time for disabled athletics,” he says. “In fact, for me there’s no such thing as a holiday - there are pretty well no weekends either.”

The trips may be paid for, but his is an unpaid position in an area of sport still run by volunteers. Last August he spent two weeks in Edmonton, Canada, at the World Athletics Championships, helping to organise the half-dozen disabled events that have become a regular part of the able-bodied athletics scene, and lobbying for disabled sport.

Then he flew to San Diego for an IPC meeting before heading to Paris to ensure plans for the World Disabled Athletics Championships, to be held in Lille next year, are on schedule.

And that was just the summer. During the May half-term holiday he made a site visit to Tunis, host city for the Mediterranean Games. They were held in September, by which time he was back at school but spending “the other six waking hours” ensuring arrangements were in place for the disabled events at next summer’s Commonwealth Games in Manchester. “I do see my wife occasionally,” he jokes, but sleep is limited to about three hours a night.

A former athlete and a school athletics coach and official (he was a PE teacher in Derby who in 1980 persuaded world champion long jumper Fiona May to switch from the high jump - and then coached her for the next eight years), Mr Cohen first became involved in disabled sport in 1979 when he answered a plea in Athletics Weekly for volunteers to help run a disabled athletics meeting at Stoke Mandeville hospital.

“I turned up on a Saturday morning and held a tape measure. But I fell in love with the whole atmosphere and ethos. It seemed so different from able-bodied sport. There was the same will to win but they seemed to enjoy themselves more; there was a real sense of the pleasure of competition rather than taking the ability to compete for granted.”

From that moment on he became more and more involved in disabled athletics, then a relatively new sport, and even helped write the rules for some events. In 1984, he helped organise the Paralympic Games at Stoke Mandeville, and in 1985 went to Belgium as a chief official at the European championships.

The first big Paralympic Games were held in Seoul, South Korea, in 1988 just after the Olympics, and Mr Cohen was sent to teach Korean officials the rules of disabled athletics. He remembers giving lectures in the middle of the stadium, his words being translated to 150 people by “a small Korean man with a megaphone” while the security forces were jumping from the stadium roof above him.

“It was a bizarre scene. I did it for four days,” he says. “That was the first time the Paralympics were held at the same level as the Olympic Games. The competition was still at quite a low level but the organisation was superb.”

The IPC was formed three years later and Mr Cohen was elected chair of its athletics section. “The different disability groups were quite insular in those days,” he says, referring to the rivalry between wheelchair, amputee, blind and cerebral palsied athletes. “People realised I was the only person who knew all the rules for all the groups. They thought I was a good all-round representative.”

He was re-elected in 1996 and again in 2000, the year of disabled sport’s greatest success - the Paralympic Games in Sydney. “We had 4,000 Paralympic athletes in Sydney, in 230 events, all organised by volunteers.” He was in Australia last October thanks to six weeks’ unpaid leave from school - “they’ve always been supportive”. But the success of those games in raising disabled sport’s profile and understanding has also raised expectations of the organisers to such a level that Mr Cohen has decided to end his 10-year tenure as head of PE at Heritage to devote more time to the sport. “We have professional Paralympic athletes now and they expect, and deserve, a professional administration,” he says. “In many countries they are not getting it, and internationally they are not getting it.”

Not that the 50-year-old teacher of 29 years is giving up his job altogether. After Christmas he will work three days a week and hand over the departmental headship. “I’d been thinking for some time about how to improve disabled athletics and this seems the ideal solution,” he says. “I need to spend time on marketing and sponsorship, and I can’t do both jobs justice. I take loads of teaching stuff to prepare while I’m away, but it’s not fair on the pupils.

“This way I will still get the benefits of a part-time job in a department that I know well. And it will be good for the school because it will get a new, younger head of department with dynamic ideas. I’ll still be here to give my experience when it’s needed; it’s just that the responsibility will be carried by someone else.” Despite the significant drop in salary (“a bit more than half”) he’s looking forward to the new lifestyle.

In the meantime, things are busier than ever. What with preparing an AS-level PE course, getting to grips with the new GCSE PE syllabus, making sure the department is “in order” before he bows out, and co-ordinating entries for next year’s world disabled athletics championships “from my back bedroom”, those three hours’ sleep look to be under threat.

Then there’s the next Paralympic Games in Athens in 2004 to organise. “By then we should be well on the way to becoming professional,” he says. “I reckon it’ll take three years to know if we’re going to be successful. The next stage, I suppose, would be to leave teaching and do it full-time.”

And give up all those long holidays? Surely not.