Squad In Touch

How do you let parents know about last-minute fixture changes?

It’s 4pm on a Wednesday. The away fixture that was supposed to leave at 3:45 has just been cancelled — the opposing school’s pitch is waterlogged. Your Year 9 football squad is already on the minibus. Three parents are waiting at the destination school. Another twelve are planning to drive straight from work to watch. […]

School Sport Management

Spreadsheets vs software: how schools manage after-school clubs in 2026

It’s the start of a new term. The clubs coordinator opens a spreadsheet that hasn’t been touched since July, tries to remember which version is current, and starts typing names into rows. By Thursday, three parents have emailed asking when football starts. By Friday, one of the columns has been accidentally deleted. Sound familiar? Spreadsheets […]

School Sport Management

What does a Director of Sport actually spend their time on?

Ask a Director of Sport what their job is, and they’ll describe something like: developing students’ love of sport, building competitive teams, running a programme that gives every student a chance to participate, working with coaches, representing the school at fixtures. Ask them what they actually spend their time on in a given week, and […]

School Sport Management

How schools track house points for sport — systems that work

House systems exist in schools of all kinds — prep schools, secondaries, boarding schools, day schools. The specific format varies enormously, but the underlying purpose is consistent: create a structure that gives students a sense of belonging to something beyond their year group, and a reason to contribute to a collective effort. Sport is almost […]

School Sport Management

Running an inter-school tournament: a practical guide for PE staff

Running an inter-school tournament is one of the more satisfying things a school can organise. It’s also one of the more logistically demanding. Dozens of students, multiple schools, fixtures running simultaneously, results to record, parents to communicate with, and usually one or two things that don’t go to plan on the day. This is a […]

School Sport Management

How schools publish fixtures and results — and why it matters for parent engagement

A parent drives to school on a Saturday morning to watch their daughter’s netball match. They’ve been looking forward to it. When they arrive, they find out the fixture was moved to next week — the update went out on the school’s sports noticeboard, which they don’t check, and on a WhatsApp group they didn’t […]

School Sport Management

Managing parent consent for away fixtures — what actually works

The away fixture is on Thursday. It’s Tuesday afternoon. Of the eighteen students in the squad, eleven have returned their consent forms. The other seven haven’t responded. Someone needs to chase them individually — by email, by text, by telling their child to remind them — and hope that enough come back in time to […]

School Sport Management

Team selection notifications — how do you tell students they’re in the squad?

Being selected for a school sports team means something to most students. For some it means a great deal. The moment of finding out — seeing your name on a list, getting a message, being told by a coach — is one that students tend to remember, for good reasons or bad ones. How schools […]

School Sport Management

Managing school sport across multiple sites or year groups

A secondary school with a prep department. A multi-academy trust with three sites. A large comprehensive with sport split across a main site and a sports centre half a mile away. In each case, the challenge is similar: managing a sports programme that doesn’t sit neatly in one place, under one set of people, with […]

School Sport Management

Tracking after-school club attendance — why it matters and how schools do it

A student signs up for the chess club in September. By November, they’ve stopped coming. Nobody noticed when they stopped, nobody followed up, and by the time anyone thinks to check, the student has moved on to other things — or to nothing in particular. This is the attendance tracking problem in after-school clubs. Not […]

School Sport Management

How do you handle oversubscribed clubs? Priority booking vs first-come-first-served

The football club has thirty places. Fifty-four students want to join. How do you decide who gets in? This is a problem that most schools with popular clubs face, and the answer matters more than it might seem. The mechanism for allocating places shapes how fair the process feels to students and parents, how much […]

School Sport Management

The hidden admin cost of school sport — and how PE departments are tackling it

School sport costs money in obvious ways: kit, equipment, travel, facility hire, coaching. These costs appear in budgets and get reviewed annually. There’s another cost that rarely appears anywhere: the staff time spent on administrative work that surrounds sport but isn’t sport. Sending consent forms. Chasing responses. Updating fixture lists. Managing club waiting lists. Compiling […]

School Sport Management

Managing tournament waiting lists — how to keep schools informed without constant chasing

You’ve sent invitations to twenty schools for a tournament with sixteen places. Fourteen have confirmed. Four are undecided. Two have declined. You have three schools on a waiting list. The deadline is in a week. Now the phone rings. One of the confirmed schools needs to withdraw — a staff illness, unavoidable. You need to […]

School Sport Management

Managing school sport over the summer — what to prepare before September

The last fixture of the year is done. The kit is washed. Reports are written. And somewhere in the back of every PE coordinator’s mind is the knowledge that September comes around faster than expected, and the first week of term is always more chaotic than it needs to be. The schools that start the […]

School Sport Management

How to manage school sport communications without WhatsApp

It started as a convenience. A PE coordinator created a WhatsApp group for the Year 9 football parents, saved themselves ten individual phone calls, and it worked. Then came a group for Year 8. Then one for the athletics squad. Then a general one for all sports parents. Then a staff group for fixtures. Then […]

School Sport Management

How to reduce no-shows at school fixtures

It’s Saturday morning. The minibus is leaving in twenty minutes. You have fourteen students confirmed for the fixture, kit has been sorted, the opposing school has been notified of the team sheet. Then one student doesn’t appear. Then another texts to say they forgot. By the time you leave, you’re two players short and spending […]

School Sport Management

How to run a successful school sports day — a practical guide for PE staff

Sports day is one of the most logistically complex events a school runs. It involves every student, dozens of staff, multiple simultaneous activities, results to track in real time, parents to communicate with, and a timetable that needs to flex when things run late — which they always do. Most PE departments have a version […]

School Sport Management

What parents actually want to know about school sport — and how to tell them

Ask a PE coordinator what information parents need about school sport, and they’ll list: fixture times, locations, kit requirements, results, consent. Ask parents what they actually want to know, and the list is similar — but the gap between what’s communicated and what’s received is often significant. This gap isn’t usually about unwillingness to communicate. […]

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