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 results. Writing communications. This cost is real, but it’s invisible — absorbed into the working week of PE staff and administrators without being measured or questioned.
Trying to put a number on it
It’s difficult to measure precisely, because the admin work is interspersed with everything else a sports coordinator does and rarely tracked separately. But it’s possible to estimate.
Take a busy secondary school running fixtures across ten sports, with fifteen to twenty after-school clubs across the week. A reasonable estimate of the administrative work involved — fixture scheduling, consent management, communication, results recording, club booking management, reports — might be fifteen to twenty hours per week during peak periods, spread across the PE team and administrative staff.
At a teaching assistant rate, twenty hours a week for thirty-eight weeks is around £12,000 to £15,000 a year in staff time. At a teacher rate, significantly more. These numbers vary by school size and programme scope, but the direction of travel is consistent: the administrative cost of running a substantial sports programme is significant.
Most of this cost is never examined, because it’s not a line item. It’s just what running sport requires.
What drives the cost
The administrative overhead of school sport is high for a structural reason: the information generated by sport — who is in which team, when fixtures are happening, what the results were, who has consented to travel — needs to reach multiple audiences (students, parents, other schools, school leadership) through multiple channels, and needs to be current.
When this is done manually — different person for each communication, different tool for each audience, no automatic connection between where information is created and where it needs to go — the overhead is high. When it’s systematised, the overhead drops significantly.
The analogy from other sectors is direct. Before online banking, checking your balance required a trip to a branch or a phone call to an operator. The information existed, but retrieving it required human effort on both sides. The automation didn’t change the information — it changed how much effort was required to move it around.
Where the hours actually go
Breaking down the admin work into categories makes the opportunity for reduction clearer.
Consent and availability: Creating forms, distributing them, chasing responses, recording who has consented. This is almost entirely automatable — and in schools that have automated it, the time requirement drops from several hours per fixture to near zero.
Fixture communication: Notifying parents and students of upcoming fixtures, changes, cancellations, results. Again, largely automatable once fixtures are being managed in a system that can trigger communications.
Club management: Processing booking requests, maintaining waiting lists, sending notifications when places become available. Automatable for the routine cases; human judgement only needed for exceptions.
Results and reporting: Recording results, publishing them, pulling reports for leadership. Automatable at the individual result level; the report generation becomes a query rather than a manual compilation.
Coordination with other schools: Confirming fixtures, managing invitation responses for tournaments, chasing confirmations. Partially automatable — the routine confirmations, the reminders — though the relationship management remains human.
What automation doesn’t replace
It’s worth being precise about this, because the argument for reducing administrative overhead sometimes gets conflated with a broader argument about replacing staff.
Coaching is not administrative work. Selecting teams involves judgement that systems can inform but not replace. Building relationships with students, understanding their development, managing difficult situations — these are the core of what PE staff do, and they’re not automatable.
The target for automation is the work that surrounds sport rather than the work that is sport. The email that chases a consent form. The spreadsheet update that records who attended a club session. The message that tells parents a fixture has been moved. These are necessary, but they don’t require a skilled sports educator to do them.
Making the case internally
If you’re making the case within your school for investment in a better sports management system, the administrative cost argument is often more persuasive than the efficiency argument.
“This will make things easier” is a weak argument — most people assume their current system is already reasonably efficient. “This will save approximately X hours of staff time per week, which costs approximately £Y per year” is a stronger one, especially if X and Y can be supported with any kind of estimate.
The comparison to make is not “what does the system cost?” but “what does the current approach cost, compared to the system?” When that comparison is made honestly, the case for change usually makes itself.