Posted on: July 11th 2019
With another year over at Norfolk House School, I look back and pose the question ‘was it a good year?’. How do we judge the success of a sporting programme in a small prep school? I think the only way is to look back over the promises and goals we set ourselves at the start of my tenure at the school.
As the new Director of Sport and Activities, I put forward the following short and medium-term goals:
Success for me is encapsulated by the last bullet point - are our students enthused by sport at Norfolk House School? Do we have high participation rates and are their performances improving?
The highlight of the year for me is that every child in years 3 to 6 represented the school in at least one of our 3 main sports, whilst 90% of the children represented the school in two sports, 70% three sports and 40% even managed to add cross-country to take it up to 4! We hosted three interschool tournaments and attended 13 hosted by others. Some events we won, some we lost, but the children's attitudes remained the same - strive to win, but accept that success and failure are two sides of the same coin and that irrespective of the result our growth mindset enables us to improve. The children are excited about sport at school and are already talking about next season!
Whilst there is no such thing as a perfect programme, and that there is space for us to improve, we have achieved all our aims with the exception of sports trips - and I’m working on that one! Moving forward the introduction of Squad in Touch will improve our parental communication, the new sports uniform is improving our appearance and pride and we are looking to add hockey and host a cricket tournament next year.
Have a great summer break, we will be back into a busy sporting calendar before you know it!
Mr Charman
