Media

Australian Rules Football is proving to be a winner with gifted and talented pupils, reports Crispin Andrews

Through the heat of a London summer, elite athletes push themselves to the limit. "C'mon mate! The bloke behind always backs up! Let's hear you call for it!"

Even though the commanding voice is undeniably Australian, there’s not a green cricket cap or spiky blond-rinse haircut in sight. Neither is the whole thing a cunningly orchestrated manoeuvre designed to get to one of those under-manned Pommie bars at England’s cricket venues before the cold beer runs out. Yet while the memories of the Ashes series are fresh in many minds, in a south London school an impact is being made by that other great Antipodean sport – Australian Rules Football.

"It's a great sport that combines elements of some of the UK's more popular invasion games, like football, rugby and basketball," says Brian Clarke of Aussie Rules Uk, who is coaching the Rare Flair Group, Carshalton High School for Boys’ cohort of gifted and talented students.

At first glance it looks as if the group don't agree. After an hour's intensive training they are almost dead on their feet. However, as an able group they are more than capable of coping with the physical demands of this active sport. Indeed, by the end of the session, the consistency of their catching, kicking, communicating and most importantly, their awareness of invasion principles, has increased dramatically. They are even starting to back each other up when the odd kick or pass goes astray – not always easy to remember for a group of naturally egocentric teenagers who are used to focusing on their own performance.

However, there is also another reason why the lads are being pushed to the limit, as Brian Clarke explains: "To help combat the obesity epidemic that is threatening kids over here we make our sessions as active and physically demanding as the guys can cope with."

The students involved in Rare Flair are not the only ones lucky enough to have had a go at Aussie Rules. Indeed, it all started two years ago after head of PE Paul Avery trained and played with a team while on holiday in the sport’s Melbourne heartland. As a football goalkeeper Paul loved the game. "It’s like goalkeeping with contact," he says.

The following year, Carshalton trialled Aussie Rules in their summer school and the boys enjoyed it so much that a tournament was added to the inter-house programme the following June. After another successful summer school outing, Paul Avery decided to take a momentous decision – from September onwards Aussie Rules would replace football on the PE curriculum.

"Most of the kids play football from the age of two upwards – at primary school, for clubs, on the park, in the street, everywhere. It was getting to the point where everyone either loved or hated it," he says. "They knew everything or more often than not, though they did. Its usefulness as a learning tool was becoming minimal."

In Aussie Rules, Paul believed he had found an alternative invasion game through which everyone could engage with the learning process. As it was a new sport there was no peer group pecking order determining who was and wasn't any good, and local club rivalries associated with football played no part. Kudos wasn’t at stake, so winning was not the only focus during games lessons, and gloating from the winners and accusations of cheating from the losers wasn’t the only form of post-match analysis.

Each year group now gets six weeks of Aussie Rules lessons. During the first four weeks, skills and invasion principles are taught, before being put to use in two weeks of Touch Aussie Rules game play – a non-contact version of the sport. An inter-tutor group Aussie Rules competition is then held in which everyone takes part, and from there students are selected for the Rare Flair Academy, where they get a term's worth of weekly coaching from Brian Clarke.

Surprisingly, dissenting voices about the removal of our national winter game from the curriculum have been minimal. The boys still get their football, with more than 100 inter-school fixtures played each year. Between 60 and 100 boys play for the school every Saturday and there's community football to get involved in. However, now they also have another game to play.

Teenagers want to experience the adrenaline charge of climbing, cheerleading and Aussie Rules, rather than more traditional sports like soccer.

Pupils are learning how to surf, rock climb and even perform BMX biking tricks as part of a move to tackle disenchantment with traditional school sports such as rugby, swimming and cross-country running.

Schools, worried that so many students give up all physical exercise at 16, hope that offering newer, adrenaline-fuelled pursuits will encourage teenagers to stay active.

The number of teenagers taking part in long-established team games such as cricket, rounders and basketball is falling, official figures show. While many of these refuseniks become idle 'couch potatoes' or stick to sedentary activities such as computer games, others are happy to get sweaty while doing more exciting and individualistic sports.

Hackney Free and Parochial School in east London spent £42,000 installing a climbing wall last December to help motivate pupils who wanted a fresh sort of challenge.

'It's something different, pupils have responded and it has increased participation in PE lessons by five to 10 per cent', said Adrian Mullis, the school's director of sport. 'Our 15- and 16-year-olds use it both in games classes and after school. They like the challenge, adrenaline rush and sense of achievement when they get to the top of the wall.'

The school still offers games such as football and netball, but it also lays on orienteering and mountain biking sessions.

'We hope that by offering imaginative activities we will address the massive rates of drop-off from sport', said Mullis.

In Cornwall and Devon, 10 secondary schools have set up 'surf clubs' where teachers who have qualified as surfing coaches act as instructors.

Joanne Hillman of the British Surfing Association, said: 'Surfing is growing rapidly in popularity in schools. Kids come across it, like in adverts on TV, think it's exciting and decide to try it. They like the lifestyle that goes with it, the element of danger and that it's now very "street". There's a definite change now where kids want to do more extreme sports.'

More and more 'grommet clubs' - 'grommet' is surfing slang for a young participant - are being set up to offer weekend lessons to enthusiasts under 16 in Kent, Wales, Newcastle and Scotland, as well as the sport's heartland in the south-west.

In Sutton, south London, Carshalton Boys' School has taken soccer out of its PE curriculum altogether and replaced it with Australian Rules football.

'About 500 pupils have done it so far, and around 30 per cent of them are those who are the shyer, less confident and more unfit', said Paul Avery, the school's head of sport. 'Pupils like the fact that because it's new, no one here has played it before, everyone is equal and there is no hierarchy.'

The school uses a modified, less physical version of a game notorious for its tough tackling and all-round aggression, called 'touch Aussie Rules', where a pupil must release the ball as soon as they are touched by an opponent.

A growing number of schools are even embracing cheerleading, that quintessentially American activity, to get girls more involved in sport.

Roger Draper, chief executive of Sport England, said: 'Research shows that kids want to experience danger but in a safe environment because they feel that danger is being stripped out of their everyday lives. More schools are installing climbing walls, BMX cycle trails and skateparks because they realise that the wider variety of sports, the more pupils will take part.'.