Making connections: reflections on the sport-education nexus, with particular reference to sport and physical education in Ireland

Despite the general growth of interest in sport as a focus of academic study at third level institutions, as illustrated through curricular innovation and the expansion of scholarship programmes, the relationship between sport and education in Ireland has been generally neglected by scholars to date. Major studies of the history of Irish education by Akenson (1973, 1975), Coolahan (1981, 2017) and Ó Buachalla (1988) have little to say on the topic and it has been similarly overlooked in recent edited collections on education in Ireland (Walsh 2011, Kelly and Hegarty 2017). Despite a long history of student engagement with sport, exemplified through clubs and competitions, specialised work on the history of Irish colleges have yet to give it the attention that it merits, studies of Trinity College Dublin (West 1993) and of the University of Limerick (Fleming 2012) being notable exceptions. The essays featured in this collection recognise the relationship between sport and education as significant and worthy of more attention from researchers than it has so far received.

One significant feature of the general growth of the history of sport as an academic subject in the early twenty-first century has been the increase in the number of published monographs and edited collections on Irish sport. These include important monographs by Cronin (1999), Garnham (2004), Hunt (2007, 2017), Darby (2009), McCarthy (2010), O’Callaghan (2011), Moore (2012, 2015), McElligott (2013), Kelly (2014), Redmond (2014), Rouse (2015), Curran (2015, 2017), Toms (2015) and Crosson (2019). Edited collections of note include that by Bairner (2005) and work on the Gaelic Athletic Association (McAnallen, Hassan, and Hegarty, 2009), (Cronin, Rouse, and Murphy 2009) and (ÓTuathaigh 2015), while two jointly-written studies of the GAA have also added greatly to our understanding of this association’s contribution to society and culture (Cronin, Duncan, and Rouse 2009; Cronin, Duncan, and Rouse 2011). Other studies of note include Cronin and Higgins’s study of the physical landscape of Irish sport (2011), McElligott and Hassan’s 2016 jointly-edited collection of essays of sport in Ireland and Curran and Toms’ co-edited work on soccer in Ireland (2018). Although most of these publications have addressed sport’s relationship with education in some way, if often only incidentally, only Dónal McAnallen’s monograph on Gaelic games in third level education has focused on it in depth. It represents, therefore, the stand-out publication on sport’s relationship with education in Ireland published to date (McAnallen, 2012). A few articles have also looked at sport and education, particularly those by Sleap (1978), O’Donoghue (1985, 1986), Bourke (2002, 2003), Murphy and O’Leary (2012) and Curran (2020) but, as yet, there has been no published collection in which contributors have systematically explored specific aspects of the relationship in the Irish context.

Along with the proliferation of publications in recent years, another notable indication of growing academic interest in sports studies and sports history in Ireland has been a number of conferences bringing academics and researchers from different disciplines together to share perspectives on sport. Conferences focusing on sports history have been especially useful in this respect. Building on the more general themes discussed at the annual conferences organised by Sports History Ireland, the first held in 2005, more specialised one-day events have been hosted at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) in Belfast, with specially themed events including Sport and the Great War (2015), Irish soccer (2017), Grassroots football (2018), and - of particular relevance here - Sport and Education in Ireland and Britain (2019) taking place. These have been organised with the assistance and encouragement of Stephen Scarth, PRONI Director of Productions, and some have received funding from organisations such as the British Society of Sports History.

This special edition, however, has developed mainly from papers given at a conference entitled ‘Sport and Education in Ireland: History, Policy and Contemporary Issues’ which took place at Trinity College, Dublin in October 2018. It is the first edited collection to bring together historical and contemporary analysis focused on aspects of sport, education and society in Ireland. It examines sport’s role and place in Irish education through a variety of perspectives opened up by leading academic researchers and practitioners based in Irish tertiary institutions. The Trinity College conference also attracted papers from a number of international scholars based on their research on sport, education and society elsewhere. Thus we are glad to include the work of Gary James and Kristian Naglo on educational developments in early twentieth-century Manchester and early twenty-first century Mainz respectively, as well as the work of Dilwyn Porter on the Reverend K.R.G. Hunt, an exponent of muscular Christianity who spent much of his career teaching games at an English public school but whose influence on soccer coaching extended much further. These papers, while opening up opportunities to compare and contrast, help to situate developments in Irish sport within a wider context.

In 2017, the Department of Education in the Republic of Ireland confirmed that Physical Education would be available to students as a Leaving Certificate examination subject for the first time during the 2018-19 school year, according the subject an academic status on a par with other school subjects that was long overdue. Various aspects of the history and development of physical education in Irish schools are explored here. Conor Heffernan’s study focuses on the absence of a specifically Irish dimension to physical education both before and after independence. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the influence of the British military was very evident, not least because it supplied so many of the instructors who worked in schools. Post-independence, the new Irish state again looked to the military, albeit one that now served under a new flag, to service its education requirements in this area, with army instructors working in teacher training colleges and drill sergeants in elementary schools, though it is clear that many children went through school without any significant experience of physical education at all (Rouse 2015, 316). Growing awareness of the importance attached to physical education elsewhere in Europe, however, had some influence and Conor Heffernan draws attention to the adoption of physical education based on Czech Sokol principles in some areas in the late 1930s.

In Northern Ireland, as Conor Curran points out, there was a noticeable tendency to look to the United Kingdom in shaping the provision of physical education in its primary and intermediate schools. The increased importance assigned to physical education in mainland Britain during the interwar years, culminated in the Physical Recreation and Training Act of 1937, as the government sought ‘to improve standards of fitness as the prospect of war came closer’ (Jefferys 2012, 4). Encouraged by the Department of Education, local authorities began to employ specialist ‘organisers’, their numbers increasing very rapidly in the 1930s (Welshman 1998, 57). The Northern Ireland government responded to these developments with its own Physical Education and Recreation Act in 1938 and began recruiting its own organisers in an attempt to provide some basic infrastructure to support physical education in schools, hence Joan Burnett Knight’s arrival in Belfast in 1944. Her impact in raising the profile of physical education for girls and women during her six years in Northern Ireland was significant and helped to provide a platform for its development thereafter. By the early 1950s a physical education college for women had opened in Belfast. Two physical education courses for women were running in Dublin a few years later but it was not until the 1970s that co-educational training facilities were provided for second-level physical education teachers both north and south of the border.

Frances Murphy and Eileen McEvoy provide an important bridge here linking the history of physical education, as experienced in Irish schools with reflections on current practice. The voice of the child has usually been absent in historical accounts of physical education in schools, though research focusing on girls in Scotland in the mid-twentieth century has provided a clear indication of the value of oral testimony in this area (Macrae 2012). Murphy and McEvoy’s research utilised the recollections of Irish primary school teachers on their own experiences of physical education as school pupils and encouraged them to reflect on how this had shaped their perceptions of the subject as adults and on their professional practice. Given that the interviewees had each been teaching for at least 25 years, the collective impact of their testimony serves to deepen our understanding of the way in which physical education in Irish schools has evolved since the 1970s. Some interviewees, significantly, had no recollection of it at all; others identified it with their participation in unstructured activities at break-time. Such experiences, the authors conclude, inhibited the capacity to construct a serviceable rationale for physical education in their later careers as teachers. Among important insights derived from analysis of responses relating to memories of secondary education is the idea that an emphasis on team sports, while encouraging some pupils to engage, has the opposite effect on others.

Though physical education, broadly defined, has come to embrace sport, there are now other ways in which the sport-education nexus manifests itself in Ireland, two of which are discussed here. Shamrock Rovers, then managed by John Giles, were early movers in terms of seeking to cater for the educational needs of their young players in the late 1970s. It was not until the late 1980s that government-assisted FÁS football apprentice training schemes were introduced in conjunction with League of Ireland clubs, albeit with the amount of payment received by young players equal to that normally received through social welfare at the time. However, those breaking into English professional football after completing these programmes were few, with Roy Keane a notable exception (Curran, 2020, 76). A few post-Leaving Certificate institutions in Dublin had established football courses by the mid-1990s, with the aim of sending aspiring players to the United States of America on soccer scholarships. While there were some successes, there were also failures. Lack of daily football and an inadequately surfaced training field, along with an absence of entry-trials for these courses – anyone who paid the registration fee could join, irrespective of football ability or age – undermined the credibility of one of these Dublin courses. Promising young players continued to pursue their footballing ambitions at the expense of their education, with many discovering that they were underqualified and at a severe disadvantage in the labour market when a career in soccer did not materialise. Tom O’Connor makes a preliminary assessment of the League of Ireland’s most recent initiative in this area. Since the introduction of elite player pathways for teenage players in 2014, involving partnerships between the clubs, colleges and universities, young footballers are increasingly likely to engage with education for longer periods than previously, thus improving their future employment prospects.

As Anne Bourke observes, despite their long-standing association with sport, higher education institutions in Ireland have been relatively slow to develop programmes which offer support to student athletes seeking to pursue their sporting ambitions while simultaneously pursuing academic studies. Such programmes are a well-established feature of tertiary education in the United States and this model has been taken up elsewhere with significant local variations. Bourke outlines and critiques the development of elite sports scholarship programmes in Irish tertiary institutions since the mid-2000s. Making and sustaining connections with sports governing bodies, commercial sponsors and other external partners is of paramount importance here and elite sports scholarships might be regarded as modest examples of social entrepreneurship undertaken via strategic partnerships with the aim of seeking a sport-related social return from which all might derive benefit. Demand, however, tends to run ahead of supply, a particular concern given the budgetary constraints to which higher education, sports governing bodies and the corporate sector are subject in a challenging economic climate.

Surveying recent and relevant literature in this area a few years ago and using a broad definition which included sport, an editorial in History of Education drew attention to a ‘burgeoning historiography of physical education in many cultures and contexts’ which had ‘brought new breadth to the history of education’ (Freeman 2012, 709). It has also enriched our understanding of the history of sport and continues to do so. The inclusion here of contributions focused on developments in England and Germany facilitate reflection on the sport-education nexus in Ireland because they focus on developments occurring in quite different cultural contexts, Ireland’s long-standing relationship with Britain notwithstanding. Though there were similarities – drill, for example, featured at primary level in both England and Ireland in the early-twentieth century – and we should be especially careful not to understate the extent to which competitive games were played in Irish schools. English physical education encompassed an especially strong tradition of modern competitive games, derived initially from the public schools but making a discernible impact on elementary education from the 1890s onwards, as Gary James indicates in his article on schoolboy football in Manchester. The crucial role of played by teachers in this process has long been apparent and is very evident here in the achievements of George Sharples and his colleagues, not only in introducing soccer in their schools but in creating an organisational structure through which strategic connections could be made and sustained with the city council and the Manchester and Salford Playing Fields Association, not to mention Manchester City Football Club.

Sports historians along with historians of education have long been somewhat bedazzled by muscular Christianity and the cult of athleticism in Victorian public schools (McCulloch 2012, 35). Dilwyn Porter’s article on the Reverend K.R.G. Hunt, ‘the footballing parson’ revisits these well-worn themes, though Hunt’s long teaching career, spanning the first five decades of the twentieth century, testifies to an enduring influence which cannot be accounted for simply by reference to the context in which it originated. Hunt, though he taught middle-class boys, was able to play an important part in the transmission of football culture more generally through his commitment to Highgate School’s missionary activities amongst working-class boys in East London and through publications, especially his widely-circulated booklet, Football: How to Succeed (1932), commissioned by the English Schools Football Association and later taken up by the Football Association to use in its drive to raise the standard of coaching in schools. Hunt’s career as a football educator suggests that the sport-education nexus often works in both directions simultaneously where there is some mutual benefit to be derived from the relationship. This is a conclusion that might also be drawn from the contributions by Bourke and O’Connor to this collection on recent developments in the Republic of Ireland.

In the final article in this collection, Kristian Naglo assesses the operation of football academies and elite schools of football in Germany through an examination of Bundesliga club FSV Mainz 05 and one of its partner schools. While contemporary in focus, Naglo’s work illustrates how far perceptions of education have changed within professional football in Germany, along with the increasing realisation of the value of a solid educational background in conjunction with any professional sporting career. The reconstruction of the small world of elite youth football in Germany was a project born out of perceived crisis at the start of the present century, a closer relationship between professional clubs and schools emerging as a key feature of the renewal process. However, whereas educators in Ireland and elsewhere have traditionally looked to physical education and sport to underpin a set of values regarded as beneficial to society as a whole or as being in the national interest – Heffernan makes this connection especially clear – the values emphasised in the particular nexus under consideration in Mainz and elsewhere in Germany reflect the rhetoric of professional sport and are linked to its particular requirements. The comparative aspect is important here. Initiatives in the Republic of Ireland to cater for the educational needs of young talent seeking a career in sport have arrived later and seem patchy and relatively unambitious in the light of the German case study.

One striking feature of the various contributions to this collection, whatever their particular focus, is the importance of key individuals in creating or activating the sport-education or, if preferred, the education-sport nexus. It clearly works both ways. This is very evident in the articles here that relate primarily to Britain and Germany with the achievement of Matthias Sammer, Director of Football at the Deutscher Fussball-Bund, in incorporating schools into the elite football development system supplying an outstanding example. The importance of individual agency in initiating new developments or effecting radical change is also apparent here in the various Irish contexts under consideration. As anyone interested in sport knows, being the right person, in the right place at the right time is often critical and locating an individual in a precise historical context is often instructive. It helps, when considering the impact of Joan Burnett Knight, for instance, to understand that she worked as a physical education organiser in Northern Ireland in the late 1940s when the Unionist administration in Belfast was committed to post-war reconstruction and social improvement in line with what was happening in the rest of the United Kingdom (Hennessey 1997, 95). We should also be more aware of the importance of key individuals, albeit often anonymous, who effected change locally, in the school gymnasium, on the playing field or in the university administrator’s office, like the inspiring teachers recalled by some of Murphy and McEvoy’s interviewees or the higher education executives who facilitate elite sports scholarships and other programmes.

It is hoped that this publication will inspire further studies of the history of sport and education, while also encouraging more debate on education’s role within sport. We still await full-length publications on the history of physical education, physical culture, the involvement of religious bodies in sport and education, migration for educational purposes, and competitive third-level sports within an Irish setting. The aim here, building on the work of the various conferences noted earlier, is to provide a starting point for broader studies of sport and education in Ireland, and we are confident these will comprise part of a wider historical British and European examination of sport and education in the years ahead.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).