Complaining about the numbers of Olympic medallists who were privately educated has become something of cheap political goal, ever since Brits started winning again. When you’re more interested in levelling the playing field than competing on it, that’s not surprising.

You can be absolutely sure, however successful Britain’s elite sports men and women are at any given Olympic games, however dramatic, inspirational or simply beyond belief their achievements, as soon as the champagne corks have been swept away and the open-top buses parked, someone, somewhere will moan that far too few went to state schools.

After Rio, according to the Good Schools Guide, 24 per cent of the entire squad and 45 per cent of the 130 medal winners were privately educated.

Around 7 per cent of children attend private schools nationally, in London it’s more like 13 per cent and 18 per cent if you’re talking about 16-18 year-olds. In Edinburgh (it may come as a surprise to some of the keenest kickers at that open goal) 1 in 4 children attend a private school and have done for many years.

And according to the Sutton Trust, 44 per cent of children in London now have a private tutor, so I guess they are privately educated too.

But I’m not the least interested in the figures.

Like so many educational stats they’re rather slippery foundations to build anything educationally purposeful on, a bit like trying to play Jenga with a box full of eels.  

No, what I’m interested in is the different experience children have of sport, in school, or outside at a specialist sports club. I loved sport at school, I coached a number of sports as a teacher and bred two overtly sporty daughters, which means I’ve spent well over a decade taxiing and spectating.

It also means I’ve been free to spend many hours observing sports coaches working in clubs, who are just doing their job. All this involvement as a parent and bystander has convinced me that the world of sport outside of schools has something to learn from the world within.

I’ve seen a little girl (not mine I would stress) being harangued by her coach, reduced to tears and then deliberately ignored, after she made a mistake on the beam in a gymnastics competition. Feel free to decide how that affected her performance on the other apparatus.

I’ve seen two male coaches, coaching a team of teenage girls whose performance was not going well, swear at them publicly, telling them that they were so bad, they would have to coach themselves for the rest of the match.

This was in volleyball, a sport where the coach’s advice and participation contributes way more to the team’s actual scoring success than any other I know.

The two then sat on a bench side-by-side playing with their mobile phones for the rest of the match, never once speaking to the team they were supposed to be coaching while, visibly bewildered and heart-broken, the girls struggled to play on as courageously as they could. This was in a national championships. Again, not my child involved.

Flip this tarnished coin, and I’ve seen parents standing in a gallery overlooking a swimming pool, stopwatch in hand, at every single training session, regardless of the crack of dawn hour.

I’ve witnessed them complain angrily to coaches about the poor performance of other people’s children, and met far too many parents so completely incapable of managing the emotional bonds with their children healthily, that clubs have had to ban them from attending training or events.

I’ve heard language screamed from the touchline of a soccer pitch no teacher would tolerate from a child playing on it, ever.

Yet I have also seen some memorable and wonderful things.

‘She learned to be a teacher’

I’ve been lucky enough to observe the work of two elite gymnastics coaches from the ex Soviet Union. These two have had an enormous impact on my youngest daughter, and as she has physically grown and developed as a gymnast, I have had ample opportunity to watch them coaching over many years.

If there is one thing that has always distinguished them as sports coaches, it is their almost uncanny ability to understand my daughter’s feelings. That’s a skill I associate with the best of teachers.

That ability to juggle the complex interactions that are taking place in one space simultaneously, to assess the needs of a whole group of different children engaged in the same or similar activities, yet know precisely what each needs at any moment. In a sport like gymnastics, which balances courage with risk, it’s easy to see why that would matter.  

Recently I had a chance to discuss all this with one of these coaches and she told me training to become a gymnastics coach in the Soviet Union had taken her six years. She spent the entire first year studying nothing other than human anatomy. I have no doubt that during those six years, whatever else she was taught, she learned to be a teacher.

Good schools and teachers will all recognise as bad practice, the teacher who punishes an entire class because of the poor behaviour of one or two members in it. “You’re all going to stay behind” is a cliché of what not to do as a teacher.

Yet, that precise strategy appears again and again in sports clubs where coaches tell an entire group to repeat a drill or exercise because one of two failed to do it to the coach’s satisfaction first time around.

Imagine what that feels like to the child when what you’re forcing them to do is repeat really demanding, even gruelling physical exercise?

If your goals are to stir up resentment and dissent amongst team members; to see that the majority of good performance goes unrecognised and rewarded; or just to teach them that adults in authority behave unjustly, then go right ahead and carry on doing it that way.

As an ex teacher, a lover of sport and supportive parent, I suspect it’s not a great idea. 

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author

To read more columns by Joe, view his back-catalougue

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