A good school rugby app is quietly becoming the difference between a thriving programme and one that quietly folds. That sounds dramatic for a piece of software, but it fits the story that has dominated school sport for 25 years: rugby union, we keep hearing, is losing the war on the playing fields. A 2024 report by Sir Jon Coles, chief executive of United Learning, warned the sport faced an existential threat and risked becoming a “declining minority sport.”
New findings tell a different story. Writing in The Telegraph this month, Daniel Schofield reported on data from Neil Rollings, a former director of sport at Sedbergh School, who now runs Independent Coach Education and leads the RFU’s National Rugby Leadership Programme for Schools. Rollings spent 12 months going into schools rather than reading headlines about them. What he found contradicts the doom.
In an ICE survey, 75 per cent of established rugby-playing schools have the same or greater numbers of boys playing than three years ago. There were 640 teams competing in RFU schools’ competitions at under-15 and under-18 levels in 2026. The numbers are down on 10 or 20 years ago, but much of that drop traces to one fact: contact rugby can no longer be made compulsory after legal advice. Against cricket and hockey, rugby is more than holding its own.
“The numbers have declined, but aren’t still declining,” Rollings told The Telegraph. The disconnect he describes is between the idea of a dying game and what he actually saw on a wet Saturday morning in Buckinghamshire, where the boys were as keen as ever and so were the parents on the touchline.
Where School Rugby Is Thriving, and Why It Matters
The growth isn’t evenly spread. Cumbria saw a 17.1 per cent rise in boys’ age-grade registrations last season. Lancashire was up 7.4 per cent, Yorkshire 5.6 per cent. At Brighton College in Sussex, the alma mater of Harlequins fly-half Marcus Smith, director of rugby Nick Buoy says they have doubled the number of sides across most year groups. They now run 20-plus teams per age group with a tiered system by ability.
Look closely at the schools that are growing and a pattern emerges. It is rarely the facilities or the postcode. At Wirral Grammar, head of PE Allen Boyd says his biggest problem isn’t finding players, it’s finding enough volunteers among staff and parents willing to give up part of their weekend, week after week. At Campion, the Essex comprehensive that became the first state school to win the RFU National Schools Cup in 2001, director of sport Rob Squire is blunt about the economics. “Everything we do is fundraised.”
That is the real fault line. As Schofield writes, much of this success rests on the drive of individuals like Squire, Buoy and Boyd, plus hundreds of parental volunteers, with the tacit backing of school leadership. Change any one of those elements and a programme can wither. A great rugby culture is far more fragile than its trophy cabinet suggests, and it’s exactly the kind of fragility a school rugby app is built to protect against.
The Admin Is the Hidden Opponent
Here is the part the participation numbers don’t capture. The schools holding their ground are absorbing a heavy load of coordination. Fixture changes. Squad selection across multiple ability tiers. Kit, consent, transport, pitch allocation, and the volunteer rota that Boyd worries about more than anything. Fundraising on top, because for schools like Campion the programme only exists because someone keeps the money coming in.
A school rugby app takes that weight off the volunteers who are already stretched. When you are fielding 20 teams in an age group, the difference between a thriving section and a collapsing one is often whether the organising is sustainable for the handful of adults running it. The right school rugby app handles registration, attendance, payments and group messaging in one place, so a head of rugby spends their evening coaching the game rather than chasing WhatsApp threads and spreadsheets.
This matters most for the schools Rollings is trying to reach. His principle is that schools “shouldn’t all have to solve the same problem by themselves.” Shared best practice is one half of that. The other half is shared tooling. A school rugby app lets a programme at a state comprehensive run with the same organisational backbone as a well-resourced independent, without needing a full-time administrator to make it work.
Closing the Gap Between Fear and Reality
There is a player-welfare dimension too. Parental nervousness about safety is real, and Rollings is candid that it is fuelled partly by Prem Rugby’s marketing of big hits rather than the age-grade game his data describes. His own findings show injury risk only really climbs from age 16.
Clear, direct communication with parents is how schools close that gap between perception and reality. A school rugby app gives a programme one trusted channel to reach every family with fixture details, safety updates and what is actually happening on a Saturday morning. That single feed does more to reassure a nervous parent than any amount of policy buried on a school website.
The Benefit Is Real Even If the Science Is Thin
One of the more striking lines in the piece: there has never been a proper scientific study of the specific benefits of playing rugby. Yet in Rollings’s informal survey, 90 per cent of heads agreed it develops resilience, respect and camaraderie. As he points out, heads agree on almost nothing, not even term dates.
At Campion, Squire frames it as social mobility. The school runs no football team until year 11, deliberately offering something else, and around 150 boys a year play rugby. He talks about boys from deprived backgrounds who had never picked up a ball before year seven going on to scholarships at Brunel or Exeter. Realistic about the odds of a professional career, he is certain about the door rugby opens to higher education, and the attitude, humility and gratitude the game builds along the way.
Rollings’s challenge, in his own words, is that the value of rugby has become “a sort of masonic secret” understood only by those already inside it. Spreading that beyond the converted is partly persuasion. A school rugby app doesn’t make that case for you, but it removes the friction that stops more schools from offering the game at all.
Take the Admin Off Your Volunteers
If you run rugby at a school, the lesson from the schools that are growing is clear, and the right school rugby app is part of it. Protect your volunteers’ time, communicate openly with parents, and make the organising sustainable. Spond is free, used by more than 30 million people in clubs, schools and teams worldwide, and brings registration, attendance, payments, scheduling and messaging into one place. It is built to give a head of rugby their weekends back.
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