Sporting events before school, during class times, as part of off site competitions and during break times involve a multitude of skill levels, equipment, sporting codes and participants – all with varying levels of supervision and expertise.
Within a school setting, there is generally a sport and PE team who can lead activities, and provide guidance on safety and accessibility for everyone involved.
Although PE teachers are skilled and highly trained in delivering sports events safely, there will always be some degree of risk. What becomes challenging for teachers is when the risk shifts from unforeseen to known, potentially bringing about an associated shift in duty of care responsibilities.
The recent tragic death of 27-year-old teacher and footballer Nathan Fitzgerald brings to light some of the challenging thinking and planning that surrounds contact sports and highlights the importance of collaborative decision making at the school level.
Over the coming weeks, PE and sport teachers may need to grapple with questions about multi-use playing surfaces, as families, community members and other teaching staff seek advice about how to keep young people safe when they are playing sport.
This can create a significant load for PE teachers, who are not necessarily trained as experts in the management of sporting fields.
It’s important that school communities and leadership teams work closely with their PE staff so no one is left to feel that responsibility for such significant decisions are theirs alone.
Let’s take a closer look at what we do know already, and how we can use this information to support and work alongside our PE and sport teams to help keep everyone safe.
Firstly, we do know that there has already been significant work done around concussion and player safety. This has included athlete education, injury surveillance and returning to play guidelines.
The Australian concussion guidelines for youth and community sport offer a great starting point for making evidence-based decisions.
We also know that concussions are a significant cause of presentations to the emergency department at hospital. The age group with the highest level of emergency presentations for concussion is the 15 to 24 year old group, with rates higher for males than females.
It’s important to remember that sport is not the only reason for concussion, however. In fact, only one in five concussions are caused by a sporting incident. The rest are made up of a variety or reasons including falls, road accidents, trauma and assaults.
Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare from 2020/21 found there were 2300 concussions which involved sport. Of those, around 910 involved some form of football (AFL, rugby union, rugby league soccer and touch football).
There were also 425 concussions which happened during cycling activities, including BMX, road cycling, mountain bike riding and velodrome events.
In fact, when taken separately, cycling as a group of sports lies behind more concussion hospitalisation events than AFL.
As we collect information and hopefully use it to make good decisions at the school and community level, it’s important to pause for a moment and think how best to use all the information wisely and effectively.
While we have come a long way in educating and being pro-active in managing concussion risks and events, there is still important collaborative work to be done.
School leaders need to work alongside their PE and sport teams to make good decisions based on what we know now, to help build on the good foundations of concussion risk and player safety that have already been established.
