Ellis Genge: Rugby has a state school problem. This is how to fix it ...Middle East

Ellis Genge says the key to reversing rugby union’s decline in state schools is upskilling teachers to spread the word.

But the England prop and newly-named British & Irish Lions squad member has been around the block enough times to also raise the obvious problem.

“The talent pool is there in state schools,” Genge tells The i Paper.

“There’s a lot more kids that go to state schools than private schools, so you’ve got to ask yourself, how are you nurturing that talent? The teachers getting involved, that’s your route in.

“But the salaries for teachers at private schools are significantly more for an ex-rugby player, an ex-professional going in – they’re significantly better compensated than if they went to a state comprehensive or a state secondary school.

“So the knock-on effect is the pool you pick from, these guys or girls are going to stand out head and shoulders above the rest, because they’ve had such better coaching through their school age.”

A review published by the Rugby Football Union earlier this season described the decline in state schools as an “urgent issue approaching crisis point”.

The challenges it cited included the complexity of the game to coach and the nagging cliché of “a game for posh white boys”, but it would be “a major strategic error” if the sport was left to “elite schools” and clubs to nurture.

The disparity was highlighted by only four of England’s 13 Lions announced last week being educated exclusively at state schools, although this is partly due to hothousing that occurs at ages 16 to 18.

The 30-year-old Genge went to John Cabot city technology college in Bristol, which converted to an academy early in his time there, then on to Hartpury College on a rugby scholarship.

He plays for his home-city club, Bristol Bears, and John Cabot are proud to call Genge an alumnus, even while remembering him on their website as a “perennially late-to-school joker”.

In return he is grateful for the luck he had in three teachers who happened to be interested in rugby, which he says was unusual for a Bristol school; as a younger kid at Knowle Park Primary, professional football was his dream.

I ask Genge about the former England head coach Eddie Jones famously recommending in these pages to “blow up” the schools system if England wanted to produce more rugby union players and leaders. Genge, unlike Jones, has a lived experience in the system.

“I definitely wouldn’t blow anything up,” Genge says with a brief smile at the literal thought.

“I’m never going to knock private education for what it is, the avenues it opens up and, from a percentage point of view, the success stories going into better-earning jobs.

“I don’t think chucking the baby out with the bathwater is what to do. I think you’ve got to take a calculated approach to it.”

This is why Genge is supporting Gallagher’s initiative to give state-school teachers with no experience of rugby or maybe any sport at all the tools to teach rugby’s basics.

“I’d love to make a huge impact on kids from the state system,” he says.

“I see all the messages I get online and all the kids coming up to me, and all the concerned parents. It touches my heart in a way I didn’t think it ever would; now I’ve got three kids of my own as well, that opens my eyes.”

Genge is also persuaded by an argument about Premiership clubs’ academies he heard recently over a coffee with Alan Martinovic, his former Hartpury coach.

“He said it doesn’t make sense for academies to take all the kids who are the best at rugby from the private schools and bring them into the sessions.

“These kids are already getting coached four times a week, playing rugby five times a week. The kids from the state schools do it for half an hour once a week in PE. So bring them into the academies two or three times a week.

“I’d never want to make them sound like objects, but you get more bang for your buck bringing in someone from a state school who hasn’t touched a rugby ball all week, but who’s obviously got raw athletic capability, and get them involved at a young age, and nurture something special. Obviously, you have then got to bring in the transport and get them around the city, which is a big obstacle.”

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Under the new Professional Game Partnership, all Premiership clubs must have at least two partnerships with state schools. It doesn’t sound much, but should help.

And if private and state schools are two parties in all this, the third is local clubs. Genge had time at Old Redcliffians RFC and he pulls people up on the posh white boy generalisation.

“In Bristol, the grassroots game is massively working class,” Genge says, “and the same if you go south, from when I chat to Luke Cowan-Dickie and Jack Nowell in the likes of Cornwall.”

Genge has, nevertheless, experienced the divide between haves and have-nots.

“When we were playing in tournaments or going away to trials, and it was held at Harrow School or Millfield School and places like this, it just blows your mind – whether that’s right or wrong, or a reflection of the way I’ve been brought up to… not envy, but feel uncomfortable in those environments.

“We went to Bryanston for south-west under 16s, we stayed there for a night, and when we went to have food it was like this grand hall at Hogwarts, it was bonkers. Our canteen was a few pizza slices and a bag of chips for a pound. They’ve got these crazy fountains and it’s just a very different experience.

“Especially as a young male in that environment, you feel quite weirdly intimidated, you know? It sounds crazy to think that the wealth is intimidating, but you feel out of place by how incredible these schools are. And you think ‘what chance have you got?’

“But I guess that’s the beauty of these success stories [from state schools]. When people come from the adversity and through the other side, that’s what makes the juice a little bit sweeter.”

The principle of “you can’t be what you can’t see” is well known, and Genge says “all sorts of groups” are invited by current England coach Steve Borthwick to watch training. Genge also says “we have a duty to make [rugby] more accessible and more affordable for people who are out of that bracket of paying 100 quid for a ticket”. But nor does he deny that supply and demand has its place.

The Lions this summer will make their usual demand of melding players from different backgrounds into one team. Genge, who has 71 caps in the front row, quips that in his ideal Lions XV, “I’ll be fly-half”.

More seriously, he says every Test side relies essentially on physicality and how hard you work, and he is used to adapting from Bristol’s one-off style anyway, and then his first Lions tour will be up to how he gets on for the first time working with coaches Andy Farrell, John Dalziel, Simon Easterby and John Fogarty.

“Speaking to the Leinster boys, they say [scrum coach] Fogarty is a proper laugh,” Genge says. “You almost feel like you’re young again going on a rugby tour – but you’re a bit older and wiser, so won’t blow it on the first night.

“I’ve got, what, five years left if I’m very fortunate, and I’d like to retire on my own terms. But I think I’m well equipped for what’s to come after; the abyss that is the unknown.”

The Gallagher Touchline Academy is a free rugby teaching programme, created in partnership with Premiership Rugby clubs, designed to upskill 2,000 teachers in delivering rugby lessons by 2028. To find out more about how to sign up: click here

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