haxx

Hi I'm based in England and I saw a post on this forum that said in Britain Martial Arts in our schools wasn't allowed, this isn't true, they are. Teaching Martial Arts in Public Schools does work. I teach Karate in 4 public schools and 3 state schools. The schools offer Karate in different formats, it depends on the school. One public school for example offers Karate (& Judo which is has it's own Instructor) as part of their PE Programme, the kids can have 3 lessons a week. The same school also offers it has part of their activity programme and they can get 2 lessons a week that way. We even have our own purpose built dojo. The other 3 public schools offer Karate after school, and they term it as a paid extra. Therefore the parents get billed directly. Of the the 3 state schools, 1 is an after-school club. The other 2 offer Karate during the school day. 1 School is a specialist Sports College. They have just made Karate compulsory for year 10 pupils (14-15 years old) and optional for Year 11 (15-16) years old. The other state school is a primary school and they are offering it to years 4,5,6 and we will be teaching a whole year (about 29 kids) per term. You do have to modify your thinking quite a lot, but it does work, I have another primary school who want us to go in and do some work with their kids. The Sports College found that 59% of the kids don't want to play traditional team games and would like to do something more individual. There is a broad spectrum of things you can cover, and hey there is more to Karate than just kicking & punching. You have to be responsible i can't teach a primary school class the same thing I would teach my black belt class, thats common sense. With the right approach I think you would be surprised at how popular it actually is, and some of them feed in to the public clubs as well. All the best Paul