“The education system is a busted flush, it’s broken,” says Lawrence Dallaglio who thinks the Government isn’t doing enough for excluded children falling through the cracks. The ex-England rugby captain, who played in the 2003 World Cup-winning team, is now a pundit: he hosts the Evening Standard rugby podcast. He is also waging war on behalf of Britain’s excluded kids with his charity RugbyWorks. This week he set off on a marathon cycle ride around Europe to raise money, travelling more than 1,000km.
“The number of exclusions aren’t going down, they’re going up and up,” Dallaglio says. “The Government is ignoring the problem, because it’s easy to… we’ve got ourselves into a cycle that is pretty damning, and it’s not going to change unless we break it.”
Dallaglio’s RugbyWorks helps children aged 14 to 17 who have been excluded around the country, with London centres in Southwark and Wandsworth. “We ensure long term that they’re not excluded from society,” he explains. To do this the charity’s coaches work directly with young people in schools. They use sport, principally rugby, to increase engagement, communication skills and discipline, and get participants into full-time employment or education. Currently they have an 85 per cent success rate.
On average, 160 young people are excluded each week from school. Once excluded, only four per cent get any kind of qualifications, as opposed to 64 per cent if they stay in education, Dallaglio tells me. Figures show that there were almost 65,000 exclusions between 2016 and 2022 in inner London — and almost 2.5 per cent of all children were excluded. Worryingly, the ratio of exclusions has gone up sharply in recent years — a troubling after-effect of Covid.
On retiring in 2009, Dallaglio planned a charity cycle to raise cash for the cause. He’s been doing it ever since, covering thousands of miles and raising well over £4 million. This year, his ex-teammate and World Cup-winning captain Martin Johnson is joining him, along with Wham! star Andrew Ridgeley. They left Rome on Sunday and will arrive in Nice on April 25. The sportsmen are competitive, but Johnson is a better cyclist, Dallaglio admits.
The effects of exclusion trickle down into society. About 63 per cent of the prison population in the UK were excluded from school, Dallaglio says. Apart from anything else, a big prison population, many of whom re-offend, is “costing us all a huge amount of money” in taxes. “I don’t believe any kids are born bad, they’re just born into quite chaotic and challenging circumstances.” He cites bad parenting, drug abuse, violence, poverty or a combination of them all.
Dallaglio doesn’t come from the same hardship as the young people who use his charity: he went to private school. But he does know what it’s like to be a troubled teen. His 19-year-old sister Francesca was killed in the Marchioness disaster in 1989, when a boat she was on sank in the Thames. “I started to make pretty bad life choices,” he says. “I wasn’t getting myself into serious trouble, but I was just disengaged with everything.” Rugby gave him something to live for. “It gave me what I needed: community, a family, a sense of purpose... someone to just put their arms around me and help me really.”
Last week the Evening Standard reported on a truancy crisis in London’s schools. New figures show that more than one in five children are classed as persistently absent — a huge increase from one in 10 before the pandemic. “Working in exclusion is by no means glamorous or sexy in any way whatsoever,” says Dallaglio. But it’s important, sometimes giving children one of their most stable relationships in their young lives. “Just because you’re excluded from school, it doesn’t mean you should be excluded from society,” he adds.
Dallaglio spent his whole playing career with Wasps, winning five league titles and two European Cups. He’s since become one of the game’s best-known pundits, helming the successful rugby podcast with the Evening Standard, alongside the paper’s Steve Cording and special guests.
Dallaglio’s verdict on the current England team is tough but hopeful, pointing to “significant progress” during the Six Nations earlier this year. “Everyone would agree that results in the last few years since Japan, where we got to the World Cup final [in 2019], have been very hit and miss,” he says. “It’s not England’s divine right to be the best team in the world.” He adds: “Steve Borthwick inherited a squad that was in need of a lot of change and a bit of a mess”.
He argues a more stable team selection has meant better results of late, and says the debate over Owen Farrell, who was captain but left the team after going to play club rugby in France, is the wrong one. “What England need to focus on is making sure that they’ve got three or four players in every position,” he says. “If I look back to the time when England were very successful… there’s always three or four players in every position pushing each other to be better.”
But back to his current day job. Dallaglio makes a final appeal for generosity to help him raise the £1.7 million a year needed to keep his charity going. “Investing in young people is never a bad way to use your money,” he says. “There’s two things you guarantee in life: you arrive in this world with nothing, and you leave with nothing, so what you do in between is fundamentally very important. It’s about giving back.”
To donate, go to justgiving.com/page/lawrencedallaglio
Listen to the Evening Standard rugby podcast here.
