Rishikul Sports & Fitness Academy

There was a time when parents thought of games as a hobby to be tolerated. That has changed, and rightly. Students who train regularly hold a higher average and score better in tests — the link between physical fitness and academic result is by now well established.

It goes further than marks. Sport teaches a child to look after their own body, and those habits carry into adult life. Exercise lifts mood, and a student with a hard training session behind them has somewhere to put the pressure of an examination year.

Leadership, teamwork, confidence and self-reliance are the obvious ones. Less obvious is that a playing field teaches quick thinking — a player has to solve, at speed, the problem the other side has just set. And a child balancing school, training and family learns to manage time, which is a skill nobody teaches directly.