Grammar schools must give poorer children a fair chance

The higher a family's income, the greater a pupil's chance of being admitted to a grammar. But fairer admissions will only begin to level the playing field

• Conor Ryan
• theguardian.com, Sunday 4 May 2014 13.38 BST

Pupils take a practice test during a tutoring session. 'Grammar school heads say they want to end the tutoring culture. But, with a quarter of pupils receiving private tuition, that may be wishful thinking.' Photograph: Antonio Olmos

Around half of England's 164 grammar schools plan to prioritise bright pupils from poorer families in their admissions policies. They have provoked a predictable backlash from some who see this as social engineering.

Yet the heads are right to embrace fairer admissions. And even those who would prefer all schools to be comprehensive should welcome these measures. Indeed, it is crucial that the grammars go further if they are going to play a stronger role in supporting social mobility.

Research for the Sutton Trust has shown that the number of grammar school pupils who come from outside the state sector – largely fee-paying preparatory schools – is more than four times the number eligible for free school meals. Only 6% of pupils in England go to prep schools, whereas 16% are entitled to free meals – but just 600 of the 22,000 children entering grammar schools between 2009 and 2011 were from these least advantaged homes, whereas 2,800 had been privately educated.

Of course grammar schools are selective, and many children from poorer homes have already fallen behind their better-off peers by age 11. That gap needs narrowing. Yet when our researchers looked at all pupils reaching the expected standard for a 14-year-old in the end-of-primary English and maths tests, they found that only 40% of able free-school-meal pupils gained admission to grammars, compared with 66% of other pupils.

Nor is it just poor pupils losing out. The research showed that the higher your family's income, the greater your chance of being admitted to a grammar. There is a good reason for this: parents who can afford it pay to make sure their children pass the test. For the richest parents, it will be £9,000-a-year prep school fees. For others, it will be £20 an hour or more for a private tutor. For many, these sums are more than they can afford.

That's why fairer admissions in grammar schools, far from giving less privileged pupils an unfair advantage, would simply help level the playing field. But while this is a welcome first step, more needs to be done. Admissions policies are only one part of the equation.

Grammar schools should reach out to a wider group of schools and pupils if the link between income and access is to be broken, while all primary schools in selective areas should encourage their bright pupils to apply in the first place. Admissions tests should reduce any bias that could disadvantage pupils from under-represented backgrounds.

To their credit, many grammar schools are acting here too: the Sutton Trust is working with the King Edward VI foundation in Birmingham and others to improve outreach programmes, while many schools are switching to less coachable tests.

Grammar school heads say they want to end the tutoring culture. But, with a quarter of pupils receiving private tuition, that may be wishful thinking. That's why grammar applicants should be entitled to free sessions to help familiarise them with the test, so those from low-income families don't lose out.

Critics will say that we should abolish rather than ameliorate selection. But the reality is that no major political party will scrap the remaining grammars without a groundswell of parental support: in this respect, the coalition parties and Labour are at one. So where grammars remain, it is vital that they do more to open their doors to bright children from low- and middle-income homes.

Others will say that we should focus instead on social selection in comprehensives or fee-paying independent schools. We also want to see independent day schools opened up on the basis of merit rather than money.

But grammar schools still educate one in 20 secondary pupils, and many have a good record in getting their students into our best universities. So it is crucial that they are open to bright children of all backgrounds.

How Jeremy Paxman tamed the spin doctors

John Humphrys in the Telegraph

Poor old Paxo. They got to him in the end. All those politicians with their lying ways. Their glib, shallow, facile, sanctimonious, self-serving failure to answer perfectly straightforward questions. Their ignorance and incompetence and wilful refusal to agree that they are always wrong and we, the interviewers, are always right. Their pathetic self-pity when they are finally exposed.

Jeremy just couldn’t take it any more. I knew the end was near when I arrived at Broadcasting House to present Today one morning, and found him in a dark corner whimpering quietly to himself: “Just answer the question, minister. Please answer the question!” 

Yeah, right. It’s far more likely that he’d be begging them to stick to their old ways. Imagine the interview in which the politician never ducks or dodges a question, never misses an opportunity to attack the opposing party or praise his own leader, and always answers every question, no matter how leading or tendentious or ill-informed, and no matter how much damage an honest answer might do to him and his party. People like us would be out of a job more quickly than an MP can fill in an expenses claim.

Who needs a rottweiler when a poodle would do just as well? The more serious question is whether politicians behave the way they do because we behave the way we do. And the answer is: it depends. Contrary to the widely held belief, all politicians are not the same. Indeed I suspect the majority do their damnedest to answer the question. Where I take issue with Jeremy is his often quoted remark that when we interview a politician we should always ask ourselves: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” 

A few years ago The Times printed a story across two pages with the headline: “Humphrys says all Labour ministers are liars”. It wasn’t true. What I’d actually said was that there are three types of MP: those who never lie under any circumstances and tend not to get promoted because the Whips are a bit nervous of them; those who make it into the top ranks and must observe the rule of collective Cabinet responsibility (or do what Robin Cook did over Iraq and resign); and those who don’t give a damn and either don’t or even can’t distinguish between truth and falsehood.

Based on my own experience, I happen to think there are precious few in that last category. Probably no more than in any other large organisation that is made up mostly of highly intelligent, ambitious individuals.

At the risk of being drummed out of the Cynical Old Hacks Club, I’d go further. I’d suggest that most of them are there because they genuinely do want to make a difference. God knows, the life of an MP is not an easy one. There are other ways of making at least as much money for rather less effort, and not be forced to apply for your own job all over again every five years.

So why are they held, by and large, in such low esteem? You may well say that’s obvious. Greed. When this newspaper ripped open the expenses scandal it tainted every one of them – even the innocent. The other reason takes us back to where I started: how they come across when they are being interviewed.

Some say it’s never been worse. I disagree. It was worse when they mostly refused point blank to answer questions from grubby hacks at all and, when they did condescend to do so, their interviewers treated them like deities. “Have you anything else to say to a grateful nation, minister?” is a parody – but only just. All that changed when broadcasting giants such as Robin Day, Alastair Burnet and Brian Walden challenged the old order and won.

But then the spin doctors arrived. This was a new religion for a new broadcasting age, and Alastair Campbell was its prophet. The approach was simple: to control the message it was necessary to control the messenger. MPs and ministers were not only told what to say and what not to say; they were also told precisely how to say it. And if they strayed, they paid – sometimes a heavy price. It works up to a point, but listeners and viewers are not fools. Sooner or later they spot what’s going on. And Paxman helped them spot it. That’s why he will be missed.

Camkerala win first game of green winter sport season

by Girish Menon

On the first day of the green winter* sport season CamKerala beat Burrows Green (from Newmarket) by 18 runs thanks to good performances by Austin, Vincent, Shinto, Jijo and a two wickets off two balls burst by Manuel. The game played at the Hills Road Sports Centre cricket pitch off Sedley Taylor Road, had a good pavilion but a slow pitch with small square boundaries and a heavy outfield.

Vincent won the toss and elected to bat. In the third over Vibin tried an uppish on drive which refused to spill out of short midwicket's hands. Girish and Austin played the next 7-8 overs carefully seeing off a good offspinner. At the first bowling change, Girish tried an expansive drive and was bowled by a slower ball. this led to a minor collapse with Austin and Manuel following Girish back to the pavilion. Vincent steadied the ship on one side, while Anil dispatched his first two balls for six over the midwicket area, one of the balls went on the railway tracks and a new ball had to be used. Anil perished in his cavalier way and then a good partnership between Vincent and Shinto rescued Camkerala. Govind in his debut match of proper cricket, as against the rubber ball cricket that he played before, managed 11 runs and the rest of the team folded quietly on 135 in 35 overs.

A good batting partnership by the opening pair of Burrows Green had CamKerala worried as they reached 55 runs without any loss. At this point Shinto held a well judged catch off Austin and the first breakthrough was achieved. Then Manuel in his first over bowled two batsmen off consecutive balls and was unlucky to miss a hat trick. Jijo then held an excellent catch on the square leg boundary and another  at point which allowed Austin to get a 5 wicket haul. Vincent then bowled well to get the tail end wickets. There was some panic towards the end as the scores got close but when Vincent bowled the last man there was relief all around. Joshy laboured hard on the field and Matthews was unlucky not get any wickets in his six overs.

Overall, it was an auspicious start to the season. To look at the positives, Austin and Vincent bowled good lengths which resulted in wickets. Shinto and Jijo held good catches which turned the game. But the old frailty of not batting the entire 40 overs seems to persist and this is a cause for concern. Nonetheless a win is a win.

*Green Winter - An African writer explaining the weather in North Europe stated that there were two seasons here. White winter and green winter. He said he preferred the white winter because they'd put on the heaters. This writer turned up for this game wearing thermals.

Humanity's future depends upon good grammar

The Bad Grammar award has been charged with sneering misanthropy, but as a judge I say that our children's lives are at stake 

If you tolerate this, then your children won't be next … a Tesco sign. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

So far in my four decades, I have lived a life blissfully free of controversy. No paparazzi have ever staked out my front door and, with the odd (in both senses of the word) outraged commenter aside, I have never, to my knowledge, sparked loathing and fury in anyone I either know or don't. So it was with an ease prompted in equal measures by naivete and common sense that when Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler Academy emailed me several months ago to ask whether I would like to be a judge for this year's Bad Grammar award, I agreed with not the slightest bit of hesitancy.

Well! Who knew that an interest in how the English language works was tantamount to announcing oneself as a frothing-mouthed raving loony? Are sentence structures the new poll tax? I could only assume so from the frankly hilarious rage that greeted the announcement of our shortlist this week. I feared I had failed in my capacity as a judge already when my presence on the panel did not prevent the prize from being raged against on the website I write for, when one especially outraged chap wrote that I and my fellow judges, Jeremy Paxman and Rowley Leigh, were "peddling sneering, condescending, dismissive, misanthropic, elitist, made-up twaddle"? He suggested that our rackety prize was some kind of undefined Gove-ian conspiracy and, perhaps mistaking our prize for actual legislation, that we were "language police". I could spend longer dismantling this particular blog but, first, life's too short and, second, seeing as the gentleman's main objection seemed to be that the prize was inspired by a book (that I had heretofore never encountered) called Gwynne's Grammar, and he himself has written a competing grammar book, I'm not convinced there's really any need.

Even lovely Michael Rosen seemed to feel the bile rising at the prospect of these awards, calling them "nasty" and insisting that bad grammar is "no big deal. We all make mistakes. In most circumstances it's no big deal. We get what the person meant from the context."

Indeed we do. This, it seems, lies at the heart of this issue: should grammar be prescriptive or descriptive? In other words, should we all adhere to a set of hard rules from the 16th century or should we just blunder along, let language take its course and assume we know what each other means? Obviously, the answer lies between those two extremes. But I am going to speak up here in defence of good grammar and, contrary to the suggestion of one columnist, my defence is in no way endorsed or inspired by Michael Gove.

One doesn't need to be Thomas Gradgrind to be interested in the rules underlying the English language, or to believe that good communication and understanding depend on clarity. Grammar is not just about learning sentence construction: it's about speaking clearly and plainly and cutting through obfustication. But even aside from that, and most importantly of all, good grammar will help you get laid.

I learned grammar at my school in the US and I am eternally grateful I did because, when I moved to London in the early 90s at the age of 11, I learned that grammar was not, weirdly, on the syllabus. As a result, I found learning foreign languages, such as French and Italian, far easier than some of my new English friends did because I understood the subjunctive tense and verb conjugations. Only one other girl in my year had also had grammar lessons and she, too, found learning foreign languages a comparative doddle. When we were about 16, a bunch of my friends, including my grammatically-correct friend, all went off on a German exchange and my friend, with her superior grammar skills, pulled not one, not two, but THREE German boys. I'm telling you, Munich has yet to recover from her visit, and grammar lessons were never so popular as when the German exchange trip returned to London.

As for my second piece of evidence for the defence, as anyone who has ever dabbled in internet dating knows, there is no bigger turn-off – none – than a spelling or grammar mistake in a prospective suitor's biography or correspondence. Yes, everyone makes mistakes and language mutates and blah blah blah, but in the pitiless world of internet dating, it is simple human instinct to rule someone out on such grounds. I've had friends cancel dates due to a simple rogue apostrophe. So consider that, grammar descriptivists. The perpetuation of the human race depends on good grammar.

So when the award rolled around on Thursday night, we all felt the heavy weight of the human species on our shoulders. Our shortlist was pleasingly outraging and the Idler Academy was veritably packed out with passionate fellow grammarians. There were some delightful entries (I particularly like the cafe chain Apostrophe misusing an apostrophe, although that is, strictly speaking, more a punctuation mistake than a grammatical one) and some downright depressing ones. Rowley Leigh voted for Tristram Hunt's incomprehensible speech, but Jeremy Paxman and I both voted forTesco, so it took the prize. Tesco, it may be remembered, was nominated for using "less" not "fewer" in reference to numbers on loo-roll packaging – "Same Luxury. Less Lorries" – and for describing its orange juice as "most tastiest". I suspect this will come as a disappointment to those who predicted that our Gove-ian prize would go to Hunt (he was runner-up) but that's the problem with dismissing basic grammar rules: you don't always talk sense.

Big Pharma, my cancer patient and me

My patient was refused compassionate access to a cheap chemotherapy. Why? Because pharmaceutical companies are often guilty of selling an ethically murky kind of hope

• 
• • Ranjana Srivastava
  • theguardian.com, Friday 2 May 2014 00.43 BST

'We both knew that the gesture will be more therapeutic than the drug itself'. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

After failing two types of chemotherapy for advanced cancer, my patient knew that her lease on life was short, but a cherished family event stood in the way. "My son is going to propose at the Christmas table, I just want to make it there." Her son has been her anchor throughout her challenge; I could see why his engagement mattered so much. But Christmas was still some months away, and I feared the feat will be difficult.

"I am not afraid to die but I just want to know that I gave it my all." This is an all too frequent exchange, unfailingly poignant, often heart-wrenching. An entirely reasonable answer would be to gently reiterate the lack of meaningful chemotherapy, broach the benefit of good palliative care, and allow for regret at both our ends. Contrary to popular belief that mythologizes every patient raging against cancer to the very end, for many this discussion eases the burden of expectation and allows for a peaceful end.

But this relatively young mother was simply not ready yet. "I would happily die right after he proposed" she smiled, reminding me that her goalposts had never changed. When a patient like that looks you in the eye, it isn’t easy to separate foreboding statistics and human longing into two neat piles and deny hope.

My head said that another chemotherapy drug wouldn't make a significant survival difference. But my heart urged me to try, if not to boost survival, then merely to reassure her that she gave it her best shot. Put simply, we both knew that the gesture will be more therapeutic than the drug itself, hardly a rare observation in medicine.

I wrote to a large pharmaceutical company for compassionate access to a common chemotherapy that’s not government subsidised for her precise type of cancer (most likely because patients typically don’t live long enough to need it). It is a relatively old and cheap drug, importantly with manageable toxicity, and I requested a month’s supply to gauge response. I added that the patient does not expect recurrent funding in case she responds to the drug, addressing a legitimate concern. In a world where we frequently push the boundaries or prescribe chemotherapy in more questionable circumstances, I feel comfortable that what I am really doing is asking the company to be my partner in nurturing hope. Which is after all what every pharmaceutical representative has told me for as long as I have known.

So I simply don’t believe it when my request is declined. Thinking this to be a mistake, I protest further up the chain, pointing out to a senior executive that only recently the company had offered me conference sponsorship worth thousands more than the small cost of the chemotherapy. The apologies come fast, but the explanations are notably absent.

'If subsidy looks unlikely, access schemes are retired, sometimes abruptly'. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

My naive puzzlement slowly turns into the realisation that almost every instance where a company has facilitated compassionate access to a product, it has been as a form of marketing as a means of gaining lucrative, government-subsidised listing. In the era of astonishingly expensive blockbuster drugs, government subsidisation is the holy grail of big pharma. The cost of treating a few hundred or even a few thousand patients for free (and in the process, securing the backing of doctors), is negligible when the ultimate prize is full government subsidy. Indeed, individuals and organisations including the UK’s NICE and Australia’s PBS are now questioning the feasibility of subsidising drugs that can cost as much as AU$200,000 a year for ambiguous benefit.

Compassionate access schemes for these incredibly expensive drugs might facilitate access for selected patients but they are not truly compassionate in the way that the average person understands. Pharmaceutical companies sell an ethically murky kind of hope than what doctors and their patients might understand. The benefit to the company must ultimately outweigh the benefit to the individual patient. If subsidy looks unlikely, access schemes are retired, sometimes abruptly. When a commonplace drug is neither vying for market recognition nor fighting for subsidisation, there is no incentive to provide it to a patient like mine, whose story would anyway never be the stuff of headlines.

You might ask the obvious question as to why it would take so long for an oncologist to figure out that a pharmaceutical company is not a charity. The common argument is that companies must necessarily recoup the cost of drug development, as only a small minority succeed in the marketplace.

But for every dollar spent on research, nearly twice is spent on lobbying and marketing – and it is also this expense that companies want to recover. From the time they are students, doctors are exposed to relentless advertising that big pharma is their companion in healthcare. The glory days of advertising saw doctors offered egregious forms of largesse, from conferences hosted in ancient castles and on cruises to lavish dining and entertainment. Then there were the rivers of pens post-it notes, stress balls and cute toys to influence prescribing. Regulation is much tighter today, but there is still plenty of money in sponsorships, paid speaking tours, adding one’s credible name to journal articles, and just promoting a drug to one’s peers, especially if you are anointed a key opinion leader.

Drug companies think nothing of sending a representative to wait for three hours in a clinic to spend five minutes with a doctor. Unlike other people, these people never ever express frustration at the ludicrous wait and are unfailingly courteous. They ask subtly about you, your family and your holidays. They probe your prescribing habit and tell you why your peers prefer their drug. They routinely ask what would make it even easier for you to prescribe their drug. It is impossible to navigate the discussion towards cost or what makes for the greater societal good.

And to be honest, it’s unseemly to be anything but polite towards someone who has waited hours to see you, seems genuinely nice, and from whom you might need a favour for your next patient. These favours are rare but the younger you are, the more impressionable. No wonder many medical schools and hospitals have banned pharmaceutical representative visits, hopefully signalling to doctors that the sandwiches have a hidden cost.

Eventually, I tell my patient that my request for compassionate access was denied. Crushed, she asks if she wasn’t important enough. "That’s not true", I say unconvincingly, "it’s just the way it is." She dies, with a few weeks to go before Christmas, leaving me to wonder whether the drug might just have bridged the small gap. I will never know, but feeling morally compromised by the whole exchange, I tell the drug company that I won’t see its representatives in future.

I didn’t expect an acknowledgment but when it came, it sounded like a thinly veiled warning that the visits were an essential prerequisite to receiving favours. An incredulous representative exclaims, "you would really do that, stop seeing us due to what happened with that one patient?"

But "that one patient" represented the human face of what happens when the interests of a patient and the pharmaceutical company don’t align. That one patient’s crushed hope felt no less important than the renewed hopes of another. What happened with that one patient finally opened my eyes to what has gone before.

It seems only right to start by paying tribute to my patient, while acknowledging my complicity in the thorny tangle of doctors, patients and drug companies.

Economics is too important to leave to the experts

Citizens may be able to see the world more clearly than narrowly focused professional economists

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 30 April 2014 17.30 BST

'Thatcher's big bang in 1986 laid the ground for freewheeling financial capitalism, whose destructive nature is at the heart of the current mess.' Photograph: PA Archive

You wouldn't have guessed it, given the fanfare surrounding the 0.8% growth figure for the first quarter of 2014, but people in the United Kingdom have been living through a period worse than Japan's infamous "lost decade" of the 1990s.

During that time, Japan's per capita GDP grew at 1% per year. This means that in 2000, Japan's per capita GDP was 10.5% higher than in 1990. In the UK, per capita GDP at the end of 2013 was 6.6% lower than that in 2007. This means that, unless the UK economy miraculously grows at around 5% a year for the next four years (factoring in population growth rate of around 0.7% a year), it is going to have a decade that is even more "lost" than Japan's 1990s.

The costs of the 2008 crisis in terms of human welfare have been even greater than the growth figures suggest. Unemployment is still nearly 7%, or at 2.24 million, depriving people of dignity and putting them under huge stress. Real wages have had some of the biggest falls in the OECD bloc of 34 countries and have a long way to go before they can recover to pre-crisis levels.

Steep cuts in welfare spending have hit many of the poorest hard. Increasing job insecurity, symbolised by the rise of zero-hours contracts, has been making workers' lives more stressful. The spread of food banks, the popularity of "poverty recipes" in cookery, and the advance of German discount supermarket chains, such as Aldi and Lidl, are the more visible manifestations of this pressure on the living standards of citizens.

What is more, even this sorry achievement has been made on the reversion to the economic model whose bankruptcy was laid bare by the 2008 crisis. That model was predicated on the deregulated financial system fuelling unsustainable growth by creating asset bubbles, one of the highest household debts in the world (as a proportion of GDP), and a large current account deficit.

How has this mess been created? The mismanagement of the crisis by the coalition government means it has to bear significant blame, but the main cause lies in the nature of the economic model that the UK has pursued for three decades.

This model started, as is well known, with Margaret Thatcher. She ripped up the post-second world war consensus on the mixed economy and started establishing one of the most deregulated economies in the rich world. Full employment was ditched as a goal and worker rights were weakened. State-owned enterprises were privatised, often with very negative consequences, as in the railways, water, and energy. Most importantly, her big bang financial deregulation laid the ground for the development of freewheeling financial capitalism, whose destructive nature is at the heart of the current mess.

Subsequent Labour governments took the roughest edges off Thatcherism by, for example, increasing social welfare spending and introducing the minimum wage. However, the underlying economic model remained intact; the New Labour thinking was that we should let the City maximise its profits by minimising regulation, and then help the poor with the taxes on those profits. There was no realisation that the financial system itself may be a problem.

After a brief period when it made noises about rebalancing the economy and the "big society", the coalition government has made a headlong dash for Thatcherism-plus. True, it has somewhat strengthened financial regulation, but in the meantime it has also subsidised the banks to the gills, both explicitly (bailouts) and implicitly (quantitative easing). Pursuing the doctrine of the balanced budget, it has cut spending in the middle of a recession, seriously delaying the recovery. It has made cuts to the welfare state that Thatcher herself would have found radical, while privatising "the Queen's head" (the Royal Mail), which even she refused to sell off.

Of course, all of these policies are supposed to have been backed up by scientifically proved economic theories – saying that markets are best left alone, that making the rich richer makes everyone richer, that welfare spending and protection of worker rights only make people lazy and dependent, and so on. Most people have accepted these theories without much questioning because they are based on "expert" advice.

However, all these economic theories are at least debatable and often highly questionable. Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry. This is why there are a dozen or so schools in economics, with their respective strengths and weaknesses, with three varieties for free-market economics alone – classical, neoclassical, and the Austrian.

Given this, it is entirely possible for people who are not professional economists to have sound judgments on economic issues, based on some knowledge of key economic theories and appreciation of the political and ethical assumptions underlying various theories. Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused.

Indeed, willingness to challenge professional economists and other experts is a foundation stone of democracy. If all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having democracy?

What this means is that, as citizens in a democracy, all of us have the duty to learn at least some economics and engage in economic debates. This is not as difficult as it may seem. As I try to show in my new book, Economics: The User's Guide, most of economics can be understood by anyone with a secondary education, if it is explained accessibly.

The economy is too important to be left to professional economists (and that includes me). As citizens, we should all learn economics and challenge what the professionals tell us to believe.

What's behind team spirit?

Martin Crowe in Cricinfo

New Zealand gelled as a team int he 1992 World Cup but splintered thereafter © Getty Images

Teamwork, team spirit, team culture, team dynamics - all buzzwords that point to the same thing. Yet in truth it is the team "functionability" that must work if success is to be achieved and a legacy created. Sports teams are no different to business teams, except sport is played out in public and each individual player is under scrutiny, as much as the team's performance is.

In reality, most teams fail, if winning a championship or event or being ranked No. 1 is the measure they are judged by. Those few fortunate enough to hold the trophy aloft, let alone do it often and frequently, like the once all-conquering Manchester United, or the Australian cricket team of yesteryear, they are the ones that come together as one. As d'Artagnan famously said, "All for one and one for all."

There are thousands of opinions, hundreds of books, case studies and manuals on the subject worldwide. There are many ways to skin a cat. Yet really, when all is said and done, it is the simple methods of how people function best in everyday life that need to be executed in a sporting team environment. It comes down to how our relationships work in any form of life, and this points always to the ability to love, to talk, to listen and to commit. In short, to relate.

In my years of experiencing the good and the bad in relationships and teams, studying others, reading lots, and hearing grand and sad stories in all kinds of endeavour, the one thing that stands out more than anything is building and maintaining trust.

Trust stems from a willingness to openly share anything and everything. It is about not being afraid to show vulnerability, admitting mistakes and weaknesses, and generally and genuinely sharing the truth outwardly and honestly among the group. Trust rules the lot.

When it is not built, or is broken, then the essence of the team's functionality is lost. Great leaders and captains have been able to rely on this trust, once established, as the cornerstone to team success.

	Australia have always had the ability to work together even if one or two of the personalities clashed

Ian Chappell, the great Australian captain, would easily speak his mind, using his open-door policy style, by buying his team-mates a beer and sitting them down at the bar, loosening them up a little and getting a natural flow of conversation bedded in. He was famous for building that trust within his all-conquering team of the '70s by simply using straight honest talking and listening. In this he helped create the environment to challenge and debate with each other.

This is incredibly healthy, the key being that the trust generated leads to open challenging discussions and passionate debate based on respect. It doesn't mean you have to hold hands when doing so, just simply to speak your truth "out in the open", be heard, and take time to listen in turn. The worst thing is to speak your truth behind the backs of the team, in particular to the media and opposition. This kills trust, and it kills the desire to continue to share. Once trust and openness are broken, there is no chance going forward.

If the first two are working well, it will go a long way to solving any commitment issues. Committing or buying into the team's work is about the desire to go to great lengths to perform your specialist role for your team's benefit. When team members are allowed to share the truth, there is a natural tendency to buy in to committing wholeheartedly to the decisions made by the team's leaders.

Without commitment there is no accountability. When all are in, it becomes easier to call team members on actions and behaviours that will assist the team cause. When accountability becomes understood, then so too is the need to focus attention to the goals and results of the team. Accountability removes the individual needs, like personal recognition and ego, from the equation.

Australia had a great handle on this with their dominance through most of the 1990s and much of the following decade. They have always had that ability to work together even if one or two of the personalities clashed. This was the open positive conflict working well. West Indies, under Clive Lloyd, showed a real theme to their togetherness, small nations becoming one, and they displayed a spirit unrivalled for 15 long years.

Through the '80s, New Zealand had a mixture of good and bad, but mainly positive functionality. Sometimes there was a lack of attention to team results and accountability, but overall there was an enduring trust, openness and commitment.

	West Indies, under Clive Lloyd, showed a real theme to their togetherness - small nations becoming one © PA Photos  Enlarge

In my term as a Test captain, I didn't allow for enough open debate and sharing, and so we had little trust to start with, and the rest of the dysfunctions followed. My failure was in not generating enough open conflict to ensure everyone had a say, bought in, and truly committed. However, it did come slowly, so by the time of the 1992 World Cup, we had nearly all five functions working smoothly.

Sadly, rather than building on that success, we splintered dramatically, the catalyst being the bomb blast outside our hotel in Colombo in late 1992, an incident that split the team in two when six players and the coach, with families at home, left the tour. From then, as a team, we were damaged goods. Administrators got involved, wrongly, and developed hideous resentment. Over just a few months all the trust we had garnered started to evaporate.

By February 1993, factions were everywhere and our team dynamic was dead. The coach, Wally Lees was sacked for very little reason. Mark Greatbatch was inexplicably replaced as vice-captain, and therefore I lost my trusted lieutenant, and before long, after just one more Test in charge, my tenure as skipper was over too. The team spirit suffered.

My last seven Tests, as a mere batsman not knowing how to retire, were the saddest of all that I played, as I watched a team pretend it existed. There wasn't one ounce of trust. That positive team dynamic never rose again for New Zealand until Stephen Fleming began his own team-building with a young bunch of mates and an experienced and inspirational management, from 1998 to 2003.

The point is, anything can disrupt the dynamic, and so it's vital that whatever happens, or whoever comes into the group, the five functions must be quickly and often referred to: Motivation for maintaining the flow of attention to results; accountability; commitment; open, honest and respectful conflict; and sharing truths - these make the lifeblood of a team's fulfilment and longevity.