School, predominantly primary, is the most challenging learning environment around.

Secondary school is far less so, as a child can already add numbers to learn algebra or understand English to learn French?

Can you begin to imagine the long term outcome if a child quits at the first signs of saying, ‘I can’t do this’?

It is so scary!

The problem is that often the child doesn’t know why they are learning odd or even numbers, how to spell, the multiplication tables, etc. In their world, they do not understand what the outcome is, why they need to learn.

They cannot see past the present moment because they haven’t learned to tell the time yet?

Golf is different, as it is a fun after school activity. Yet a child can learn the quality of keep trying, because they can see what they want to do (outcome) and believe they can do it!

Invariably, they will stay there until they achieve it.

Perseverance (keep trying)

If anyone tells you golf is easy, I can tell you they are lying!

Golf is hard. One day the ball is flying long and straight; the following day, it heads towards the trees, seemingly at will. For a child, just learning the basic skills proves very demanding.

In the first place, it might be a case of a hit the ball, miss the ball scenario. Then it might be getting the ball air born or not.

Or on the putting green, rolling a ball close to the hole from a long distance and then missing the short putt.

Then the child starts playing golf, and they need perseverance in bucket loads.

It is like, “Welcome to golf, now the fun starts.”

A personal best score one day, followed by ten rubbish games, frustrating or what?

In many circumstances, that is a walk away, give up, quit, but with golf, something else happens. A little sulk, and back to it, working out how to play that great golf again.

Golf is the perfect tool for developing these attributes:

• never give up,
• keep trying,
• if I can do it once, I can do it again,
• if ‘they can do it, so can I,’
• why, how questions?

Putting is an excellent example of perseverance; my role is to keep the child as a learner. If you look onto a putting green, you will see adults or established golfers aiming to get the ball as close to the hole as possible; objective – make their next putt as short as possible. The result is that many of their shots finish short of the hole.

A young golfer looks at the hole and whacks the ball towards it; objective – get the job done with that shot. They are not worried that the ball finishes further away than where they hit it, as long as it looked like and had a chance of going in. The child keeps going until the ball is in the bottom of the hole.