Every month, Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids go back through one of the guest conversations from earlier in the year and reflect on the main ideas discussed. This month: Daniel Lycett, Head of PE at St David's College in North Wales, who rebuilt the entire department from the ground up after deciding his own teaching was switching kids off by year ten.

The original conversation (episode 81) covered donor sports, a converted squash court, and curriculum redesign. This review goes further — connecting Lycett's redesign to the research of a New Jersey neuropsychologist who facilitates social interactions of autistic kids through Lego building, a chess coach in New Zealand who created team chess when introduced to CLA, and a French badminton study that found beginners engage more in classes using games designs on a narrow corridor court than a full doubles one.

The golden thread connecting all these topics: none of this is about better drills. It's about individualising games, activities and task designs to facilitate learning according to different needs.

Daniel n ad the freedom to bin GCSEs and BTECs and rebuild from scratch. Keith's point isn't about envying that freedom — it's that most practitioners in PE inherit a traditional teaching framework and never stop to ask whether it fits the needs of the kids in front of them. A remote school in North Wales isn't a template to copy. It's a reminder to read your own teaching or coaching context carefully before turning the handle on an imposed programme.

Daniel LeGoff's work using Lego with autistic children — rotating roles, building together with separate roles— gets a twist from Keith: what if collecting the pieces required walking, orienteering, problem-solving in motion, instead of while sitting stationary at a table? Movement and the gathering task become the same thing and there could be a double benefit from problem-solving and learning while in motion. .

A chess coach in New Zealand who created team chess when introduced to CLA solved a 12-kid class. A French badminton study split a doubles court into narrow corridors for beginners and saw motivational engagement rise in the pupils. Same principle, two completely different sports: scale the task to match what the learner actually needs, not to what looks like “the real game.”

The court scaling ideas were shared with international audience of Badminton coaches:

Dieu, O., Crombez, L., Davids, K. & Llena, C. (2025). Optimising Badminton court dimensions to enhance physical activity. Communication to the Badminton World Federation Coaches Conference, Paris, France, August 29-30.

And then published after expert peer review here:

Dieu, O., Llena, C., Davids, K., & Potdevin, F. (2025). Enriching organisational design for games: The case of Badminton in Physical Education. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 30(1), 13–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2022.2153821

Keith's own weekly pickleball group becomes the clearest example: he deliberately keeps the ball in play for newer players rather than ‘pickling them’ and smashing them off the court, nudging the task just ahead of their current level and adjusting as they improve. Helping learners to improve can facilitate better games later in their development! Iannames it — metastability — and connects it straight back to handicapping in junior sport. Many coaches in racket sports use this task constraint of ‘feeding’ individual learners on court, carefully assessing how to ratchet up the feed a little at a time, when demanded by the learner's rate of progress.

Each month, Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids revisit a previous guest conversation and dig into the ideas with the benefit of hindsight — pulling threads together that didn't fit in the original episode, and connecting them to other work in ecological dynamics and skill acquisition. This month's review draws on episode 81 with Daniel Lycett, head of PE at St David's College, North Wales.