01
Leadership & direction
How clearly priorities, authority and strategic choices are understood.
Independent research · International school sport
How resilient are school sports departments?
Forge is an independent research project exploring how sports departments in international schools operate, where operational fragility appears, and which systems support stronger, more resilient programmes.
The first study uses a confidential Systems Stress Test. Participants receive an immediate individual result while contributing to a developing anonymous evidence base.
The research
School sport is highly visible. The systems behind it are not.
Departments can deliver full calendars, competitions and strong experiences while still relying heavily on individual knowledge, unclear ownership or processes rebuilt each year.
Forge is collecting structured, confidential responses to identify recurring patterns and develop a more useful evidence base for sports leaders.
Study 01 · Systems Stress Test
30 questions · 6 areas · Approx. 10 minutes · Confidential
Contribute your department's perspective.
Answer based on how your sports operation actually works today. You will receive a Forge Score, six system scores, your strongest area, primary vulnerability, fragility signals and one priority action.
Take part in the research02
People & accountability
How ownership, expectations and productive challenge work in practice.
03
Systems & operations
How reliably recurring work can be delivered without depending on memory.
04
Opportunities & pathways
How sporting opportunities are designed, explained and reviewed.
05
Evidence & improvement
How departments learn whether changes and programmes are actually working.
06
Resilience & continuity
How well operations survive absence, turnover and leadership change.
What happens to the data?
Individual insight. Collective learning.
01
Participate
Complete the confidential diagnostic and receive an immediate result.
02
Aggregate
Responses are examined as anonymous patterns rather than identifiable school-level results.
03
Learn
As the evidence base develops, Forge will publish emerging patterns, practical findings and research questions.
Research standard
No invented benchmarks. No false certainty.
Forge will distinguish between individual diagnostic results, early patterns and findings supported by a sufficiently useful body of comparable responses.
Where the evidence is too limited to support a conclusion or comparison, that limitation will be stated plainly.
Contribute
Add your experience to the research.
The value of the research improves as more sports leaders contribute honest perspectives on how their departments actually operate.