About School Padel
School Padel was created with a simple belief:
A child doesn’t need to love every sport. They just need to find one they love.
Finding that sport can change a child’s relationship with physical activity. When children experience success, enjoyment often follows. When they enjoy being active, they are far more likely to want to do it again.
Padel is exceptionally good at creating that early feeling of success. School Padel exists to give more children the opportunity to experience it.
Why School Padel?
After years working as a PE specialist, School Padel founder Jordan Wadsworth knew that not every child connects with traditional school sports.
Often, the problem isn’t a dislike of physical activity itself. Children simply haven’t found the activity that makes movement feel enjoyable.
Early success matters. Padel is relatively easy for a beginner to pick up, rallies can develop quickly and children can experience the satisfaction of actually playing the game remarkably early.
There is also a naturally competitive side to padel that children love. For pupils who struggle with larger team sports, doubles padel provides an opportunity to work with a partner, communicate and compete together without the complexity and pressure of a large team.
Our Mission
Children are moving less, and we believe helping them discover enjoyable ways to be active has never been more important.
Our aim isn’t to make every child an athlete. It’s to help more children discover that movement can make them happy.
Padel provides a wonderfully simple opportunity to do that. Put a racket in a child’s hand, give them an achievable challenge and let them experience the satisfaction of succeeding.
Movement = happiness.
Padel + children = a lot of smiles.
Our Approach
School Padel has been developed from a PE teacher’s perspective. That means we’re interested in much more than simply bringing a padel coach into school for a day.
We consider how padel works with real classes, different abilities, existing school facilities and teachers who may never have picked up a padel racket before.
ACCESS → SUCCESS → CONFIDENCE → ENJOYMENT → PARTICIPATION
The goal is to make padel easy to introduce, enjoyable to teach and difficult for children to put down.
Experience & Expertise
School Padel is led by Jordan Wadsworth, an experienced PE specialist and BPCA-qualified padel coach.
Jordan’s career in school sport has included roles in state primary education and independent preparatory schools, including Lead PE Teacher responsibilities, curriculum planning, teacher CPD and the organisation of whole-school sport.
His wider coaching qualifications and experience span swimming, hockey, cricket and gymnastics, alongside his current work coaching padel.
School Padel is Jordan-led, supported by a wider team working behind the scenes and helping with its development and rollout.
Our Ambition
Our ambition is big.
We want padel to become one of the first sports schools think about when planning PE.
Not because schools are required to teach it, but because teachers, PE leads and school leaders recognise how naturally it supports their objectives.
Accessible physical activity. Early success. Competition. Cooperation. Confidence. Enjoyment. Progression into lifelong sport.
If we can help children find a sport they genuinely love, we can help them build a more positive relationship with movement that extends far beyond a PE lesson.
From School to Lifelong Sport
School should be the beginning, not the end.
Our wider vision is to introduce children to padel at school and create opportunities for those who love it to continue playing through local clubs, coaching and community facilities.
Some will play competitively. Others will simply play because it’s fun. Both are successes.
Meet the Founder
Jordan Wadsworth
PE Specialist | BPCA Padel Coach | Founder of School Padel
Jordan has spent much of his career teaching children sport and looking for ways to make PE engaging, inclusive and enjoyable.
Padel stood out. It combines accessibility with competition, teamwork with individual involvement, and simplicity with enormous scope for progression.
That led to one obvious question:
If adults find it this difficult to stop playing padel, what happens when we give children the opportunity to start?
School Padel was created to find out.
Our Philosophy
A child doesn’t need to love every sport. They just need to find one they love.
And our invitation is equally simple:
Adult or child, give padel a go. You may struggle to stop.
Bring Padel to Your School
Give your pupils the opportunity to discover a sport they may want to play for life.
Bring School Padel to your school.