Wonder how long it would take for our international side to improve if every club was scoring "outstanding".

All depends upon your starting point is, and what the target is.

Captain obvious over here.

Salford is the easy one to pick on but why are Huddersfield and Cas so average/poor? Good catchment areas, decent structure at both clubs and two top British coaches.

I don't think there's much wrong with Hudds academy. It's probably something relatively minor that has led them getting a 2 rather than a 1, as its only in 1 category.

Cas, I suspect, aren't putting enough money into the facilities or their academy as a whole. Before Cas fans jump in, I'm not having a go too much, Cas struggle financially as they have to run off their own income and don't have the benefit of being able to post losses each year.

It's why clubs incomes are so vital and are closely related to both our health as a sport and our ability to compete at international level.

Is there an equivalent report being published for the Championship sides?

Huddersfield were rated
1
1
2
Overall 2

Despite building one of the best indoor training centres in the game, Hudds were marked down because the training centre and the indoor barn, the 3G and the grass fields they use are about three quarters of a mile apart. The inspectors feel that to be an issue because it involves moving players (particularly Scholarship) from one location to another.

There's very little Huddersfield can do about that situation but it's plainly ridiculous to use that as a reason for not giving them an outstanding!

I'm pleased there are so many "outstanding" and "good" academies out there. Although I'd prefer a little less qualitative and hell of a lot more quantitative metrics.

Management is measurement, or so they say ...

Assessing a club or an academy will always (and should be) qualitative rather than quantitative. It'd be like saying Leeds academy is worse now than it was 10/12 years ago because there isn't another Sinfield, McGuire, Burrow, Diskin etc group coming through.


Agree. It's daft to do things like that, especially as, bizarrely, the overall grade is automatically the lowest grade of the 3 seperate criteria.

Since the report, which labelled Salford 'weak' we have beaten both Leeds and Widnes academies who coincidentally were given an 'outstanding' score. Josh Wood will also make his debut tonight against Warrington, the third academy player to do this season.

Yeah that's how the assessments work.

Just saying, considering our leadership and management, delivery and meeting of players need are so weak they're not doing too bad. Ryan Lannon, Matty Gee and now Josh Wood also making the step-up so far this season suggests things perhaps aren't as weak as the RFL would have you believe.