Schools should do more to foster a spirit of healthy rivalry in exams, sports and other competitive activities to prepare pupils for the risks and failures that they are likely to encounter later, according to a leading education and business adviser.

Schools should also encourage children to confront risk by erecting balance bars in the playground, or by conducting explosive science experiments.

Sir Digby Jones, the Government’s skills envoy, said that an obsessive “safety first” approach to life was creating a generation of children who were ill-prepared for a world that requires daily risk-taking to achieve success.

Schools that banned traditional playground pastimes such as conkers, cartwheels and snowball fights, or that advised children not to swim back-stroke for fear of injury, were stifling the creative spirit that would enable their pupils to succeed in life, he said.

Sir Digby, president of HTI, an enterprise linking schools and business, said that overprotecting children left them unprepared for the “big bad world”. His comments are the latest in a series of attacks on risk-aversion culture, suggesting that the tide is turning.

“I want to see serious compet-itiveness in exams, sports days and activities designed to equip young people for society,” he said. “We must not delude our young people that they can all be winners and that failure and risk do not exist: the world beyond the school gates is not a level playing field. I want winners to be applauded, not held back because of political correctness.”

This should apply to practical schoolwork, particularly in science, he added. A recent survey of science teachers indicated that 87 per cent had not let students conduct some experiments or practical work, he said.

He questioned whether society had reached the stage where the only place children felt able to take risks was in the safe virtual reality of computer games. While teachers were not to blame for the risk-averse culture, schools were a good place to start correcting it. We all needed to understand better how to identify and evaluate risk without eliminating it, he said. “A risk-averse society does not innovate. It does not exploit scientific discoveries. It stagnates and eventually declines,” he said.

HTI is setting up an awards scheme, Go4it, which will reward schools that cultivate a risk-positive culture. Fears of teachers being sued for accidents on school trips or in the playground have played a big part in the risk-averse attitude demonstrated in many schools.

As part of an apparent backlash, a book, The Dangerous Book for Boys, which teaches children old-fashioned pursuits, was a bestseller last year.

Caution: schoolchildren at play

- Conkers were banned from a school playground in Lanarkshire last year because they could trigger anaphylactic shock

- Paper planes were outlawed by a primary school in Kent after teachers found that some of the school’s pupils had been “overzealous” in launching the missiles

- Pupils in Devon were ordered not to throw snowballs because it was tantamount to bullying

- Schools in Scotland refused to hand out oranges during break times in case children choked on the pips

- The sack race has been dropped from a games day in Hartlepool because its organisers say they cannot afford to insure youngsters against injury. They were told that the bill would double if the sack race were included in the event

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