You have to wonder whether students tend to be more cooperative for having seen their deputy principal in a full suit of armour, galloping her charger at 25 kilometres per hour and smashing a ninefoot lance into a competitor’s shield.

Sarah Hay was relieving deputy principal at Chifley College Bidwell campus last year when she started training to perform and compete as a medieval jousting knight.

After watching her in action, Ms Hay said the students at the very least came away with a dramatic vision of medieval life and better appreciation of the physical hardship of taking to the battlefield encased in 27 kilograms of steel.

Ms Hay has ridden horses all her life and said she was hooked on the sport after watching her first jousting display.

“I just thought [jousting] looked fantastic.” she said. “It’s like a dream come true for me – it has brought history alive.”

Ms Hay jousts with Nova Hollandia, a team that also performs at community events and schools, giving exhibitions that she said relate well to aspects of the Stage 4 syllabus.

“The presentation is designed around the Hundred Years War, and the content looks at the way people lived in medieval times, the social structures, the legacies of medieval times, the heraldry,” she said.

Ms Hay, who found it difficult to “connect with history” as a student, said she was now passionate about using the sport to engage others.

“The kids love it. First of all, they’re amazed that a female would be a knight,” she said. “Then the questions start: ‘Is that how the armour really was?’ ‘It must have been so hard in medieval times, so hot, you would have been so tired and so filthy. It’s so heavy’.”

Ms Hay said the students “love seeing the armour, swords and lances close up”.

“You can make personal connections with medieval history – and I don’t know how else you could do that,” she said.