Written evidence submitted by The Queen’s Club Foundation

Game On: Community and School sport

The Queen’s Club Foundation is the official charity of The Queen’s Club.  We are registered with the Charity Commission No.1164144.

Our vision is to improve lives through racket sports and, with the support of The Queen’s Club, the LTA Tennis Foundation and other funders, we aim to provide opportunities for those from minority to groups to be able to access to tennis, padel, real tennis, rackets and squash whatever their background or circumstances.

We are an LTA Award winning organisation, being Regional winners of the LTA Connecting Communities Award and National Finalists for the same award in 2024.

Community Sport

1. What is the current quality and availability of facilities for grassroots sport?

In many South West London Councils, the facilities to play tennis and padel are predominantly costly and exclusive, requiring either Club membership or high court fees on public facilities.

• What interventions are needed to improve this provision?

We achieve the above by providing free coached sessions and events for the community.  Facilities are the main barrier to us providing more free grassroots racket sports.  We have a limited number of court hours in local parks and tennis venues provided to us through our links with the Council in Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea, but we have funding to deliver more.  We utilise a considerable number of court hours at The Queen’s Club but we could deliver more if we had further local facilities.

The recent parks investment strategy, investing in the parks tennis network is brilliant and has resulted in a brightening up of local accessible facilities across the UK, with re-surfaced and re-painted courts and booking systems which enable families and individuals to enjoy the sport without a need for costly membership. While this strategy has increased participation in the sport, in our view, even more could be achieved, particularly in underserved areas, by making a few changes.

Currently, as community sports provision is now managed outside the local council, they have leasehold agreements with local parks tennis and padel providers and these providers allow a very small number of court hours to us for community use. We are incredibly grateful for the facilities and for the small number of hours we are allocated. However, with a greater commitment to community sport within the provisions of the leases to commercial operators of these sites and a recognition of those community hours in the commercial agreements between the providers and the Council in terms of the cost of the contract, we could deliver more.

At the moment, there is a situation where park courts are utilised by self-employed coaches or tennis coaching providers, who can often charge high rates for either individuals or group lessons. It is easier to teach one person for an hour on a court than a group of 12 children with learning difficulties. So with increased access to local facilities, opportunities for community provision could be even further expanded, in an area where there are a number of charities who provide sport to the local community for free.

2. What sources of funding are available for grassroots sport and are they sufficient?

We are partly funded by The Queen’s Club and individual donations, but we rely heavily on external grant applications to fulfil our community delivery.  We have found so far that applications for grants are time consuming and we have been relatively unsuccessful in our applications for such grants.

• How can funds be distributed more effectively and application processes be improved?

In community sport, the main cost of the delivery is the administration and management of the delivery, building a network of local connections, working with charities, community organisations, schools and the local community.  To carry out this administration, staff are needed.  Most of the funding is “project cost” funding, so each application commits the organisation to more and more projects, like an ever-expanding business, without the core funding provision needed to support this.  We need more funding opportunities to support core funding employees like programme managers, who can facilitate long-term, sustainable grassroots sports provision.  As the Councils do not manage the community sport delivery in-house anymore, community delivery needs to be organised externally, yet as everything has to be a “new project” for sports charities funding purposes, the day-to-day work of developing sustainable grassroots programmes and linking schools with communities, which we could deliver, is not being funded sufficiently.  Local sports charities are therefore enormously stretched, working incredible amounts of volunteer hours and in some cases lurching from project to project just to retain sustainable funding.

3. How can volunteers be better supported and what is needed to attract and retain more volunteers to grassroots sport?

The Volunteer DBS system is complicated. Each organisation having its own DBS application system means people are having to apply for multiple DBS certificates.  A simplification of this would assist us greatly.  It would also be good to have a National volunteer recognition programme, offering training, benefits and rewards, with a local database of volunteers who had completed it.  If the database contained lists of areas of expertise etc, we could then go to this database with volunteering opportunities and offer volunteers opportunities to assist where relevant.  At the moment, we shy away from offering volunteer administrative work, because of the poor optics of a charity of an established organisation utilising an unpaid workforce etc, but this has meant volunteers, especially young adults, are missing out on opportunities to volunteer and learn new skills which could lead to better future employability. 

This system could be almost like an extension of the DoE programme i.e. a system where young and old people could register if they have interest to volunteer in the sport and gain a “passport to volunteer”.  This would be very attractive to many non-profit organisations. It would need processes in-built so that members of from underserved communities can easily apply to be part of the system.

4. How can grassroots sport be made more engaging and accessible to under-represented groups?

There needs to be more of a focus on sport delivered within communities rather than trying to encourage people to come outside their communities to play sport.  This comes back again to facilities.  We work in an area of White City, at the Phoenix Academy where there is great sport’s provision at the school, but nowhere really for the children to transition towards in order to play racket sports outside of school. There are no nearby parks, or indoor facilities where they can play. If there was more funding for in-community sports provision, then it would be easier to create a pathway for children to stay in sport.  Many secondary schools, with further investment in the school’s sports facilities, could provide this opportunity, although care would need to be taken that the new facilities would have to be reserved for affordable community use, as otherwise commercial sports providers will offer high rents for the use of the facilities and the opportunity to increase community provision would disappear.

School sport

5.               How can schools better enable children to develop positive and life-long relationships with sport and physical education?

• What can be done to engage groups with lower participation rates - such as girls, those with disabilities or from lower socio-economic backgrounds?

Schools can offer specific racket sports sessions for the minority groups mentioned above.  By working together with external charities, such as ourselves, we can provide the expertise, support and funding to support the teachers in the delivery of racket sports within a schools setting, especially with improved facilities referenced above.

Local charities are already focussed on maximising participation within these groups, so by enabling such charities to deliver more local, free sport, grassroots and schools sport will grow in all of the groups mentioned.

6. How should schools and sports organisations work together to deliver better sporting opportunities for children in and outside of school hours?

There needs to be increased communication between the sports organisations and local schools.  One of the challenges we face is to make initial contact with the schools who are in real need of assistance. We find there is a huge lack of publicly available up to date data on levels of deprivation in schools and levels of inactivity.  When we are looking to target schools and areas where help is most needed, we are caught between out of date surveys online, partial word of mouth data from School Games Organisers and general local knowledge.

It would assist us enormously to have a better assessment of the “local need” easily accessible online.  We could then target appropriate schools and deliver programmes that are desired, relevant and sustainable in the local area.

7. What measures are needed to make the pathway from school to community sport easier?

Local accessible facilities are enormously important, but also forging links between the schools, parents and community organisations while the children are still at school. The interesting question is “who should own the responsibility” for that communication? Neither schools, Councils nor governing bodies currently seem to offer an overview of this communication process.  School’s Games organisers are often passionate individuals with a real desire to increase levels of activity, but our experience is that they have such an enormous number of sports to co-ordinate and competitions to organise, that they do not have the capacity to spend time on forging the necessary links above.  As a result, sometimes a small group of schools are actively engaged in school’s sports competitions, whereas others, which might be in great need, are not involved.  Further investment in SGO’s giving them also a potentially wider remit especially in creating partnerships with local charitable organisations and also further staffing would go some way to alleviate this problem.

Governance

8. How effective are national and local government and sport governing body initiatives in delivering school and grassroots sport, and how might they be improved?

The LTA Serves Project seeks to deliver tennis to community venues in the UK.  We have found that in particular the LTA Serves Level-Up London Project opened doors for us to certain communities to make initial contact, enabling us to deliver a successful project improving an opportunity for a number of children from the local community to play tennis. However in terms of its on-going effectiveness, the LTA would need further funding to extend the offer of the Serves Project to make the continuation of the tennis offering more sustainable. Once the Servies venue is established and activators are trained, there is another piece of work to provide links for the participants at the venue to maximise their enjoyment of the sport in terms of opportunities for local competition, opportunities to play elsewhere locally at local facilities, opportunities to volunteer in the sport, opportunities to be mentored in the sport.  Currently levels of funding do not provide for this next vital step and local facilities, especially indoor facilities are few and far between.

9. How can the Government facilitate better coordination across the sport ecosystem to deliver grassroots and school sport?

• Is the Department for Culture, Media and Sport successfully leveraging the economic and community benefits of sport and physical activity across Government?

The Government needs to decide who is facilitating better co-ordination. At the moment we have:

• Councils, who are financially stretched with sports development managers covering enormous ranges of sports and not enough time nor workforce or funding support to manage the detail. SGO’s as referenced above have an enormous number of sports and schools to manage.
• Charities who are spending vast amounts of time applying for project funding but who are lacking core staff who have the time to engage properly with community organisations.
• Community Organisations, who again have little money or also no idea of the possibilities offered by the sports, or the requirements for a good standard delivery and pathways for players.
• Schools, who lack links with local sporting organisations, or who are prioritising academic achievement over sport because of increasing pressures, or who lack essential facilities or who have started to rent our facilities to commercial sporting providers to make extra money.
• Governing Bodies, who have an enormous amount of expertise in delivery, and data on the positive outcomes from sport, but an inability to crack the community nut, because of, in short, a lack of affordable, good quality facilities and a community structure to co-ordinate usage of the facilities by those most in need.

Submission by Katharine Maurici on behalf of The Queen’s Club Foundation

11th January 2025