Written evidence submitted by Platform Cricket
SUMMARY
BACKGROUND
For the last 20 years I have managed a charity in the heart of London, with the objective of improving children’s lives through sport and physical activity. We have successfully engaged children from hard-to-reach communities in disadvantaged/urban areas, utilising sport for positive personal/social changes.
Our organisation started life as the Tower Hamlets School Sport Partnership (SSP) - a publicly funded body aiming to move over 90 schools towards achieving a Government Public Service Agreement of all children achieving 2 hours or more of physical activity per week. At only 27%, Tower Hamlets had the lowest proportion of children hitting that threshold in the whole of the UK when we started in 2005 but by the time the measure was reviewed and adapted to a 5 hour target in 2009, we had increased it to 93%.
Over the same period we increased inter-school competitions from 3 per year to over 70 and we drove up the diversity of sports experienced by children in Tower Hamlets schools to over 24 - the highest average range of any UK borough.
We were one of a network of School Sport Partnerships (SSPs) that covered the whole of England. The SSP programme changed the Physical Education landscape so much by the early 2010s, that we were appointed to a more significant role in community sport and physical activity. In Tower Hamlets, then the UK’s 2nd most densely populated borough with by far the highest levels of child poverty (52%), fewest sports clubs and a number of cultural issues which were creating barriers to participation, approaching this required a great deal of innovation and investment.
Our comprehensive approach to plugging the gaps in the borough's sporting infrastructure through creating Community Sports Coach roles and new initiatives was the foundation for an annual transition of over 12,000 children into community sports participation - a remarkable achievement that was in turn the basis for Tower Hamlets becoming one of the top 10 sporting boroughs in London for the first time.
Our charity won national awards, particularly for its Coaching & Leadership programmes which put 16-21 year olds at the centre of delivering community sport initiatives – a necessary step in a borough where sports volunteering was below 3% of the adult population. Our scheme was linked directly into the Games Maker programme in the lead up to the 2012 Olympic Games, for which Tower Hamlets was a host borough and a number of its graduates were involved in Olympic Legacy planning, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games.
During this period we also hosted students, teachers and Government officials from Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Cyprus, Holland, Pakistan, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Iraq, Rwanda, Spain, Turkey and Zambia, who were keen to investigate our approaches to tackling participation and using sport to address social issues.
It was in 2012 that the coalition Government inexplicably withdrew funding for the School Sport Partnership programme nationally. This was the single most damaging act in preventing the UK from having the sort of sporting legacy through hosting the 2012 Olympic Games, that it should have had. It caused outrage among our participants and their families to the extent that over 200 young people from Tower Hamlets led a national campaign demanding the Government reinstate funding for the programme. While this ultimately did not happen, it did lead to the creation of the School Games Organiser scheme and the Primary Sports Premium which still benefits Primary Schools across England today.
Locally, the popularity of our programmes and magnitude of our impact convinced local stakeholders to support the transition of Tower Hamlets SSP into the Tower Hamlets Youth Sport Foundation - a charity with a very similar set of objectives.
Our cricket programmes continued to be a particular success. Despite there being no cricket clubs/grounds in Tower Hamlets, there was clear talent and enthusiasm locally, so we created a project which supported over 100 children into community participation annually, linked to a club outside of the borough.
Cricket is not as well-used a tool for positive social change as some other sports, but we believe it can become so because it:
Consequently, we created the Platform Cricket Programme which has grown to become the charity's flagship project. It currently engages over 20,000 children in 17 London Boroughs annually, including some of the UK’s most marginalised, vulnerable and disadvantaged children.
Our work is predominantly based around central London, which includes all of the most densely-populated UK boroughs, the lowest amount of open spaces and sports clubs, high ethnic and religious minorities, many of whom are relatively new to the UK and/or refugees & asylum seekers. Standards of physical health and mental wellbeing are stubbornly lower than average in the communities we serve and many face significant social challenges.
Through research, assessment of data and liaison with a range of community partners we identify areas where our programme has purpose, then establishing "hubs" that include an equal focus on:
Each Hub is made-up of 5-15 Primary Schools across 2-3 wards. In-school sessions are 5-week units focussed on Year 4 classes (8-9 year olds) and community programmes are 10-30 weeks in duration, dependent on funding.
GOVERNANCE
Sport and physical activity suffers when the UK’s economy performs poorly and/or there are frequent changes in Government who in turn, change policy. It is not unique in this sense, but it is perhaps more adversely affected as it falls across so many Government Departments. Grassroots sports organisations may draw upon funding originating in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Education or the Department for Health & Social Care, or depending on its focus, even the Department for Transport, The Home Office or Local Government. Furthermore, most sports organisations do not view themselves as being in the voluntary sector and so do not have a structure or the fundraising expertise to draw income from multiple sources. This leaves them vulnerable and often unable to fully demonstrate their social impact.
The split between the DCMS and the DfE is particularly problematic for youth sport.
THE SOLUTION(S):
1) Strive for cross-party consensus around school and youth sport policy.
SCHOOL SPORT
THE ISSUE(S):
The demise of the School Sport Partnership (SSP) programme set sport in England back decades. It was a world-leading programme which gave responsibility (and a reasonable budget) to borough-level organisations who were able to pool resources and coordinate the PE and school sport landscape to ensure minimum standards/offers to all children. The annual data collection and related target-setting shone a light on schools who were not timetabling enough Physical Education, were not teaching PE well enough, were not sufficiently conscious of their pupils’ physical development and wellbeing and were not connecting with opportunities for their pupils to become physically active outside of school.
Following the backlash, the Primary Sports Premium was positioned as a replacement for School Sport Partnerships – with individual schools now being given funding annually and granted complete autonomy on how to use it. To begin with, many schools used the premium to continue striving for the same sort of standards set by the SSPs – particular as accounting for its usage was a consistent theme in Ofsted inspections. Inevitably, this became fractured, watered-down and less scrutinised over time and now the overwhelming majority of schools do not use the fund to enhance their school sport offer as was originally intended but with the pressures of stretched-budgets, instead use it to support the delivery of their core curriculum – mainly through additional swimming lessons or the employment of specialist sports coaches who deliver PE lessons as cover for when class teachers are planning.
The standard and experience of sports coaches delivering Primary School PE lessons varies greatly but even where they are vey good, their focus is almost always entirely within the school they work in. Therefore, the interaction between schools through competitions, leadership programmes and other events that was occurring under the SSPs (and helped to breakdown barriers between children from different neighbourhoods and post code areas) has almost vanished and the path from a school sporting experience into community sports participation, and all of the positives that can bring, has also dwindled.
2) An equivalent national structure to the School Sport Partnership programme should be re-introduced to monitor/improve standards of Physical Education & school sport in a borough’s schools, to facilitate school-club links, and to manage any other local initiative which support increases in children’s physical activity levels and addresses personal/social development.
COMMUNITY SPORT
THE ISSUE(S):
By the time DCMS/Sport England funds filter through to Active Partnerships and National Governing Bodies, in most cases they are not significant enough to support a comprehensive approach to participation because they are understandably focussed on club networks. Unfortunately, sports clubs are not evenly distributed across the UK and so people in the most deprived urban and rural areas where there tend to be less clubs and where volunteering is lower, miss out. It is not surprising that these are also the areas with the biggest health and social challenges.
In the days of School Sport Partnerships, we were able to reforge those links between Physical Education and Community Sport which are split at the top of Government, and we were able to pool resources, highlight need and address demand. An organisation working with and representing c.40,000 children across 50-90 schools is powerful and for the first time, sports development in this country had become child-centred with resources focussed on need rather than being club and facility centred where resources are focussed on where they can most easily be used.
As a small example, in the early 2010s some Algerian heritage families arrived in Tower Hamlets from France where their children had taken-up water polo. There were no water polo clubs in the area but having been alerted to the issue by the children’s school, we were able to work with the local leisure provider to start a water polo session at a borough pool, linked to a club in another area. This supported many children to improve their standards of swimming but in particular, these Algerian heritage children were able to adjust to their new life when integration was otherwise difficult due to their lack of English.
Now, this would just not happen. These children’s 2020s equivalents would be lost to a sport they could have continued to enjoy into adulthood, and health and social implications may follow. As we know, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) such as the upheaval and trauma can leave young people vulnerable, so they may also fill their time with less positive activities and fall into antisocial behaviour, crime or extremism.
The sport itself would also miss out on young participants and in my example, they can scarcely afford to – Water Polo is a smaller sport in the UK, which suffers from some perceptions of inequality and social exclusivity.
In larger sports, there is often additional funding available for programmes focussed on an under-represented community or with a demonstrable social impact and many admirable projects are created to address this, but there can be problems:
On a similar note, Local Council funding for youth services (which is non-statutory) has disappeared in many places due to massive cuts in Central Government support but that which does remain is almost always focussed on traditional youth centres rather than organised sport. For young people who develop an interest in sport but who live in the more deprived inner-city areas that are likely to lack sporting opportunities, it is highly patronising to view youth centre activities as a reasonable alternative to a sports club. I have never understood why so many councils own and sustain youth clubs yet would not usually consider owning or sustaining a sports club, even if there was an obvious gap in their area’s sporting offer.
The Holiday Activity and Food Programme (HAF) has been a really significant, welcome addition to the range of possible funding sources to support sports activities and it is concerning that the future of this funding remains uncertain – but even here, there could be some improvements. The programme is very prescriptive in its focus on means-tested Free School Meal children, so courses are often under-capacity. They are also arguably weaker than if there was a little more tolerance of non-means-tested Free School Meals children attending (25% for example) – the effect on social cohesion can be lost and many children whose families fall just outside of the criteria also find staying fed, active and occupied positively difficult during the school holidays.
Overall, there is funding around for sports activities but only if they demonstrate a health or social value and are not just for sport’s own sake. That is a marked difference from the late 90s and early 00s when sport’s social value was deemed inherent, which made it easier for sports clubs to thrive: they are experts at providing activities and not experts in making applications and measuring social impact. Indeed, when you are focussed at engaging children at the absolutely pivotal 7-11 year old age range where habits around physical activity and exercise are being hard-wired for life, it is very difficult to demonstrate how you are supporting mental health or employability, and reducing crime or long-term health conditions. Therefore, many programmes that are well-funded focus on older age groups but there is a lot of evidence to say that the battle to create lifelong sport and physical activity participants is being lost by then.
There also continues to be a lot of funding around for capital projects and the balance between support of capital and revenue expenditure is rarely correct in my experience. It is very difficult to start new clubs – it is easier and much cheaper for children to be taken to where clubs currently exist. We were involved in a twinning initiative in the lead-up to the 2012 Olympic Games and we were privileged to work with and visit Usain Bolt’s school in Jamaica – it was noteworthy to me that arguably the world’s greatest ever sprinter came from a school/town with very little in the way of facilities, but they did have coaches and teachers with the time and inclination to take children on the often 2-3 hour round trip into Kingston for training, trials and competition.
THE SOLUTION(S):
2) All sports clubs of a certain size should be mandated to work with neighbouring schools (potentially via a proxy) in order to support children’s transition into community participation.
3) Recognise, reward or insist that sports clubs receiving significant funding via Active Partnerships or NGBs (ie. not entirely private clubs), or that are participating in recognised/affiliated leagues are reflective of the areas they are serving.
4) Prioritise funding support for revenue projects and workforce development.
5) Continue funding for a revised version of the Holiday Activity & Food (HAF) programme.
EQUALITY, DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
THE ISSUE(S):
Thankfully there are rapidly diminishing examples of bigotry, prejudice and stereotyping in grassroots sport. Each generation of sports coaches are more enlightened and a child who wanted to participate in a certain sport at a certain club NOT being allowed to do so would not be tolerated. However, many parents will still be wary of their children becoming involved in certain sports because of the image they have – often informed by a history of exclusivity or the behaviour of fans of professional teams, both of which give the impression of an unwelcoming environment. There is also some lingering ignorance when it comes to more elite levels of sport – for example, players not speaking English or acting in certain ways “not integrating” and players not willing to sacrifice certain religious observations “not wanting it enough”.
Our increasingly divided society, particularly the visibility of jingoism and racism, has definitely had an impact on youth sports participation in recent years. Some sports are viewed as the territory of certain groups and many sports are even less integrated than they were 40-50 years ago.
But it is important to recognise that some fault for under-representation sometimes lies at a family’s/community’s end too. In our work, we recognise similarities between non-participation in sports and non-attendance at university: it often runs in families, and it takes a significant effort to break the cycle. Often, if parents have had no positive experience of sports participation themselves, they do not recognise the value of it, and it is therefore a very low priority – particularly compared to academic, work and religious commitments. A child’s participation in sport requires a significant commitment and some compromise but some families are just not able or willing to make that commitment, despite their child’s talent or enthusiasm.
THE SOLUTION(S):
1) Favour comprehensive, blended sporting programmes for funding rather than narrow projects focussed on a specific group or health/social outcome.
2) Recognise that some sports clubs, charities and initiatives hold a greater strategic importance than others when it comes to addressing under-representation.
3) An equivalent national structure to the School Sport Partnership programme should be re-introduced and their role should include monitoring equality and accessibility of local community youth sport, and developing the skills and confidence to influence and advocate in under-represented communities.
If you require any more information, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Chris Willetts
CEO