Taxonomy term

Silent Steppers is a joyful blend of walking, dancing and mindset coaching, all delivered outdoors through silent-disco headsets.

Picture a mixed group of around 50 people moving along seaside promenades, parks and coastal walkways – everyone listening to the same uplifting music while receiving real-time encouragement, positivity and coaching through their headphones.

It’s energetic, inclusive and completely different to traditional indoor exercise. And so much fun, too!

What began as a personal healing tool has evolved into a community movement that people across the UK now travel to to experience.

Often taking 10,000 steps in an hour or simply letting the music lift their mood, us Steppers leave the session feeling lighter, stronger and more connected to ourselves, and to each other.

How it all began

Silent Steppers actually started during one of the hardest chapters of my life. After suffering a trauma, I found myself walking outdoors to clear my mind.

On these walks, I’d listen to music and quickly realised how the world softened inside that musical bubble.

The lyrics felt more meaningful, my thoughts slowed down and, for a short time, I could switch off from everything I was carrying on my shoulders.
 

With a background as a qualified dance teacher, senior mental health lead and life coach among others, and with over 25 years teaching trauma-informed approaches, I invited a few colleagues to join me for a music-assisted walk.

I chose songs that helped me heal, put on the headset mic and coached them through the session.

The effect was instant. The energy was electric. Silent Steppers was born! 

A community that keeps growing

Fast forward under a year and Silent Steppers now has hundreds of participants every week that include children, right through to our oldest Stepper aged 83.

We train in all weather – rain, wind, sun and/or coastal gales – and the tougher the conditions, the more bonded the group becomes.

Alongside our main sessions, we now run Steady Steppers, a slower-paced, mobility-friendly version designed for those with disabilities, injuries, chronic conditions or lower fitness levels.

These sessions offer the same music, the same mindset coaching and the same sense of achievement, just at a pace that feels safe and accessible for everyone involved.

The physical and mental impact across both groups has been extraordinary and participants have reported improvements of different kinds like weight loss, better fitness levels, plus better balance, coordination and confidence.

Others have mentioned being able to return to exercise after cancer treatment or joint replacements, a reduced reliance on mental health medication (always under GP guidance), stronger mobility and the ability to jog for the first time in years, and, overall, significant improvements in mood, stress levels and wellbeing.

And if all of that wasn’t enough, overwhelmingly, people describe Silent Steppers as their escape – an hour where they can lose themselves, breathe differently and feel part of something special.

The outdoors connection

Taking Silent Steppers into outdoor public spaces has created something truly magical.

We dance-walk along promenades, move through parks, train beside the sea and often stop people in their tracks who just smile when they see us.

Week after week, members of the public pause to watch us, cheer us on, take photos or even start dancing as we pass. People tell us we’ve made their day, how amazing we look or how we lift their mood. 

Many now recognise us and come back each week just to see us in action because our group's energy is infectious.

These interactions have become part of the heartbeat of Silent Steppers, and proof that movement and joy ripple far beyond the people wearing the headsets.

Challenges and what we’ve learned

I must admit, however, that with popularity comes challenges.

We only have 60 headsets, which means waiting lists of 25+ people are becoming common.

I’m also frequently asked to run sessions across the UK – and even internationally – but with existing commitments, it simply isn’t possible.

However, I’ve now excitedly trademarked licensing training that'll launch in the new year, which will create opportunities for Silent Steppers leaders in towns and cities nationwide.

There are other key lessons we’ve also learned:

• When exercise is fun, people stick to it – many of our steppers are a year in and saying it’s the only thing they’ve ever stuck too.
• Authenticity matters, as people connect with honesty and real stories.
• Listening to the community and adapting accordingly is essential.
• Music profoundly changes the movement experience.
• Mindset coaching and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques amplify the emotional impact.

The future of Silent Steppers

The combination of music, scenery, encouragement and community creates an empowering, accessible and inclusive atmosphere that translates into a wellbeing experience unlike any other.

It fills me with pride that what started as a personal coping mechanism has now grown into a nationwide wellbeing model, supporting hundreds every week.

I also love that Silent Steppers is reshaping how people view exercise, mental health and community connection.

Silent Steppers is proving that exercise can be enjoyable at any age and ability. One dance step at a time.

National Fitness Day is a wonderful celebration of the joy of movement, but also a rallying call – a reminder that if more people, from every walk of life, are moving more often, the benefits ripple far beyond the individual.  

Sport England’s central mission is for everyone to enjoy the life-changing benefits of sport and physical activity.

And those benefits are profound; being active prevents 1.3 million cases of depression, 900,000 cases of back pain, 600,000 cases of type 2 diabetes, 150,000 cases of coronary heart disease and 100,000 strokes each year.

Active lives boost the economy too, saving £10.5bn a year in health and care costs and reducing pressure on our overburdened NHS. 

But behind the numbers are real people. Active children are happier, more confident, and perform better academically.

Active adults take 27% fewer sick days, leading healthier, more productive lives.

For those living with mental health conditions, the impact of exercise is especially striking: ukactive’s new Mental Health in Motion report shows that 72% say being active helps them stay in work and avoid sickness absence. 

Yet we still face an inactivity crisis.

A quarter of the population in England does fewer than 30 minutes of physical activity a week.
 

The evidence above demonstrates that is not just a health issue – it’s a social and economic one as well.

With 2.5 million people out of work due to poor health, the cost to the UK economy is over £100 billion a year. So, the challenge is huge – but so is the opportunity. 

National Fitness Day is about meeting that challenge head-on, by showing people that being active can fit into their lives, whatever their age, background or ability.

From spin classes to swimming, from walking football to yoga, there’s something for everyone.  

It’s also a chance to celebrate the people who make these experiences possible: the instructors, coaches, lifeguards, volunteers and staff who open the doors of their facilities to millions every week.

In 2024 alone, there were over 600 million visits to gyms, pools and fitness clubs across the UK – and a record 11.5 million people are now members.  

At Sport England, we’re proud to back National Fitness Day.

Through our strategy Uniting the Movement, we’re working with more than 150 partners to break down barriers, close the inequality gap in activity (worth £15.6 billion a year to the economy on its own if it can be addressed), and target investment where it can have the greatest impact. 

That means supporting grassroots facilities; putting movement at the heart of every school day, because habits built in childhood last a lifetime; and embedding physical activity across government policy – from prevention-first healthcare to workplace wellbeing. 

And crucially, it means ensuring that the fitness and leisure sector – the backbone of National Fitness Day – continues to thrive.

We know the pressures the sector faces but we also know the immense value it creates, and therefore Sport England will continue to work with ukactive and its members to ensure that gyms, pools, clubs and community fitness spaces remain central to the nation’s health and wellbeing. 

These facilities are lifelines for our communities, facilitating social connection and bringing people together to boost their physical and mental health 

As I’ve stepped into this role, what has struck me perhaps more than anything else is that none of what we do is achieved by one organisation alone.

National Fitness Day shows what’s possible when we come together as a movement, powered by the organisations and people who believe in the vision of a healthier and happier life for all – regardless of background, bank balance or postcode.  

So, whether you’re hosting a free gym class, joining a taster session, having a dip at the pool, cheering on your child at their dance class, or simply going for a walk – you are part of something bigger.

You are helping to build a healthier, happier, more resilient nation. 
 

For more than 10 years, I’ve had the privilege of being part of a partnership between Sport England and the National Trust that’s been quietly but powerfully changing lives.

This is more than just getting people outdoors – it’s about creating real, lasting opportunities for everyone, especially those who need it most, to connect with nature and feel the benefits of being active in green and blue spaces.

Being outdoors and connected to nature has demonstrable health and wellbeing benefits.

Studies have shown impact such as lowering stress levels and reducing cortisol and inflammation, which are increasingly seen as factors in depression, autoimmune diseases and cancer.

Our work at the National Trust is shifting towards a more ‘place-based’ approach, but what exactly do we mean by that?

Rather than parachuting in with one-size-fits-all solutions, we’re considering what’s already happening in local communities, at National Trust properties and on their land, and finding ways to make those spaces more accessible, more welcoming and more connected to the people who live nearby.
 

Whilst we consider how to be more locally responsive, we continue to work at a national scale on initiatives such as improving navigational and orientation signage to ensure paths are easy to find and follow, and refining path-grading methodologies to better reflect the diversity of users.

This work focuses on describing the path itself rather than the person using it and it goes in line with the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) principles and the Equality Act.

What I love about our work is that it’s about making meaningful connections between the land and the community.

It’s not just about trails or facilities – it’s about creating safe, natural, traffic-free environments where people can walk, cycle, run, paddle or simply be.

I’ve seen firsthand how many barriers can stand in the way of people accessing the outdoors.

Things like fear of getting lost, finding themselves in unfamiliar terrain, safety concerns, challenges around travelling to our places or just not knowing where to start.

We’ve worked hard to design experiences that support people who are new to the outdoors and it’s making a real difference.

For that we’ve been able to capitalise on the strength of the National Trust brand.

Our properties are trusted spaces, with essential facilities like cafés and toilets, which makes them perfect for families, groups or individuals who might be taking their first steps into nature.

The multi-use trails that have been developed are a great example. They’re accessible, enjoyable and range from three to 5km, which makes them ideal for walking, wheeling, running or cycling.

And the impact has been incredible!

We’ve seen a 23% rise in visits from people of ethnic backgrounds, which indicates we’re reaching new audiences and helping more people feel like they belong in these spaces.

This is fantastic news since we strive to improve the experience for communities that often find barriers to exploring the great outdoors.

I’ve also been inspired by the way this work helps those who may need deeper support.

Whether it’s supported paddling sessions, inclusive activities for families with SEN, or community-led cycling groups like the Muslim Cycle Sisters at Osterley, there’s a real commitment to inclusion.

And it’s not just about participation but about representation, too.

The Trust is working with partners to tackle underrepresentation in the outdoor workforce, for example through our walking leaders programme, which is such an important step toward long-term change.

Nature restoration and biodiversity play a big part in our work.

Our infrastructure developments are designed to improve visitor experience and get people active whilst protecting some of the most sensitive nature areas.

We are strengthening our knowledge and skills in designing experiences that deliver real, meaningful and lasting nature connection to inspire more people to care for nature and their local environment.

Looking ahead

As I reflect on the past decade, I feel proud of what we’ve achieved and even more hopeful about what’s to come.

Our partnership with Sport England shows that when we focus on people, place and purpose, we can create spaces that are not only beautiful, but truly inclusive and life-enhancing.

And that’s something worth building on.

There has never been more opportunity for young people with a disability to access and thrive in cricket.

In my short time as Chair of Lord’s Taverners, I’ve been privileged to witness the transformative power of our disability cricket programmes, not just for the young people who take part, but for their families, schools, and communities.

These experiences aren’t just inspirational, they are life-changing.

The need for our work has never been greater. That’s why I’m proud to be leading an organisation committed to making cricket the UK’s most inclusive team sport. And few moments capture that ambition more powerfully than the recent Disability Cricket Day at Lord’s.

The event closed with history being made: the first ever international disability cricket fixture played on the main ground at Lord’s, a mixed-disability T20 between England and India. It was a moment that united grassroots passion with elite aspiration, showing every young person in attendance what’s possible.

This remarkable alignment – national youth competition and elite international showcase, side-by-side – is a beacon for what sport can be when inclusion is placed at its heart. It’s a demonstration of the pathway that exists and is strengthening year-on-year for cricketers with a disability, and a reminder of the importance of representation. Because when young people see others like themselves competing at the highest level, they begin to believe: this is for me, too.

The success of the day was only possible because of the strong partnership between the ECB, MCC, and the Lord’s Taverners – a spirit that reflects Sport England’s Uniting the Movement strategy. Together, we’re not only creating unforgettable moments; we’re laying the foundations for long-term change.

Cricket – like all sport – holds the power to change lives. But that power is only realised when it’s accessible to all. Too many young people with a disability still face barriers: lack of opportunities, inaccessible environments, or simply not seeing themselves reflected on the field. The message they hear can all too often be: this isn’t for you.

At the Lord’s Taverners, we are here to change that.

And thanks to events like Disability Cricket Day – and the partnerships that make them possible – we’re showing that our sport can lead the way in making inclusion not just a principle, but a reality.
 

It’s been just over a month since the 10 Year Health Plan was published – a key milestone in the government’s commitment to create an NHS fit for the future.  

It’s taken me time to navigate the headline ambitions, shifts in language, structural implications and, critically, what this all means for physical activity. There are 160 pages to get through, after all… 

There’s lots to unpick and this post from the Medical Consulting Group includes a visual that usefully summarises the key points.

For patients, it’s a positive and empowering tone, underpinned by a digital revolution and receiving care closer to home.  

With Neighbourhood Health a cornerstone of the Plan and elected mayors playing a greater role in prevention, combined with Local Government Reorganisation and Devolution, this all presents big opportunities to align with Sport England’s investment into communities that need it most.
 

Since publication, much commentary has reflected that the Plan could have gone further in utilising physical activity’s preventative powers.

It’s true: the evidence and opportunity for impact at scale are significant. I have two glass-half-full thoughts on this:

1. This Plan feels like it goes further on physical activity than any previous national NHS/health strategy. Whilst we can go (much) further, this is progress to build upon.
    
2. Rather than considering ‘potential’ purely through physical activity’s reference, there are numerous levers throughout the Plan to capitalise upon. We’ve learned that framing physical activity’s role in supporting wider, shared outcomes is key – whether that be tackling health inequalities, preventing and managing multi-morbidity, falls/frailty or social isolation… the list goes on.
    

At the heart of our campaign are our women, and our mission is to tackle the gender activity gap by getting more women and girls moving in ways that work for them.

In order to achieve this, it’s key to listen to all women and girls, keeping their views and needs as our North Star.

It’s this insight that tells us about the range of barriers that many women face to being active.

The power of working together

Women from underrepresented communities face a disproportionate number of obstacles because they can experience systemic, social, structural, cultural and financial inequalities – barriers that cannot simply be overcome through personal motivation alone.

So the next phase of This Girl Can is unapologetically focused on tackling inequalities and supporting women from underrepresented backgrounds to get active and to achieve this, we know a collective effort is essential.

We want to work in a truly collaborative way to make sure we’re developing inclusive, representative work and that we’re continually learning from the many different organisations who are already embedded in reducing inequalities.

We only get one childhood and there was a time when being a child meant playing out, spending time with friends in person, exploring, joining teams, falling out, making up and everything in between.

Sadly, this is not the case for most young people nowadays, but why?

On the one hand, our research indicates that at least one in four young people feel they don’t ‘belong’ at school.

And Sport England's latest Active Lives Children and Young People report tells us that almost 50% of young people are not meeting the Chief Medical Officers' guidelines of having 60 minutes of physical activity a day, and that young people are spending more time interacting with screens than with their peers.

People here are used to being told what’s wrong but through hope, community spirit and ambition we wanted to focus on ‘what’s strong; not what’s wrong’, using a place-making approach.

Note we talk about an ‘approach’ rather than a ‘plan’ and this is because we’re following a set of principles, instead of rules.

Joining the dots

Place-making is a fluid and dynamic way of working that’s context-focussed, rather than project-focussed.

We wanted to put schools back at the heart of these communities for them to act as catalysts for social change.

However we had also heard stories of persistent absenteeism among students and of the struggle to recruit and retain teachers.

There were also descriptions of pupils' bad behaviour and lack self-regulation, which in many occasions resulted in a lack of aspiration and a rise in apathy.

That all needed to change, so for over 18 months we worked in these places, spent time there, built relationships, listened, learnt and tried to put wind in the sails of the educators and people who know these places better than anyone.

We wanted to listen to the people living, working and playing in these places, but with a listen-to-understand rather than a listen-to-respond attitude, and in order to achieve that we created a new role in schools: the place-maker.

Place-makers are members of staff that live in the community (or have strong connections to it) and who can help activate young people’s talents.

This small group of changemakers have been incredibly effective at joining the dots with local stakeholders including youth services, policing, transport, health and housing.

And there’s more!

We’ve also created the 'Communities of Place’, a series of safe and brave spaces where people are encouraged to raise important issues and work out solutions together.

The importance of trust

In Perry Barr, for instance, girls were not accessing opportunities at the same rate as boys, so the school made a connection to Saathi House, which is a vibrant local community hub specifically designed for women and girls.

Together, they listened to understand the community needs and, as a result, enabled an NFL Flag Football project to provide a safe, diverse and inclusive space for young girls to learn, play and grow together that was managed by a group of female mentors promoting physical fitness, teamwork, confidence and leadership.

Through our approach to Youth Voice, we've also discovered an appetite for Youth Leadership, so the schools invited students to apply to become a young place-maker.

They received 109 applications and there are now 35 young place-makers in Tower Hamlets and The Prescot School, proving the desire for young people to be the change they want to see in their community.

Our place-based work is built on shared values and purpose, because we:

• spend time with people in their places
• build reciprocal relationships and see what we can give rather than extract
• understand by truly listening
• focus on strengths rather than deficits or weaknesses
• are transparent and have tough conversations.

If you take the first letter of these values, you get the most important component of what we do: trust.

Trust is fundamental to us because we’ve learned that progress travels at the speed of trust and that trust is also the hardest thing to earn and the easiest to lose.

And while we are also aware that we don’t have all the answers, we believe that the people in these places do and that part of our collective role is help them to unlock them.

The answer to the riddle in the title is easy – sport and physical activity.

At Sport England we’re always talking about the benefits of being active, but for nerds like me, the past few months have provided a particular treasure trove of data about the social and economic value of sport and physical activity.

And then on 1 October 2024, DCMS published a new Sport Satellite Account for the UK.

The positive ripple effect of being active

This revealed that during 2021, the combined economic impact of sport (direct and supply chain – including the production of sports equipment and apparel, the construction and maintenance of sports facilities or their marketing services) was equivalent to £83.1 billion, or 4.1% of the UK’s productivity (gross value added).

The document also showed that every £1 invested in sport generates £1.55 as gross value added in the economy.

A few weeks later we published the results of our new research on the social value of community sport and physical activity, revealing that in 2022/23 the social value of sport and physical activity in England was £107.2b.

This value consists of the individual wellbeing benefits of sport and physical activity (both participation and volunteering) and the wider health benefits of a more active population.

However, the report also highlighted the £15.6b of social value that we are missing out on due to inequality in sport and physical activity, and how the value of being physically active is greater for some of those who are least likely to be active, like adults with a disability or living with a long-term health condition.

The first time the importance of spatial planning in creating population-level increases in physical activity was articulated was through the You’ve Got This (YGT) programme – the Sport England-funded Place Partnership in South Tees.

Sport England has worked on different approaches to capacity and hosting when taking a place-based, whole-systems perspective to work and I'm happy to have contributed to the latest set of resources published by the organisation.

YGT adopted the socio-ecological approach to systemic change, where policy and the physical environment appear as key components of the wider determinants of health. 

These aspects are recognised as carrying a high weighting in this framework – difficult to influence but once achieved, the changes are highly impactful over the medium and long-term.

The need for cooperation and understanding

These considerations resulted in the creation of my role.

My post looks at improving collaboration between public health, transport planning, and planning departments across South Tees to promote health, well-being, and physical activity through the Local Plan, the wider policy framework, and innovative new programmes.

My job looks at improving the collaboration between public health, transport planning and planning departments across South Tees to promote physical activity through the Local Plan and the wider policy framework for local healthcare services in a number of community wards and venues across Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland, and Hambleton and Richmondshire.

Previous attempts to enhance collaboration across South Tees had faltered due to time constraints and heavy workloads.

Recognising this, YGT facilitated initial meetings where urban planners, transport planners and public health practitioners could gather away from the office environment.

This process revealed issues such as a limited understanding of each other's roles and decision-making processes, alongside a shared commitment to creating healthier environments and a strong desire to collaborate.

Over the course of a year, three additional workshop sessions were convened to further explore these issues.

Simultaneously, through Sport England's partnership with the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), YGT established a new relationship with one of their experts, Gemma Hyde, who played a pivotal role in charting a path forward.

The culmination of these efforts brought together senior planners, transport planners and public health practitioners supported by Sport England, the TCPA and The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI).

Despite initial slow progress, participants valued the time for reflection and identified key issues like capacity and staff training.

Collectively, it was agreed that there were specific challenges related to coordinating the work and addressing the need for knowledge and training among staff and elected members.

To support the process, YGT agreed to fund a position initially for a period of two years and that this role would encompass the whole of South Tees, with Middlesbrough Council (MC) serving as the employer.

This is where I join the story.

Reflecting on progress to date

My background as a behavioural scientist and public health spatial planner definitely came together on this project, as behavioural science studies the patterns, motivations, and factors that influence human behaviour across different contexts, using scientific methods to understand why people make the decisions they do and how behaviour can be modified or improved at individual and societal levels.

Our boroughs, MC and Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council (RCBC) are currently at different stages of the Local Plan cycle.

In the emerging Local Plan for MC, I contributed to the Health and Wellbeing Policy and successfully secured an agreement to require Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) for all residential developments that exceed 100 dwellings.

I also devised an additional HIA screening process based on health and open-space ­deprivation on a ward-by-ward basis to be conducted for all major development across town.

There was also the completion of a Health in All Policies (HiAP) assessment of the emerging plan (Regulation 18).

Productive discussions with colleagues in RCBC have centred on the potential for a similar approach in the future review of the Local Plan.

I've also facilitated, with colleagues across public health and spatial planning and other stakeholders, the creation of MC’s first HIA toolkit, which has physical activity at its heart and taking as our primary model the well-respected HIA materials created by John Wilcox and colleagues at Wakefield City Council.

Public Health South Tees recently completed our Joint Strategic Needs Assessments (JSNAs), to which I also contributed, ensuring that the JSNA is integrated into MC's emerging local plan for health and wellbeing policy.

Once adopted in late 2025 or early 2026, this will provide developers with clear baseline information about our communities and our priority goals for health and wellbeing across the borough.

Looking ahead

The foundational changes we're beginning to implement in South Tees represent a significant shift in how we integrate public health, planning and transport policies to promote physical activity and wellbeing.

However, we face significant challenges ahead.

We'll need to secure sustained funding beyond the post's initial two-year period, maintain momentum across different planning cycles between our boroughs and ensure consistent implementation of our new policies.

Looking to the future, our next steps of sharing best practices through Sport England's expansion process and deepening collaboration with the Tees Valley Combined Authority are crucial for scaling our innovations.

If we succeed, we could contribute to a new standard for how local authorities approach integrated planning for health and physical activity, potentially influencing national strategy and contributing to more active, healthier communities across England.

Our male weight loss programme celebrated its 10th birthday in 2024 – a key milestone in its support of men up and down the UK and beyond!

MAN v FAT currently has over 8,500 men of all ages participating in its more than 150 owned club locations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and has seen its members lose more than 750,000 lbs of weight combined.

This year the organisation started supporting those interested in rugby with MAN v FAT Rugby and football with MAN v FAT Football, and there’ll also be new 'MAN v FAT sports' in the coming years.

In February 2024, Move Consulting teamed up with the Active Partnership National Organisation (APNO) to lead an exciting project funded by Sport England to develop national guidance for creating physical activity for health pathways.

But what exactly is a Physical Activity for Health Pathway?

The term 'pathway' highlights how local organisations connect, using their resources to support the community.

Our goal is to figure out how to enhance collaboration between the health and physical activity sectors ensuring that everyone can access the support they need to be more active in ways that suit them.

Meeting needs through collaboration

We know that one in four people in the UK are living with one or more long-term health conditions, and that this audience is twice as likely to be inactive compared to those in good health.

This is why it’s important to provide clear and accessible support to ensure that those who may benefit the most from engaging with activity are able to do so in a way that works for them.

We also recognise the influence health and care professionals can have on this audience, because studies show that one in four patients would be more likely to be active if their GP or nurse encouraged them.

This highlights the need to empower health professionals and others to guide people on physical activity options and to signpost them to opportunities or to make referrals where appropriate.

From our discussions with the health sector, we’ve noticed inconsistent engagement with physical activity as a solution.

Common challenges include a lack of awareness of local offerings, limited referral options and capacity issues within existing services.

As highlighted in the Easier to be Active resource developed by Sheffield Hallam University in partnership with Sport England, there is a need to support better collaboration between the health and physical activity sectors.

The development of physical activity for health pathways can form part of the solution. 

From consistent approaches and raising awareness to increased systematic change achieved through greater collaboration in service provision, we can unlock valuable resources in our communities and better meet the needs of those living with, or at risk of, long-term health conditions.

A broader approach

Throughout our work to date, there have been calls for innovation and flexibility in how the system operates and while there are pockets of innovation across the country, it’s essential that we expand the offer and our approaches. 

Take Exercise on Referral – this long-standing model connects people with qualified fitness professionals, typically in a gym setting.

While it can be effective, it doesn’t really work for everyone, so we need to consider whether we’ve fallen into a one-size-fits-all approach or what nuances to the model are being made, if any.

The conversation around 'risks' and physical activity has also evolved significantly over the past year.

The 2021 Consensus Statement still resonates, emphasising that the benefits outweigh the risks when it comes to being active with a long-term health condition.

Ongoing work from the Faculty for Sport and Exercise Medicine (FSEM) is helping reshape how we view risk, encouraging a model of medical guidance to complement an emphasis on patient-centred care, rather than medical clearance.

In other words, we want to empower people to make informed choices about being active.

Consistency is key

We’ve known for years that physical activity is beneficial for people’s physical and mental wellbeing, yet we’re still not harnessing its full potential.

To create effective pathways, we need more consistency in how they’re designed and we’re curious to identify common considerations being implemented across the board.

One area that often lacks consistency is behavioural change support.

Many view this as a simple step from inactivity to activity but it actually involves navigating a complex array of behaviours.

We need to support individuals as they incorporate activity into their lives in ways that feel right for them and this is more than just adding programmes.

It’s about meaningful engagement and shaping solutions with people, not for them.

Shaping the future together – get involved

Collaboration and co-design are at the heart of our approach.

We’re partnering with stakeholders like NHS Horizons, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) and the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity (CIMSPA).

Our community of practice groups consist of 39 organisations, bringing together voices from the Active Partnership network and other sectors.

We’re also reaching out through sector-wide surveys to gather insights and share best practices.

Our current Pathways Perspectives survey focuses on behavioural change support and is open until the end of November 2024.

We’d love your input, so please complete the survey and share your experiences.

Stay informed

Want to learn more about the Physical Activity for Health Pathways project?

Visit us our website or our LinkedIn profile, or sign up to our monthly Move newsletter to stay in the loop.
 

They say time flies and while this is a cliché, it is one that’s undeniably true. 

It’s certainly the case when it comes to our Place Partnerships, because as we celebrate a year since we kickstarted our Place Expansion, a lot has happened!

Back in November 2023, our Place Expansion programme committed to investing £250 million of National Lottery and Exchequer funding into local communities across England in the following five years, to ensure those in greatest need were able to get active.

We've had a busy and positive year

In the past 12 months, and through this first phase of this Place Expansion, we’ve invested in 53 new places across England, partnering with 27 Active Partnerships and the dedicated organisations they work alongside.

From Swindon to Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool to Brent and Walsall to West Norfolk, we’ve been partnering with key stakeholders in each of these places to establish what the local ambition and approach will be.

Our support will ensure all places across England will gain access to the tools, resources, learnings and capabilities to help them work more collaboratively and achieve the systemic change that is needed at a local level to address the barriers to getting people active. 

By galvanising the system in this way, we know we can bring about lasting and sustainable change to every part of the country.

Working together for local change

Since launching our place-based expansion last November, we’ve invested nearly £20m to help each of our place partners develop their individual approach.

This way of working – ground up and rooted in the needs of local communities – is contributing towards achieving a positive impact that we have not seen previously. 

We’ve seen that baking in physical activity into local, long-term strategic and policy commitments is a key solution to driving change within wider outcomes such as health, environmental sustainability and community cohesion.

Take Exeter as an example.

They have embedded our Active Design principles into their Liveable Exeter strategy –  a 20-year housing plan – by which they will build 12,000 homes where giving people chances of being physically active are at the front and centre of those developments.

We’re also seeing greater connection and collaboration amongst partners within a place than we’ve ever seen before.

At the end of September, the Greater Manchester Memorandum of Understanding brought together the combined authority, integrated care partnership, the transport, voluntary and community sectors, leisure providers, the GM Moving Active Partnership and Sport England. 

Through this collaboration, we will see resources aligned to support the integration of physical activity and sport at the highest decision-making levels in the city and region. 

And within these communities, we are seeing that this work is contributing towards positive signs of inequalities reducing and the inactivity gap closing. 

The contribution of the work and the focus of partners in Greater Manchester has seen year-on-year reductions of inactivity levels in children and young people and, for the first time, this is lower than the national average.

Meanwhile, in Pennine Lancashire, direct engagement and collaboration with the Muslim community has seen over 5,000 young people increase their daily activity levels through the Active Madrassahs programme.

More positive change to come

Impact like this is being felt up and down the country and this work really does speak for itself with a robust message: together we are stronger. 

Our Place Partnerships will see us work in every corner of the country, partnering with organisations in areas that face the biggest barriers to a more active life. 

Together we will create lasting change within the communities that need it most to ensure that more people can live active and healthier lives for longer.

So, looking forward to reaching new places in the next year and to keep celebrating across the country.
 

Reclaiming narratives – this year's theme for Black History Month – is important to us because it aligns with The Selby Trust's mission of working with and empowering communities who are often marginalised in society.

This helps in fostering appropriate representation, challenging stereotypes, building solidarity and advocating for systemic change, as well as cultural preservation.

The Selby Trust continues to play a significant role in supporting the BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) community through various initiatives, both locally and across London, so as well as reclaiming our past, we can strengthen our present so that the community can look forward to a promising future.

One culture, many communities

Located in Tottenham and within walking distance to over 78,000 people, the trust was formed in the 1990s at the Selby Centre, a former secondary school, by the late Bernie Grant MP – best known as the first Black British MP.

He was elected in 1987 and created The Selby Trust to support the local community.

As our strapline of ‘’One culture, many communities’’ suggests, we’re continuing to support those most in need locally through the activities and outreach provision in place.

We are there for our community by continually advocating for the needs and rights of BAME individuals, by helping to amplify their voices and by ensuring they are represented in decision-making processes.
 

The large majority of staff, as well as other organisations and groups using our premises, are from the local area as community is at the forefront of what we do.

We provide various services and facilities to support local residents and organisations.

This often includes spaces for community events, activities and meetings, as well as resources for education, employment support and social services.

These centres typically play a vital role in fostering community engagement and development by supporting cultural activities and events that celebrate the heritage of BAME communities, fostering pride and a sense of belonging, which is key to the Selby Trust.

We also run free activities in our local area. These include dance sessions for the elderly, fun day activities and events, plus training sessions on job interviews and finance wellbeing to students from the local sixth form college.

But there's more!

Working together for local enhancement  

We also operate the Selby Food Hub, a programme that was established at the start of the pandemic and that currently helps 150 families by providing access to food packs and essential items on a weekly basis.

Our Global Garden hosts fruits and vegetables from across the world, providing healthy food for those attending our food bank, as well as access to a unique open space at the heart of our community.

Now named Selby Ventures, our business-to-business support programme, we help local small and medium-sized organisations and start ups with free workshops and tailored business support, aiding and fostering growth in partnership with Kingston University.

Support has ranged from marketing and Search Engine Optimisation help, access to grants and bid writing, and a second phase will be kickstarting this autumn.

We facilitate connections between individuals and local grassroots organisations, creating pathways for collaboration and support within the community.

We also offer educational programmes and training opportunities that equip individuals with skills for employment, enhancing their economic prospects, like CV-writing workshops, and this autumn we’re offering free IT training to locals who may need to improve their digital skills most.

This will be an opportunity to help users with basics skills like learning how to use their IT devices to boost employability prospects and to access digital resources to tackle the levels of digital poverty in the immediate community.

Initiatives focused on health awareness and mental wellbeing address specific challenges faced by the BAME community.

Since 2021, we’ve been continuing to run regular and free holiday programmes for local children aged five to 16 through Selby Active.

Through both sport and enrichment provision, we’ve delivered activity to 900+ unique participants with free access to activities that would, otherwise, not be available for local young people. 

And we’re also working in partnership with the NHS to deliver blood transfusion and liver screening sessions on-site and with Endometriosis UK to raise awareness among the community of endometriosis.

It’s an exciting time for us as we press ahead with plans for the Selby Urban Village, a new centre, council housing and spaces for businesses to thrive, plus improved community facilities and leisure space for local people to enjoy.

This will continue to be a place for the community, by the community.
 

“It’s like the Olympics but even better” said my 10-year-old, as I watched him and his younger sister glued to the T54 marathon on the TV, not long after I had returned from four days in Paris.

They had fully engaged with the Paris 2024 Paralympics from the get-go and not just because it was constantly on our TV in the lounge.

They were not afraid to ask the usual questions about the sports, the athletes and the countries represented, but I also heard (and welcomed) the inquisitive questions around inclusion, adaptations and the different equipment used, and I was embracing the teachable moments with them!

A true game-changer

I echoed their excitement as my short visit to the Paralympic Games in Paris was nothing short of incredible.

The energy, determination and strength that radiated from the athletes made it clear that the Paralympic Games are more than just a showcase of sporting excellence.

They represent the culmination of years of effort, dedication and commitment to their sport.

At the events I went to, the majority-French spectators were generous with their support – even if it wasn’t for their team.

The venues had been dressed for the occasion and tried hard to be as accessible as they could be for both participants and spectators.
 

But what about the public transport? Well, the organisers recognised they couldn’t do much about their old and dense Metro system and the city's sometimes inaccessible street layout, but they focused on what they could change.

So they created more accessible bus routes, shuttle buses and accessible taxis that together with a relatively accessible public transport app, aimed to cater for the 350,000 disabled visitors.

The system was by no means perfect, but it showed progress nonetheless.

During my time there I was lucky enough to see wheelchair basketball, athletics, boccia, para table tennis and goalball.

In each sport the skill level was high, the playing quality was outstanding and I saw records broken. I felt incredibly grateful to be there!

Because in what any other four days can anyone ever see that much live sport and at that level? 

The ParalympicsGB team delivered outstanding results and thrived in a full (and loud!) stadium and, for the third consecutive Games, they were second in the medal table.

And even if you couldn’t attend in person, you could follow the action on Channel 4, from where 20 million people watched, achieving the biggest audience share in 12 years for the channel.

Paris’ were also the most accessible Games ever, as 91% of the presenting and commenting team were disabled – 30% of crew in total.

There were also repeated adverts for Every Body Moves – the inclusive sport and physical activity finder.  

All these elements have truly set the bar for future Games high. Very high.

The main purpose of my visit to Paris was to attend the Championing Change reception with ParalympicsGB.

This was the launch of their new social impact strategy together with the launch of Equal Play –  their campaign and policy paper to garner a commitment to ensuring every child has the same access to PE and sport at school.

The Equal Play campaign’s goal is to ensure that no child is left on the sidelines, as just one in four disabled children say they take part regularly in sport at school.

There are 1.5 million disabled children – 15% of the school population – and so the figures of those who do not participate are stark, but the documentary that goes with it has been brilliantly done.

Present at the event were multiple stakeholders from across the sector, which included a notable visit from UK’s Government Minister of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy.

She echoed the call to support the human rights of disabled children to play sport, as part of a bold new ambition to raise the healthiest generation of children in our history.

Gathering momentum afterwards, there has now been an open letter sent to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer about Equal Play from ParalympicsGB that has gained significant traction across the sector and on social media, as well as from the athletes themselves.

So much more to come

However, despite all the progress we have seen there is still so much to be done to challenge the many inequalities faced by disabled people in sport and physical activity.

Our Active Lives surveys constantly tells us that disabled people are still twice as likely to be physically inactive.

And of course not every disabled person can or wants to become a Paralympian and it is true that elite sport is only for a few. However, getting society to the point where every disabled person can play sport, be active and move more in everyday life is even more important.

So it’s everybody’s responsibility to step up, to consider our approaches and to provide wholly accessible opportunities for everybody to be able to enjoy the benefits from moving.

In the words of Paralympian Stef Reid MBE: “The inclusion revolution is officially on!” and I couldn't agree more. 
 

The Sports4All Innovation Summit, held last week in Paris, marked the start of a critical mission that will run until the LA 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The event was initiated by Sportinnovator in the Netherlands, along with fellow frontrunners from other countries including Sport England, Sport Ireland, Danish Sports Federation, Indescat (Catalonia, Spain), National Resources Centre for Sports Innovations France and Sport Flanders.

The mission of the event was to demonstrate how innovation in sport and physical activity can contribute to addressing the societal inequalities that many communities experience.

There’s also a lack of dedicated support for the purpose-driven individuals and organisations who are designing to meet the particular needs of specific communities.

In fact, these social innovations are central to overcoming the policy-implementation gap.

The support they need is threefold:

• connections that are peer-based, but also public and private as the evidence of their impact grows
• investment to allow them to stay focused on the barriers they are solving rather than chasing the cash
• coaching to help them navigate the complexities of sustaining their business as it grows and to help them respond to change.

So I pose two questions: which local projects can you connect with and learn from? And who could you amplify and advocate for nationally?

2. Social innovation is more important that technology innovation

The term 'innovation' is often firstly associated with technology and new products, but what came across loud and clear in Paris was that innovation for inequalities needs to first have a social purpose, especially when we want to apply it to remove systemic barriers that exist in communities.

This aligns with how we define innovation at Sport England:

Innovation is applying a creative mindset, generating ideas and experimenting to make positive changes that improve people's experiences of physical activity. It is an approach that puts people’s needs at the heart, continually learning and adapting to remove the real-life barriers they are facing.

So think first about who you are seeking to help and then what problem or barrier you are removing for them, before you decide on the solutions that might work best for those communities.

Ideally those groups are also involved in the discovery and design processes, rather than having things done to them.

3. Support to scale the innovation process is key

As Cormac Macdonnell from Sport Ireland shared: "Good ideas and initiatives deserve to be shared and scaled across Europe". But, within the sport sector, it can sometimes feel like we are competing rather than collaborating.

So how can we help many more innovators experience the sharing spirit that our 15 projects experienced at the Summit?

They were offered the opportunity to learn from like-minded people who are trying to solve the same problems, but in different cultural contexts.

We need to do more to create the space for people to trial new approaches, fail fast but learn quickly, and to share that learning so that we are building motorways together, not roundabouts.

Thanks to John Hughes, Director of Partnerships at Community Integrated Care, who talked about an Inclusive Volunteering project that we funded, who shared this fantastic analogy.

Looking at the possibilities ahead

I think it is fair to say that we all left the Summit positive about the future, as what was evident in the room was that the passion for improving inequalities through purposeful innovation is alive and well.

But creating and nurturing the conditions where innovation can thrive will take patience and collective care, so what we really need to consider is whether we’re up to the challenge. I know Sport England is. Will you join us?

On behalf of Sport England, I would like to thank Sportinnovator for the opportunity, and Community Integrated Care, Intelligent Health UK and Planet Earth Games for joining us and sharing what they are learning about supporting disabled people, people on lower incomes and young people with others from across Europe.

If you’d like to learn more about how to take practical steps to apply innovation in order to remove barriers for specific audiences, please look at our innovation and digital resources, our latest research or get in touch with our team.
 

The problem is that lots of people feel they do not have the opportunity to lead an active life, despite wanting to.

Many of us face barriers to moving such as living with long-term health conditions, caring responsibilities, financial constraints, work commitments and desk-anchored jobs.

So we want to show easy ways for everyone to find a way to be active and that’s what our aim has been with Get Moving.  

The page has been updated with with lots of inspirational ideas to help people move more as a way to support their mental health.

These include tips, guidance and advice on how to keep or start getting active, with activities for both indoors and outdoors, ones the inspire family fun, challenges and more.

Every movement counts

We know that children and young people (5-18 years of age) need to be active for an average of at least 60 minutes per day across the week, whereas adults need at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity action a week.

It may sound like a lot, but we often neglect the little things we can all do, day-to-day, that really count towards that important quota of daily exercise.

It's what we call the moments for movement. 

Easy ways of getting active to help boost people's mental wellbeing, daily, because – paraphrasing one of the most influential slogans of our time – every movement counts.

This could be anything from dancing in the kitchen to your favourite song, to ditching the car at the school drop-off/pick-up and scoot or walk instead.

It could also be encouraging your colleagues to try a walking meeting to get away from the desk and breathe in some fresh air (and hopefully get a bit of sunshine too!) or trying a short run over lunchtime.

So many people swear by it as it gives them a shot of energy and it gets their creative and focus juices flowing.

#MomentsForMovement

Going back to our proud collaboration with Mental Health Awareness Week, there will be lots taking place across those seven days.

We would love for you all to get involved, encouraging your partners, community groups, colleagues and family members to find new ways of moving more in our daily lives.

And this is when the beauty of social media comes along!

Think of tips and ideas of how to get active, including local activities that may inspire other places to do something similar, and talk about why our mental health is important.

We ask that you capture those active moments with photos or videos and that you share them on social media with #MomentsForMovement.

To help spread the word, the Mental Health Foundation have created new assets for anyone to use, including logos, images and editorial copy that can be downloaded for free.

Every day in Mental Health Awareness Week we will be exploring different themes via our social channels and we would love for sector partners to align planned comms where possible so we can make the biggest collective impact.

The themes for each day of the Week will be:

• Monday 13 May: Moments for Movement 
• Tuesday 14 May: Our workforce
• Wednesday 15 May: Active Travel 
• Thursday 16 May: Green and blue spaces 
• Friday 17 May: Children and Young People.

Please encourage your partners, colleagues and relevant clubs and sport organisations to join in too. 

I can’t really wait for May, and while I may not be ready for a lunch run just yet, I think I’m going to try those walking meetings, even if it’s around the house – until the rain stops.

Any day now, I’m sure.

I’ve always loved power hockey and played it since I was eight. 

Power hockey is the powered-wheelchair version of field hockey, which started at Liverpool's Greenbank Sports Academy in 2000.

This is the only contact sport for electric wheelchair users and in March 2021 a governing body - GB Power Hockey Association (CIO) - was born.

A disabled sport by disabled people 

It’s the best sport ever as it makes me feel like I have no disability and I can focus on just enjoying it, so imagine my delight when in 2001 I was offered to become a trustee by Gerry Kinsella, chairman of the charity and creator of the sport.

This opportunity meant I could help develop the sport nationwide, something which is key to my current role as media secretary at the charity.

I also helped organise and run power hockey’s inaugural tournament, held in May this year, at the sport’s home of Greenbank Sports Academy.

It was an action-packed day with teams from around the country competing in front of hundreds of spectators.

I think it is safe to say that without the role of disabled people within power hockey, the sport wouldn’t exist and I’m proud of having helped laid the foundations for this exciting and up-and-coming sport to prosper and immensely improve disabled people’s lives.

How does Sport England support our work?

Funding from Sport England has enabled the Greenbank Project, working in partnership with the GB Power Hockey Association, to promote and develop this great new sport.

The funding has aided the creation of four new hubs in England - in Chester-Le-Street, Gloucester, Middlesbrough and Burton Upon Trent - and the further development of the Liverpool hub.

The hubs - which will train teams to compete in different leagues and championships - each have eight power hockey chairs stored, ready for players to use in power hockey and power football weekly sessions.

The funding has also paid for the role of the Greenbank Power Hockey business development manager to support the development of the hubs.

The officer has introduced the games of power hockey, and sometimes power football, to the hubs by organising test sessions in each venue before the hubs start.

This figure has also developed the local partnership, which is crucial to the hubs' success and is supporting the volunteer force to run these centres.

The funding has also enabled the development of the chair themselves.

They count with a shooting mechanism that can propel the hockey ball out of the chair using two electromagnets and the players can tackle each other safely due to front bumpers, more commonly used to protect walls from forklift trucks.

The chairs are made by Powersport Engineering, a community interest company, which took over making the chairs from Greenbank in 2020.

The project has enabled the social enterprise to flourish and develop through the turbulent Covid period and has also enabled disabled people to return to playing sports after the pandemic.

Power hockey and power football players were isolated for a prolonged period during the pandemic due to their vulnerability, but the hubs enabled the players to come out and start playing sports again in a safe environment.

Sport England has also supported the sport by providing a case officer who helped shape and link the project with other key organisations.

Together, we’ve made power hockey a sport with the necessary infrastructure and workforce to thrive and one, more importantly, with a truly exciting future to look forward to.

This is something for all lovers of sport, not just the disabled community, to celebrate.
 

Getting to grips with data and understanding what this means can be a challenge. There’s so much of it available but never in one place and often telling a similar, but still different, story.

It can be very confusing!

Data is there to help us design the right solutions, to help us determine the next steps in our strategies and to provide us with a narrative for how and where we should direct our efforts, time and resources.

For this Black History Month, I was interested to see what our Active Lives surveys (our main piece of research) said about black people and their relationship with sport and physical activity.

And while adults being active for at least 150 minutes a week fell 2% from November 2018-2019 to 56% on last year’s survey, I still believe we may be witnessing a positive and upward trend, and that’s a good thing.

We know that your experience of physical activity in childhood is likely to influence how you relate and engage with physical activity as an adult - this is particularly true if the experience is a negative one.

With the exception of black children and young people, specifically among black boys, activity levels are back in line with those seen pre-pandemic for all ethnic groups.

So there’s clearly no room for complacency when it comes to data sets and responding to trends.

The key is keeping people engaged, because when people feel excluded or unwelcome they revert to places and spaces that make them feel less so.

Sometimes these spaces are established just for those representing a specific demographic, or reflecting on the same cultural identity or lived experience.

But they can also be welcoming to all and provide an opportunity to connect and stay connected. That’s what the Tell Your Story report calls parallel or alternative structures.

When the home nation sport councils published the Tell Your Story report alongside the Tackling Racism and Racial Inequalities in Sport (TRARIIS) report back in June 2021, we knew that the findings were going to be difficult to see and read.  

So we took the decision to intentionally engage members of the stakeholder group to work with us to help not only to action the TRARIIS recommendations, but to empower us to be an organisation that values race equality and is committed to ensuring our insight reflects the challenges we have around inclusion, belonging and participation.

We are proud that together we are creating the right conditions to change the negative experiences of culturally diverse communities in sport.

But while data is key, we can’t rely solely on it.

Our mission throughout Uniting the Movement is to reverse worrying trends and to give special attention to the areas where we can help disrupt what could become an acceptable norm.

We need to consider what sits within the insight and get serious about having a better understanding of what motivates and impacts people’s ability to engage positively with sport and physical activity.

And this is especially relevant to inactivity levels for black adults, which the latest survey placed at 31.1%. Too high.

We are well aware of the joys and health benefits of being active, yet we know that there are structural and systemic barriers that get in the way and prevent people from doing so.

So, while we celebrate the positives of the latest data, let’s use the momentum provided by this month to keep working through the year to ensure we are all able to reap the benefits of an active lifestyle.
 

One year ago, all eyes were on Birmingham.

The city kicked off a spectacular 10 days of sport and culture with an opening ceremony at the newly refurbished Alexander Stadium in Perry Barr.

Sport England invested £35 million into the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games as part of our commitment in Uniting the Movement – our 10-year strategy – to tackle inactivity inequalities. 

Now, as we look back at this momentous occasion, we reflect on the progress we have made in delivering on our ambition with a list that, while may not be exhaustive, will help to highlight a series of areas and examples of how our funding is being used to create new opportunities for people to be more active.

More than infrastructure

Substantial funds were allocated to enhance facilities, talent, volunteering and grassroots initiatives, and through them Sport England has played a pivotal role in laying the groundwork for a more active and healthier region and nation.

Our investment of £2.5m has supported the development of a brand-new state-of-the-art aquatics centre which was designed and built to meet the needs of the residents in and around Sandwell, whilst providing an iconic regional asset.

It was this sense of place and the importance of working at that level, evidenced in our local delivery pilots, that drove the creation of our substantive community-focussed programme - the Commonwealth Active Communities (CACs).

The CACs are four place-based programmes, made up of a consortia of organisations in Birmingham, Coventry and Solihull, and a collective approach by the four Black Country authorities of Dudley, Wolverhampton, Walsall and Sandwell.

Each place identified its strategic and local needs and developed an approach to tackle inactivity and inequalities via physical activity, through the principles of co-production, collaboration, distributive leadership and a commitment to learning and sharing outcomes.

Across the four places, activity focussed on young people, active environments (including streets, parks and canals), inclusivity and disability, walking and cycling, social prescribing, care homes and mental health.

These elements are now the focal point for other services and organisations for us to connect with, and the programmes and tools developed have added to our learning and informing our future place-based work.

Regarding the nurture of grassroots sports participation on the back of the Games, we focused on the above-mentioned CAC principles and invested £6.5m into the 22 Games national governing bodies of sport.

The aim? To use the Games to amplify opportunities for underrepresented communities to get active and to enjoy the benefits of sport and physical activity.

Some examples of these efforts include:

• British Wrestling - they used their allocated funding to support the appointment of two locally trusted women as legacy leads to head female activation sessions to highlight the barriers women often face in sport, and to further support clubs and groups to challenge these, providing more opportunities for women and girls from culturally diverse backgrounds to be active.
   
• England Athletics - they have developed their Funetics scheme, delivered through engaging with locally trusted organisations and services to better connect with local communities, like with the share shacks I mentioned earlier. Through this connection, the group have provided equipment bags, resource cards and training for community members to use in parks and festivals to engage with families.

With the backing of government, we also distributed around 16,000 items of sporting kit used in the Games, which benefitted 290 community organisations.

This giveaway helped foster a sense of diversity, equality, ownership and involvement and it provided opportunities for people of all abilities from a diverse range of communities.

Beyond the Games

Looking past the immediate benefits of the £870m boost to the UK economy, our investment in Birmingham 2022 has made an impressive impact through initial evaluation.

As we celebrate the one-year-one milestone, it is important to recognise that the journey is far from over.

The impact of the Games and our investment continues to evolve, with ongoing efforts to engage communities, develop talent and promote physical activity nationwide.

Our commitment to fostering a healthier and more active nation remains, serving as an inspiration for future major events and further place-based working.

We want to celebrate but also acknowledge the dedication, hard work, and collaboration that has gone into creating lasting change.

As we move forward, the profound impact of our investment will continue to inspire and shape the future of sports participation, community engagement and overall wellbeing in Birmingham and beyond.
 

It sets out the primary and secondary drivers for change, alongside the small steps to create change, with the figure below setting out some current examples.

The driver diagram enables us to be responsive and adapt our actions based on what we are learning.

So, while we are clear and remain fixed on our vision and desired outcomes, we are also working dynamically, using the insights from each engagement and action to adapt our approach and always asking questions as we keep advancing towards our overarching goals.

It has taken time to get used to this way of working but this agility has helped to ensure we are finding routes to create the change we are seeking within the system.

This has been a truly rich and rewarding experience.

Throughout, we have been guided by a strong commitment to supporting people to enjoy the benefits of physical activity, and the potential to build healthier lifestyles by embedding activity in healthcare settings.

There is still more to do, but we are excited by the challenge and will continue to evolve our approach to make it happen.  

Our latest Active Lives Adult Survey shows that, overall, activity levels have returned to where they were prior to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic – when they were already at a record high.

This is news for all those involved in sport and physical activity to celebrate.

We can all still recall the impact the pandemic, and the restrictions that came with it, on our lives and for lots of us, on our activity levels. While we could get out for a walk or a bike ride, pretty much every other activity was impacted massively.

So, the recovery of adult activity levels back to pre-pandemic levels so quickly was not to be taken for granted and, as I wrote in my welcome note to today’s report, is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the sport and physical activity sector – from volunteers at small organisations up and down the country, to councils working to keep leisure centres open.

But we’re not dancing in the aisles at Sport England HQ yet. Why? Because behind that positive headline figure sits a mixed picture, and some worrying long term trends that started before the pandemic.

Yes, 29.1 million people are meeting the Chief Medical Officers’ guidelines of 150+ minutes a week of activity, but at the same time there are 11.9m inactive people – 1.2% more than before the pandemic.
 

And we’re still seeing gaps in activity levels based on:

• Gender – 65.6% of males active vs. 60.8% of women
• Affluence – 72.6% of the most affluent are active, compared to 52.7% of the least affluent
• Ethnicity – 67% of ‘White Other’ people are active vs. 55% of those identifying as ‘Other ethnic group’
• Age – activity levels are falling for 16-34-year-olds, while they’re on the rise for older adults
• Whether a person has a disability or long-term health condition – 68.1% of people who don’t, are active, compared to 47.5% for those that do.

These results show that while sport and physical activity is easy and accessible for many people, for millions it is not – these groups are our focus in the years ahead and, working collectively as a movement of thousands of organisations, we have the ability to make sport easy, accessible and enjoyable for everyone.  

How we’re moving

Looking beyond levels of activity, there are also some interesting changes in how people are choosing to get active.

While there has been a reduction in the number of people walking for leisure compared to the previous year (after consecutive years of growth), other types of activity have seen big increases. The number of people participating in team sports and swimming in the past 12 months has increased significantly, reflecting the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, and how big an impact they had on participation rates throughout the pandemic.

However, while team sport levels are now back to those seen pre-pandemic, swimming levels (3.8m people swimming at least twice in the last 28 days) are still below what they were prior to coronavirus restrictions being implemented (4.2m) and even further behind the 4.9m from the first year of Active Lives.

We’ve also seen active travel (e.g. walking or cycling to work or to the shops) levels recovering significantly after big drops during the pandemic – though not returning to their pre-pandemic levels, perhaps reflecting the increase in days many people spend working from home.

What next?

All these figures, the positives and the negatives, show why our Uniting the Movement strategy is so vital.

We know that our staff didn’t just wave a magic wand and all of a sudden the public decided to go out and be active again. We know that, in reality, it was the sport and physical activity sector that made this recovery possible.

Which is what the first year of Uniting the Movement was targeted at – responding to the challenges of the time, transforming the way we work, planning for the coming years of our strategy and transitioning from our past work into targeting our new goals. But the biggest change is doing that together, building a genuine movement, working together towards the same goals.

Today’s results show that how we all responded to the pandemic helped activity levels to recovery quickly overall – but that now is the time to re-double our work to address the inequalities that sit below these headline figures.
 

Horizons are a team that facilitates transformation and innovation across the healthcare system by using large-scale change techniques to build energy and broker connections.

In 2021, we joined forces with the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) and Sport England to deliver the Moving Healthcare Professionals programme (MHPP).  

This ambitious initiative, running since 2017, aims to embed physical activity within health systems to support people to stay healthy and to support the management of long-term conditions.

Together, we are working to help ensure this becomes the norm, rather than the exception.

This work provides a great opportunity for us to connect the dots to other large-scale transformation work we are leading across the NHS and to maximise the benefits for individuals, society and the healthcare system.

The potential to drive change is hugely exciting, but it’s also a leap into the unknown.

Below are some of the approaches we’ve explored together and some highlights from what we’ve learnt along the way.
 

Over the last year we’ve benefitted from taking a collaborative approach to monitoring and understanding increases in the cost of living and its effect on sport and physical activity.  

The cost-of-living increases are due to several converging challenges, including the financial legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic, conflict in Ukraine and associated economic sanctions and inflation.

Working with our System Partners, we’ve created the ‘Cost of Living Insight and Research Group’ – a network of System Partner insight and research Leads who meet regularly to share and discuss learning, insight and research plans.
 

What have we learned from working together?  

From the outset, our focus as a group has been to work collaboratively to bring together what we understand about the cost-of-living increases.

We’ve benefitted from working alongside one another, creating an open environment where people feel able to share, learn, listen, and support each another with ideas and thinking.  

The group has grown organically over time. Starting off smaller in number but, as word about the group has spread, we’ve grown and we continue to welcome new members.

It sounds simple, but setting up a dedicated Teams channel has enabled us to bring new members up to speed as they join and allows us to communicate with one another regularly, between meetings.

Bringing together a broad range of people from a variety of organisations has helped us establish an overall view of what we know, spot gaps in our understanding quickly and draw upon our collective expertise to fill them. 

Another strength of the group has been our ability to share information and learning across a wide network of people, quickly – answering questions like; to what extent is the context changing? How are people feeling? What can we learn and share about how organisations are responding? 

What next? 

One of our next steps as a group is to work with Sheffield Hallam University to bring together and consolidate our collective research and insight.

This is in order to create a central story, focussed on the cost of living, which can be accessed and shared by sport and physical activity organisations and groups.

This will be available in spring/summer 2023. If you are a System Partner and would like to learn more about the Cost of Living Insight and Research Group, please e-mail me.

*when compared to NET adults and other subgroups.
 

Physical inactivity is detrimental to our health and contributes to the development of more than 20 chronic diseases, placing a burden on our health and social care systems. 

The UK’s current data shows 12.4 million adults (27.2%) do less than an average of 30 minutes of physical activity a week, and that 2.2m children and young people (30.1%) are classed as ‘less active’, achieving fewer than 30 minutes of daily physical activity.

The UK Chief Medical Officer’s Physical Activity Guidelines highlight the essential role being active can play in supporting our physical and mental health. They state: “If physical activity were a drug, we would refer to it as a miracle cure, due to the great many illnesses it can prevent and help treat.”  

Leading a more active life can help reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases, and being physically active helps many of the 19 million people in England living with long-term health conditions to manage their symptoms.

Physical activity can also bring wider benefits, including better mobility and improved self-esteem, and has an overall positive effect on wellbeing.

Integrating physical activity into health systems has been identified as one of the eight ‘best buys’ for physical activity.

And there's relevant research that provides examples to enablers of how to integrate physical activity into health and wider systems. It's these opportunities that we must explore in future.

We know that embedding physical activity in everyday healthcare could bring significant benefits due to the wide reach that healthcare professionals (HCPs) have across the population.

According to NHS Digital, there were almost 431m general practice, outpatient and A&E attendances in 2018/19.

So, at the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) we've been collaborating with Sport England to work with partners in the health system to create change in practice, culture and systems. 
 

We know people regularly engaging with HCPs (those with, or at risk of developing, health conditions) are far more likely to be inactive and experience other inequalities.

Insight from the ground-breaking We Are Undefeatable campaign revealed that the NHS and healthcare professionals are trusted sources of information. A quarter of people say they would be more active if told to do so by their GP or nurse.

There is an opportunity to transform people’s interactions with HCPs and embed physical activity within the NHS to reach those who have the most to gain from being active and to increase their knowledge, confidence and motivation.

So how do we go about enabling HCPs and the system they work in to better integrate physical activity into their daily practice to bring benefit to individuals and communities?

Taking action 

The team at OHID and Sport England have been working together since 2017 to embed physical activity within the health system to help reduce physical inactivity in the population. 

Together, we have delivered an ambitious, multi-layered programme, the Moving Healthcare Professionals Programme (MHPP), which sought, in part, to address barriers that HCPs and allied HCPs had when addressing patients.

These included a lack of formal knowledge, skills and confidence in discussing physical activity. 

The programme developed education and training packages to help overcome these barriers. It also sought to influence changes within the NHS system and make physical activity part of the norm.

These changes sought to influence the system, infrastructures and cultures and establish physical activity as part of an evidence-based preventative approach.

The evaluation of the MHPP found that it contributed to whole-system change, including greater recognition and value of physical activity.

HCPs reported the training tools increased their knowledge, skills and confidence to promote physical activity.

I was 17 when I developed paralysis of my right leg and foot drop due to a cancerous tumour on my spine. Given six weeks to live, walking wasn’t a high priority and I accepted that, should I survive it, I would be a wheelchair user for life.

Following treatment, I was able to become somewhat ambulant and here is where my issues with representation started.

Wheelchair users in sport have some fantastic role models and it’s easy to see yourself. However, those of us with some mobility have fewer heroes like us.

I found that I fell into a kind of no-man’s land where I was too disabled to play able bodied sports but not disabled enough for parasports.

At this point I gave up sports and physical activity.

Access to gyms in my area was limited and I didn’t have any clear way to participate – I wasn’t wanted by sports and so I cut it from my life.

I had been a rugby league fan but chose not to watch the games. If they didn’t want me, I didn’t want them.

But in lockdown I rediscovered my love of watching sports, albeit played in empty stadiums. I watched hours of old games on YouTube and reconnected with friends who are also supporters.
 

I decided to try wheelchair rugby league in 2022 and found a real passion for the sport. I then started playing physical disability rugby league and later, coaching all forms of disability rugby league.

Disabled people need representation in sport. We need to see it in order to be it.

Last year England won both the physical disability and wheelchair rugby league World Cups.

Both teams have players who are ambulant disabled. Some are amputees and some were born with their disability, but both teams were united in offering clear representation to disabled people.

Wales also took part in the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup and had two female players.

This shows young girls with disabilities that they can be sports stars, that they can represent their country and that they can inspire the next generation.

The campaign Every Body Moves, which has been developed by Paralympics GB and Toyota and that used to be known as Parasport, is key because there is a sport or movement out there for everyone, you just need to find the one that works for you.

More comfortable in your own space? Perfect – you can do online wheelchair boxing or dance classes. 

For those who want to be outdoors there’s Nordic walking or learning disability rugby league like me!

The first step is building more movement into your life. It doesn’t need to be an organised activity; it can be as simple as moving in time to your favourite song.

Participating in rugby league has given me so much more than being active. A recent survey by Savanta tells us that disabled people are twice as likely to say we feel lonelier and more isolated now than before the pandemic and cost of living crisis.

Sport has given me a place to participate and a group of friends who support me not just on the field, but off it as well.

Many activities are free or low cost so it’s a great way to meet people without breaking the bank.

I encourage you to get out there and give a new activity a go, if it’s not the one for you, move onto another one.

There are loads out there and you’ll find someone who inspires you to be the best version of you. You might even make some friends and find a new social life!

Believe me you’ll be surprised.

As for me, my goal for 2023 is to try 12 new sports. Next up is cycling and I plan to take part in the Superheroes half-triathlon for people with disabilities in August – something you’d never hear me say 18 months ago!
 

We are living longer, but not in better health.

Too many older adults are not able to enjoy the benefits of an active life.

This can impact both our health and our quality of life – our strength to lift the grandchildren, our mobility to see friends and our capability to remain independent in our own homes.

Regardless of your age, movement makes people happier and healthier.

What we did and how communities benefitted

Despite the positive benefits, we know that maintaining an active life as we get older can be challenging.

Work, family and caring commitments can understandably take priority and societal narratives often reinforce the notion that as we age, we will and should slow down.

And so, Sport England has worked with 25 Active Ageing partners over the past five years to support more than 30,000 older adults into sport and physical activity; and, to learn how to provide positive, inclusive physical activity experiences that support older adults to build more sport and physical activity into their daily lives.

What we've learned about maintaining and developing an active life as we get older

Our participants embraced all manner of activities from dance and gymnastics to coastal rowing - challenging stereotypes about what older adults would be interested in and that getting older means slowing down.

The importance of co-production across the project lifecycle

The example of 10 Today and its wonderfully charismatic presenter, Terry, shows the power of this approach. They created a strong sense of community and belonging through constant insight gathering and product testing with their audience to adapt the offer to respond to their evolving motivations, needs and physical capabilities of their audience.

Terry demonstrated seated and standing adaptations of the activities depending on how you might be feeling today, and the 10 minute broadcasts were filmed as if in Terry’s home to help the activity feel more achievable within daily life.

The co-production thread continues into our evaluation and learning activities.

Our partners co-produced more appropriate evaluation frameworks, data collection tools and accessible measures with their participants.

This helped more people to value and take part in the evaluation, so it could better reflect the full impact of the projects and be used to enhance participants' experiences.

You can see the learnings of this approach informing our evaluation and learning for Uniting the Movement.

The power of fun and age positive offers

This 'Dance On' video – from a community-based dance programme in Leeds, Bradford and Doncaster - showcases another example of how the right opportunity and support can reframe physical activity as a fun and achievable experience, irrespective of your age.

Their messaging, imagery, music and language are all person-centered with their promotional materials showing what the experience is like to reassure and alleviate any concerns.

And whilst health is a key outcome, their video highlight the fun elements – “I like all the jiggling about!” – and the positive impact on mood, friendships, and the ability to do every-day tasks. These tangible, short-term, benefits are more relevant and attainable for participants.
 

I would like to thank all our Active Ageing partners and the evaluation team at CFE research partners who have contributed to these learning resources and to a collective aspiration that collectively we can deliver more relevant, attainable and enjoyable physical activity and health offers for people as they get older.
 

We wanted to understand more about how things work (and sometimes don’t) in our place and the conditions needed to reduce inactivity and narrow inequality through system change.

The maze just seemed like the natural place to start the most recent phase of Navigating Local Systems (NLS) in Wakefield.

The NLS work is one of Sport England’s test and learn approaches aiming to drive real change within a system. 

Stage one taught us that sometimes you have to go around in a big circle, learning all the way, to fully understand your starting point.

By the start of this current stage, we had figured out that how we did things was important.

There are sometimes limited options on what you do, but how you do it is only as limited as your thinking.

This has been the basis for everything we’ve done since the maze.

Learnings and considerations

Since then, we’ve had people using Cluedo cards to talk about working in an asset-based way, we’ve been on an asset treasure hunt taking photos of our local treasures and sharing them in a WhatsApp group; we’ve made and worn different hats to consider sustainability challenges from different perspectives; we’ve blindfolded ourselves and navigated the funder/provider/participant experience; we’ve planted sunflower seeds in a community allotment while talking about the big things that could grow from small beginnings; and we’ve told and heard personal stories about our relationship with physical activity.

People know when they come to a ‘conversation’ we’ve arranged that there are a few things we hold dear:

• The quality of the invite and the meeting environment is important (quality doesn’t mean expensive!) just as it is in our social lives.
• Putting people in different spaces and situations puts them in a different mindset.
• We try to be specific with people about why their individual contribution is valued, sometimes this means following up with people to say ‘hope you’re able to come because we know you’re great at…’.
• We snowball (even in summer) - we invite people and we ask them to bring a friend, and it’s never too late to get involved.
• We connect personally to the work and each other - we try to build a sense of friendship and team.
• There’ll always be some modelling of different approaches that people can take away and try in different contexts.
• There’s always an opportunity to be a bit active.

We evaluated what we were doing and got positive feedback: people told us our engagement methods were different; people learned new facilitation approaches and told us they would use them back in their own work; people had connected outside of the conversations; we heard we are great system conveners. A-Mazing!

We’d laid some strong foundations, and people were on board and acting as allies.

We were riding high on that good old rollercoaster! And then there was this: ‘Honestly it was genius, but ...’

We heard that to keep moving forward we need to figure out how to keep momentum between the group conversations; turn the small shoots of collaboration into something stronger; define a clearer common purpose that places sport and physical activity more prominently; and continue to define and align objectives so that our contribution knits into the fabric of the other big pieces of work happening in the district.

Challenge accepted!

And this is where the journey is taking us next, we need to keep navigating the whole-system maze, riding Oblivion and sometimes getting the jump leads out to re-start the car.

But we know we’ll get there because we’ve filled a few potholes in along the way, we’ve got some clear way-markers, and we’ve got some great people willing to help draw the map.
 

GOGA programmes have been hugely innovative in embedding diverse activities into their offering, including things such as boccia, Nordic walking, youth weightlifting, boxing, basketball, walking football, bowling and many more.

But the GOGA Approach goes beyond simply promoting being active. Instead, it strengthens the community spirit, increases confidence and improves mental health. 

According to GOGA’s website, 42% of participants admitted to doing no physical activity prior to GOGA, and this method and activities have been used in 35 localities across the UK.

In October this year the GOGA team launched their awareness campaign, The GOGA Way, which aims to show how their programme can help organisations do things differently.

Running for a year, the campaign will also highlight how GOGA projects use both usual activities and non-traditional physical activities to engage inactive disabled and non-disabled people in activity together.

Using the GOGA Approach, there is no focus on impairment type, or elite pathway, as these activities bring people together to be active in enjoyable ways.

And #TheGOGAWay campaign will raise awareness among organisations of the key concepts and elements that make up this approach. 

It will also encourage implementation and aid understanding of how these can be shared across new places, and it will support organisations to deliver new interventions and encourage more of the most inactive people to get involved. 

If you have any question or would like any extra info, please get in touch with our disability team or with the GOGA team.

For example, we haven’t seen a full recovery in positive attitudes towards sport and physical activity.

Across the five fundamental attitudes that make up physical literacy (enjoyment, confidence, competence, understanding and knowledge) we are seeing fewer children reporting positively.

This is a concern as we know the more positive children feel across these areas, the more likely they are to be active, but also because it is a reflection of a consistent reduction in broader wellbeing.

Overall happiness and life satisfaction are down – this is due to factors well beyond the world of sport and physical activity but it impacts on people’s activity habits.

Crucially too, done right, sport and physical activity can help.

We know that being active makes you happier and improves your wellbeing, so the more children we can help get active, the better the contribution we can make to their wellbeing.

We can’t do that alone though; our role is as much about convening others as it is in investing ourselves.

Without a really strong and successful system underpinning children’s participation – including teachers, schools, clubs, coaches, our network of partners and, of course, parents and carers – which puts children and their experiences at the heart of everything they do, we won’t ever make the progress we all want to see.

This is the central premise of Uniting the Movement, that no-one can deliver change alone, that it is only when we join up work, genuinely collaborate to improve the experience of sport and physical activity for children and young people and unashamedly work to address the inequalities in sport, will we achieve our overall mission.
 

Wanting to change that perception, I stood against these barriers and focussed on helping fight health inequalities for the other women around me. 

This is when I came across the Dream Big programme, so I started as a volunteer supporting other women lead cricket sessions for the local community. Now in my role, I have been fortunate to be a part of leading the change within the national organisation and bringing even more women into Dream Big.

Challenges and key learnings

Dream Big Desi Women has been a hugely successful initiative, but it is even more powerful considering the two years of disruption and uncertainty due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is also set against a wider landscape of falling volunteer numbers within sport and physical activity, with over 3 million fewer volunteers giving their time in November 2020-21 than during the previous 12 months.

Recent data shows that volunteers remain under-pressure and at risk of burnout, so what has made Dream Big so inspiring for women to get involved?

A defining moment for me in the programme was the design and creation of hijabs and modest apparel for volunteers.

Having designed a modest fitness wear line previously, I knew the value this brings.

This addition helped to not only broaden the reach of the programme, but also to increase its inclusivity and create a new sense of belonging for volunteers within the game.

Insight shows the experience of volunteering is key, so it’s important to create a volunteering journey that is accessible.

By adapting the training and its environment, and by providing opportunities for development, volunteers can be motivated to come back and spread the news about the programme.

This then allows this volunteer opportunity to become community-led and an engine for positive social change.

The three key lessons from the programme for me have been:

1. Understanding the true value behind listening and implementing change. Taking the time to understand the barriers, challenges and initiatives that volunteers want to see will help you reach more people.
    
2. Adapt, adapt and adapt! Never stop innovating, and don’t be afraid to try something new. For instance: modest apparel, virtual coffee mornings and training events and festivals celebrating the diversity of your volunteer base.
    
3. Celebrate your volunteers – reward and recognition has been the key tenet behind the success of keeping our volunteers engaged in the game. 

Dream Big is a great example of the work Sport England is doing in its partnership with Vision for Volunteering - a movement of volunteer-involving organisations and volunteers, working together to create and support amazing volunteer experiences.

So all I can say is here's to many more years or working together and making each other - and those around us - better.  
 

The Active Sunnah campaign

On Friday 28 October, the Active Sunnah campaign went live through the weekly Friday sermon, which is conducted by Mosques throughout the country.

It highlighted how the Islamic faith is filled with examples from the highest sources relating to participation in sports and physical activity.

The sermons were conducted at over 130 Mosques throughout the country and transmitted via social media directly into people’s homes, plus the collaboration of our national and local partners meant the reach was further extended.

Several Sport England colleagues attended the sermons, including football relationship manager Asad Qureshi, who visited the Makkah Mosque in Leeds.

We also produced a document that illustrated concepts such as maintaining a healthy body, mindfulness and spiritual awareness.

This resource illustrated the historic traditions in a simple format so that they could be utilised by all organisations and institutions across the country, and it remains a tool that educational organisations such as the Madrassahs can use with their children for years to come.

We had two objectives with this campaign: to remind Muslims of our heritage and how we must look to revive this somewhat forgotten perspective; and to educate national organisations providing clarity that Islam is not a barrier towards sport and integration.

As a direct result of the engagement and awareness campaign, we’ve been inundated with messages from organisations such as Mosques, Madrassahs, sports clubs and charities who would like to work in collaboration with us delivering sport and physical activity for inactive members of their local communities. 

And we have also been approached by organisations such as the British Islamic Medical Association and the Mosque and Imams National Advisory Board to carry out further campaigns pertaining to health and wellbeing.

The campaign was – and continues to be – a resounding success, with Muslims and non-Muslims working together to support the campaign locally and nationally, which is a result we’re tremendously proud of.

Back in 2019, we commissioned research to find out who volunteered at major sporting events.

The report showed there were unexplored opportunities for greater diversity amongst those who could get involved with high-profile sporting events, like the Commonwealth Games, the 2022 Euros or the Rugby League World Cup. 

For example, the research highlighted that only 9% of those major event volunteers surveyed said they had a disability or long-term health condition, compared to 12% of the population.

We know through our Active Lives Survey, that volunteering can bring personal and community benefits for those giving their time.

Positive outcomes for volunteers can include improved mental wellbeing, making friends, and developing skills.

And we want everyone to be able to benefit from this experience.

But there are gains for organisations too, as volunteers bring their ideas and skills and support even more people to enjoy getting active.

Following the report, we launched a small innovation fund, the Major Event Volunteering Fund 2019-2021, to work with partners who wanted to pilot innovative and inclusive approaches to event volunteering.

With the support of Lottery funding, we were able to help lessen the risk of trying new things.

The Rugby League World Cup team and the charity Community Integrated Care were both separately supported by Sport England funding. With investment from the Major Event Volunteer Fund and our Disability Partners funding, they brought their work together to create their ground-breaking inclusive volunteer programme.

Despite the tournament being delayed by a year, they have launched a range of accessible and aspirational volunteering opportunities for 361 people who have care and support needs.

With roles coordinated by Community Integrated Care, individuals are volunteering alongside their families or support workers in a variety of roles throughout the 61 fixtures of the tournament across operations, spectator services and digital and media teams.  

The tournament is still ongoing, but this partnership has generated lots of interest. Community Integrated Care are now growing their event volunteering work to include the UEFA Women’s Euros this summer and the World Gymnastics Championships 2022 in Liverpool.

They have changed the expectations of what major event volunteering can be.

Further reading

To explore more about Sport England’s ‘test & learn’ Volunteering Funds 2017-21, please read our final report.

Or catch up on some mini-innovations led by community clubs and groups during the pandemic.

Volunteering is changing and if you’d like to explore more about what the future could hold, and how innovation can be an ‘everyday’ thing, please see our partnership with Vision for Volunteering.

Vision for Volunteering is a 10-year movement for volunteering in the UK, with five central themes including “experimentation”.

If you are looking at volunteering differently and innovating, get in touch as we would love to hear from you.
 

For the past five Invictus Games, Help for Heroes has been responsible for training and delivering Team UK to the largest international adaptive sporting competition for disabled veterans.

The Games help shine a spotlight on those with a disability and demonstrate that sporting achievements are still possible. They also generate a wider understanding and respect for wounded, injured and sick servicemen and women.

But it's not just about the elite athletes, the ones who want to make the Paralympics or Invictus Games - though we have seen many of our veterans we support reach these heights.

Everyone has their own idea of success, their own idea of what a personal best looks like and this focus is crucial for a recovery journey.

No matter your injury, disability or illness, sport must be accessible to all, a vision shared with Sport England and its Uniting the Movement strategy to transform lives and communities through sport and physical activity.

Having fitness goals and aspirations, no matter how big or small, helps you rediscover your motivation and gives you a renewed sense of focus and purpose.

When somebody is first injured or becomes sick, it can be daunting and cause a real identity crisis.

It can be hard coming to terms with who you are and what you are able to achieve, but sport is an easily accessible way of providing something you can throw yourself into at whatever level.

It's about getting out, getting confidence back and that self-belief.

Sport is also something which can be done with teammates, allowing somebody with a disability to be active and socialise with like-minded individuals.

For our veterans, it enables them to rediscover the camaraderie they enjoyed when they were part of the Armed Forces.

Sport services at Help for Heroes offer a broad range of activities out in the community and at all ability levels, from recreational to competitive, helping to maintain an active, healthy and independent life.

Our adaptive sports activities make sport inclusive and allow veterans and their families to reconnect with who they were before they were injured or sick.

This increases their confidence when they realise they need not be defined by their new circumstance, and that they can still do or play something they previously loved.

These activities are delivered day-by-day in communities across the four home nations. They help reduce social isolation, build connections in communities, and offer opportunities for veterans and their families to give back via volunteering. 

In collaboration with UK Coaching, we have also recently delivered a Coaching Academy, which gives veterans the chance to train for a sport coaching qualification and build on their skills in civilian life.
 

I also grew up in a white neighbourhood where there was lots of green space, so being active was a part of my lifestyle from a young age.

I compare myself to other people that look like me and I am so much more privileged due to, among other factors, the area I grew up in.

This is why intersectionality is so important; two people may look the same, but another part of their life is so different and gives a very different opportunity to being active.

Being female has actually been the toughest barrier for me within sport, but I do often wonder if my race has played a part in which sports I chose/was pushed towards, or if it was just by chance?

I was pushed towards athletics – a sport with a lot of black role models, both male and female.

Lots of assumptions are made about black athletes, for example that we must be quick – but it’s very rare to see a black athlete in a decision-making role.

For example, when was the last time you saw a black fly-half in either the men’s or women’s game of rugby?

Finding my people

It was by chance that I fell into rugby when a coach ran a taster session for the girls at school. I loved it and went from there.

But it wasn’t until I moved to London after university that I discovered a lot more of my culture and finally saw people that looked like me.

However, working in the sports sector, I was still always a minority and it wasn’t until I arrived at Sport England and joined the Culture Crew (our internal staff network) that I felt like I finally found my people!

This is a key challenge when building our social movement 'we can move'.

Working with the Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) West (part of the National Institute for Health and Care Research), we developed ways to measure the growth and impact of the movement.

One method which proved to be very successful was ripple effects mapping (REM).

REM is an interactive and engaging way of understanding the wider intended and unintended impacts of a project or programme over time.

You can find out more about the mechanics of REM through our recently published paper on how REM can be used to navigate the rivers of system change, and through the Putting it into practice resource by Sport England, which includes examples of other approaches, models and tools used by places to support a whole-system approach.

Over the three years I’ve worked at Active Gloucestershire, I’ve tested a variety of ways to capture the wider impact of our work and that of our network.

Often, the cause of failure was the level of additional administration required in recording the impact. But REM involved fun, interactive workshops and created an opportunity to bring people together to discuss what had happened.

This reduced the admin elements of capturing data, and also increased the quality of the learnings through the additional insight from the discussion between the participants.

Still, this method does have a few challenges:

• Firstly - recognising and accepting that much of the impact will be invisible to us and communicating that the findings from REM is a small snapshot of the wider impact is key.
• Secondly - how much detail do we capture? This is an area we are still testing and is often influenced by the aims of the project being evaluated.
• Thirdly - if REM is run with only internal staff, the wider impacts captured will be limited. The strength comes from bringing a wide range of people who are involved in or impacted by the project.

Using it in practice

At the time of writing this, we are building up to hosting our first 'we can move' network event to bring people from across the movement together, so the attendees can make new connections and pledge to incorporate physical activity in their work to make Gloucestershire a happy and healthy place to live and work. 

We are using REM to measure the success and impact of this.

The workshops we have run so far have all been internal. And whilst the wider impacts captured are currently limited, they have facilitated a safe space for our team to share their thoughts on developing the event and initial feedback from their networks.

This has helped shape and improve the planning of the event and ensure everyone has clarity on their role, whilst building up a range of consequences and outcomes we are expecting from the event.

To manage the challenge of bringing people together to capture the wider impacts, we are providing opportunities during the event to share feedback and their pledges, then following this up with a post-event survey.

A purposeful engagement strategy for our team will follow, to utilise our relationships with attendees to capture longer-term impacts.

These will allow us to map out the intended and unintended consequences from the event and visualise any change in size and strength of 'we can move'.

REM has created a lot of excitement for capturing impact, not only at Active Gloucestershire, but with our partners – both locally and nationally.

It has become a core part of our evaluation toolkit and ARC West has developed a useful suite of training videos to help other organisations use it.

I’m excited to watch it develop and demonstrate impact further as more organisations discover it and use it.
 

Black Majority Churches in the West Midlands

A YMCA in Wolverhampton hosted the first BMC in the West Midlands in 1953. Known as the Black Country, due to the rich coal seam that sat just below the surface of the ground, the increasingly industrial region attracted a range of communities seeking work opportunities.

Today, the percentage of Black and South Asian people living in the Black Country is higher than the national average.

These are communities who are more likely to report living with impairments or long-term health conditions and more likely to experience discrimination than their white British peers.

As a result, it’s perhaps unsurprising that activity levels have historically been low in the region. However, a thriving network of Black Majority Churches came together with the local Active Partnership, Active Black Country (ABC) to change this through the Get Out, Get Active (GOGA) approach in 2020.
 

Mobilising Black Majority Churches through the Get out, Get Active approach

GOGA is a national programme that has helped more than 30,000 disabled and non-disabled people enjoy the benefits of being active together.

Delivered in partnership with Activity Alliance and a range of other organisations, GOGA takes place in 21 location across the UK, including the Black Country.

ABC is running a three-year GOGA programme that explores the potential of faith centres to reach the most inactive disabled and non-disabled residents.

Set to launch in early 2020, the project had to rapidly adapt to changing needs of local communities amid the first wave of coronavirus (Covid-19.

In its early stages, Bethune Smith (ABC’s faith and activity co-ordinator) worked alongside the newly formed consortium of black-led churches (Churches 4 Positive Change) to oversee the distribution of activity packs and exercise guides to help local congregations stay active during lockdown.

The programme expanded significantly throughout the course of the pandemic, engaging faith leaders from a range of backgrounds and cultures.

Resulting in yoga classes in Sikh gurdwaras, chair-based exercise classes in Black Majority Churches, and a range of cross-community outdoor activities when coronavirus restrictions allowed.
 

Closing the Gap - inequalities in sport and physical activity

Over the summer, Sport England hosted webinars with colleagues from Active Black Country and the GOGA national programme as part of our #CloseTheGap2022 events - a series of workshops and conversations dedicated to tackling inequalities in the sport and physical activity sector.

In the Active Black Country webinar, we heard how GOGA harnessed the potential of faith-based networks to engage black communities who had otherwise struggled to be active.

We’re so impressed with the cultural competency demonstrated by Bethune, Mike and the team that we wanted to celebrate their successes as part of this year’s Black History Month.
 

For our second hosting in 2018, we supported community and sports clubs to open their facilities along the route and invite the community in.

This enabled us to build numerous 'mini fan zones' to watch the race on tv, and live as it passed by, and also helped organisations reach new audiences.

Many of them are still hosting coffee mornings to bring the elderly together in their community as a result of the original event.

Key things to consider

Getting involved however, does not happen overnight and you will need to plan and prepare well before the event to maximise the impact.

Try making this as seamless as possible and remove what we call ‘sludge’.  

Sludge is anything that makes accessing your club or activities hard, or is a potential barrier for people to take part.

This can be as simple as contact numbers not being updated on your website, or promotional material using very technical language that is difficult to understand.

Organisations will also need to be prepared  for the anticipated influx of new members, and this will require you to plan months ahead.

Many of these large events are planned for years in advance, so get involved in discussions early as you will need to replicate this.

Think about:

• training and developing volunteers ahead of the event
• how you organise introductory sessions - think about giving free tasters
• having a welcoming face to meet and greet new participants and members.

The hardest step for someone coming to an activity for the first time is the first step, and you need to make this as easy as possible.

As council officers, we need to consider our role in this process, plan alongside our community clubs and groups and, where possible, fund the training of volunteers and release other resources to help grassroots organisations.

For example, in Doncaster we developed a very simple micro grants scheme that enabled us to support 33 groups (11,000 people), many of which were previously not engaged, and help them engage in TDY and UCI Road World Championships.

To help clubs, professionals, and event organisers, Get Doncaster Moving are just about to launch the GAMEPLAN book, which brings all our learnings into one easy-to-use guide. 
 

But it’s not just about medals. Impact is a space for everyone, regardless of ability.

Community is so important for us. We help teach kids ideas of respect and discipline from a young age.

By providing this safe and inclusive space for them, we ensure they’re on the right track to live active, healthy and safe lives in the future.

Children have come in with little-to-no experience and we’ve trained and nurtured them, to the point where we see them competing and winning medals while being good and respectful human beings. It’s so inspiring to see. 

The biggest success for us is that all these sporting achievements are from children, young people and adults from culturally diverse groups and communities living in inner-city wards of Birmingham who don’t have the same opportunities as many other people.

There are lots of barriers in their way and they face inequality on a daily basis. 

For example, Arslan Shah is a 24-year-old member at Impact Fitness that lives with spina bifida and we've worked with him to provide the best possible environment for him to practise and grow as a person.

"The coaches have helped me overcome my disability and I can match up with pretty much anyone else," he told me recently. "Everyone has really helped me a lot. It’s helped me with my confidence, my self-esteem and so much more. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done."

Adapting and growing

Even during the lockdown, we didn't stop supporting our students. All our programmes were transferred online, with lessons taught six times a week from coach Farid’s living room, focusing on the student’s mental and physical capabilities.

A challenging time like this meant students needed an outlet more than ever, and this ensured they stayed focused. 

The training and discipline of wrestling and martial arts helps them develop as healthy young people and encourages a positive mental attitude that will help them to get the best out of themselves.

Our programmes focus on being active, healthy, developing skills, as well as confidence, resilience and determination. 

We prepare our students for greatness, by supporting them to fall in love with sports and getting active. Helping them to express themselves and their emotions through sport means their lives are being transformed.

As they increase their fitness and skills, and begin seeing what they are capable of, they start believing in themselves. 

Our impact is also going far beyond just our central space and aims to reach people in different communities across the West Midlands.

Impact work with children in schools and after-school clubs to help tackle obesity rates, while making wrestling more accessible and fun.

These programmes take place in youth centres and wellbeing centres too, tackling antisocial behaviour in those often hardest to reach. 

With the extra funding from Sport England, we are investing in our facility and the ways we can help children and young people in Birmingham. 

We have a few punching bags and some mats already – but with the funding, we have been able to complete some building refurbishments, purchased wrestling mats and weight training equipment to help develop the children's strength and conditioning abilities.

We’ve also purchased a boxing ring for the young people to get a better feel of what it’s like to be in the boxing ring. 

Without investment from people like Sport England, groups like us wouldn’t be able to expand, offer more classes and reach even more people in our community. 
 

I was completing against people I knew as teammates in GB teams. At the Commonwealths we were rivals, competing for different home nations against each other.

We were soon friends again after the competition though.

The other thing about the Commonwealths is the clear difference in the developing nations in our events – but that’s not a criticism. The Games help to give opportunities for those countries to bring developing athletes and give them the opportunity to complete at a global, multi-sport event.

A chance for change

I think that any event that can act as an opportunity to raise the profile of the disability sport is a positive thing.

Obviously, it is great to be able to showcase elite events, and what para athletes can achieve. But it’s also important to show people the range of sports that disabled people can participate and compete in.  

I know that sport can change your life, you can travel the world!

But it opens so many possibilities in life, even if you don’t make it through to elite level, just being involved in sport is fantastic, and so much fun.

Everyone should have the opportunity to participate in sport and be active – sport should be accessible and open to everyone.

It is important that young disabled people and their parents to see other disabled people involved in sport, to help them realise that sport is for them.

I went to the Paralympics in Barcelona to watch as a youngster, and it really inspired me to give athletics a go – something I had not done before.

Not everyone is going to be a top athlete, but everyone should be able to have a go at a range of sports.

The Commonwealths, like the Paralympics, showcases a wide range of events.  There are lots of sports to get involved in. 

I hope it will inspire disabled people, especially you people at school and their parents/carers to see a range of sports and help them to realise that sport is for them.

Disabled people should be able to access all kinds of sports and find something that they like to do.  Hopefully they can see all the different sports and have the confidence to have a go.

I also hope that people that are involved in running sport (coaches, officials and volunteers in all roles) have watched these Games and see how disabled people can play and compete in a range of sports, and that they take time to consider whether their clubs or activities are accessible for disabled people in their local community.

I hope they reflect on the range of disabled people they’ve seen at the Games and ask themselves what they can do to support more disabled people to get involved in their activities or clubs.

Mostly, I hope people stop and ask themselves:

• do we have disabled people in our club/sport/activities?
• is what we offer accessible?
• how could we do more to promote our sessions to disabled (young) people?

We need to ensure that all sports and clubs/activities are accessible for disabled people to get involved and to get involved in spectating too.

Because of my cerebral palsy I use a chair every day now and I find it hard to watch my young son play football for his club, as not all venues are accessible.

This is hard for me, as I want to be there to support him.

Disabled people need to be able to access sport on all levels in all ways.