Every year we have a number of projects we are looking to fund to enable us to create innovative work which will encourage more young people to take part in PE and school sport.
If you would like to support a specific project, we are currently seeking funding for:
Young Sports Officials
The Youth Sport Trust is concerned that the profile of technical sports officials such as judges, referees and scorers is ageing and that there is currently no formalised structure for enabling young people to take up these roles.
It is commonly accepted that the best way to inspire young people is through young people. Based on this, formal structures enabling young people to take the lead as sports performers and coaches have already been established in England. We believe that it is now essential to create a complimentary structure for technical sports officials through our Young Officials Programme. This project will offer young people in England exciting new opportunities to engage as volunteers and leaders in sport.
The project began in April 2007 and will run for three years. It will create new qualifications allowing young people to become technical officials, encourage, train and deploy a younger age group of officials, facilitate a rapid expansion of sporting opportunities for young people throughout England and enable participants to develop skills such as confidence, leadership and communication and access exciting new career pathways.
We are now looking for funding from April 2008 for the second year and third year of the project.
Residential Sports Leadership and Volunteering Camp (Northern Ireland)
Our TOP Link programme enables young people aged 14 to 18 to develop as sports leaders and volunteers by organising and running festivals of sport or dance for local primary or special schools. It has been successfully running in Northern Ireland since 1999 and has involved some 800 young people in sports leadership and volunteering to date. It has also involved 150 students from Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) to deliver and organise the TOP Link workshops.
We are now seeking to build on this work, by providing additional opportunities for young people aged 16 to 18 to continue and develop their sports leadership and volunteering roles beyond TOP Link. This work will be modelled on the highly successful Step into Sport programme which operates in England funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
As an initial step in this process, we are seeking funding to launch the first ever residential Sports Leadership and Volunteering Camp for young people from Northern Ireland aged 16 to 18.
The residential Camp we are proposing will be cross community in catchment, will include as a target group young people from areas of social need and will help deliver some of the requirements of the Revised Northern Ireland Curriculum for the provision of more vocational opportunities/the development of good citizens.
Funding has already been raised for the first year, and we are now looking for funding for the final 2 years in order to ensure that the Camp becomes fully embedded and sustainable.
Playzone
Playzone is a new project designed to provide creative and innovative outdoor play opportunities for children within early years settings such as nurseries and children’s centres. It builds on the success of the Youth Sport Trust’s early years physical activity programmes and our work in primary and secondary schools which has led to the transformation of 440 playgrounds.
The Playzone project aims to expand the opportunities for young children to learn through physical activity in early years settings by transforming the outdoor environment to create a wonderful place to play. The Playzone created will include a range of different and inspirational ways for children to be physically active, use their imagination, explore, learn, play and have fun.
We are seeking help to fund an initial project which will pilot the development of Playzones with twenty settings such as children’s centres and nurseries. The pilot project will lead to the production of a handbook designed to disseminate the lessons learnt and share good practice in the development of outdoor environments with other early years settings.
The Playzone project will focus on working in deprived communities where young children are in the greatest need of early intervention to support development and learning. In these communities early years settings generally have no outdoor facilities at all or outdoor environments which are very run down and it is extremely difficult for local fundraising by parents to raise sufficient funds to tackle this.
TOP Sportsability Festivals
The Disability Survey 2000, commissioned by Sport England, revealed worryingly low rates of participation in sport and physical activity amongst young disabled people in all settings and across all ages. To address this situation the Youth Sport Trust has developed the TOP Sportsability programme. This is the only programme in the world offering a progressive pathway and range of appropriate sporting opportunities to disabled young people, via tailored training, resources and equipment.
Sports festivals are an important tool in providing young people with full and active lives. They offer a range of important learning opportunities to participants. To enable young disabled people to access these benefits, we launched a new project to establish a national network of annual TOP Sportsability Festivals.
The first year of our TOP Sportsability Festivals programme was a great success. As well as enjoying the festivals enormously, young disabled people were able to use the events as real learning opportunities, experiencing new sports and physical activities, and developing a range of new skills.
We are now seeking funding to run this programme for a further two years to ensure that it is fully embedded and sustainable for the long-term, and also to expand the impact of the events by encouraging the involvement of new schools/areas.
I eXcel project
It is essential that our most promising young sports people achieve the best education they can whilst pursuing their sporting ambition in order to create a solid basis for the development of careers in later life. Following consultation with UK Sport, National Governing Bodies of Sport (NGBs) and the education sector, we have recently developed an Elite Athlete Education Card - the I eXcel Card - to support the specific educational needs of exceptionally talented school age athletes.
The I eXcel card is available to young people in full or part-time education, who have been identified by their NGB. Holding this card officially identifies a young person as exceptionally Gifted and Talented, thus encouraging their school/college to provide appropriate support to meet their needs. Accompanying the I eXcel Card is a set of support materials provided in the form of 5 booklets which go to the card holders, parent/carers, coaches and schools/colleges.
These booklets are unique to each sport involved in the project and designed to provide guidance on the very specific support and co-ordination that the Card holder will require in order to fulfil their academic and sporting potential.
The pilot was launched in September 2007 and currently works with 87 young athletes across 3 sports; diving, gymnastics and hockey. (One of the young people benefiting from this pilot is the young diver Tom Daley who will be the youngest male Olympian in Beijing). Feedback is already showing that the reception of the scheme is extremely positive and there is now great interest amongst additional NGBs in getting their athletes involved. We are therefore seeking funding which will enable us to:
- expand the I eXcel Card scheme to reach a total of 33 sports by 2011/12
- provide Card holders with a significantly enhanced level of support, including access to expert clinics, a web–based expert advice library and targeted help for young athletes who are struggling to cope with combining education with their sporting commitments or who are being failed by their existing support system.
For further information please contact us at fundraising@youthsporttrust.org.