Chapter 6: The vision
From fragmented projects to a national sport ecosystem
We have looked at why the current system struggles, and at how other countries organise sport differently. The next step is to set out what we are actually trying to build: a system that makes sport a central part of community life. It should become a driving force of social cohesion and individual well-being – a source, in short, of human flourishing.
This is much more than saying that we need to be “managing sport for the whole population”, which has been said countless times before. “Sport for All” has served as a slogan, as the name of organisations, and as a heading in innumerable reports. But slogans do not build systems.
What is instead required for delivery is a change of approach where the sports manifesto is written not for those already minded to play sport, but for the unsporty. Getting involved has to become something that people of all shapes and sizes actively want to do whether they consider themselves good at it or not, because it is part of a cultural outlook and a shared understanding that it does them – and the world around them – good.
Helping people understand that is the aim of Sport England’s Physical Literacy Consensus Statement[1] - a useful step in setting out both why movement matters, and why confidence, motivation and competence are not optional extras. But better language does not, on its own, change behaviour any more than slogans do – and promoting physical literacy when the only options visible to most people are the same narrow range of sports, delivered in the same unappealing way, is once again setting ourselves up to fail. If the vision is to make sport a source of human flourishing, the structural framework needs to support the words. There has to be something real for that new literacy to attach to: visible options, accessible entry points, and a system that makes participation straightforward.
Taking the vision seriously means changing the design principles, not writing more words. Most work aimed at broadening participation involves trying to persuade the 52% who do not currently take part to engage with what is already on offer - squeezing them, as square pegs, into round holes. What should be happening instead is that the system is designed around them - embedding sport properly into the community. And by that I mean not just football, cricket, and the handful of other ball sports which dominate the limited offering in schools, but sport (indeed, physical activity) in its widest sense – from archery to wrestling.
What this looks like in a perfect world
If we were starting from scratch, we would probably organise community sport around multi-sport hubs, as the Netherlands have done: places where a wide range of activities sit side by side, and where people can try different options without having to navigate a fragmented system. This should not be impossible: it is, after all, already being created – for more than just sport – by the OnSide Youth Zones that are proliferating across the country.
Built on a public/private partnership basis, with a three-way engagement between the charity, the local council, and local businesses and philanthropists, these state-of-the-art facilities now exist in a number of towns around Britain, with more being built. They were created to provide “somewhere to go, something to do and someone to talk to” in communities with none of those three - and generally high levels of crime (almost as if there were a link). Each was constructed from scratch, and together they now form a network of independent charities providing 25 activities a night – including sport – to people aged between 8 and 19. I chaired the project to create one in London’s White City, where WEST Youth Zone was built from the ground up to serve more than 3,000 young people. On the face of it, there is no reason why the same model could not provide sports facilities in town centres, serving as a community hub for a wider age-group.
Such an approach would certainly make a broader range of options easier to access and simpler to try. Currently, people wanting to “have a go” have to hope that they like the first thing they try, because if they don’t, they have to start again – possibly miles away. A single sign-on with multiple options would simplify administration, allowing resource to be focused instead on coaching and delivering a tailored approach. Barriers to entry could be reduced; opportunities to “browse” the options would be dramatically simplified; and participation at every level could be encouraged and celebrated. Instead of the top-down, patronising focus on worthiness and diversity, sports across the board would automatically resemble society at large – because society at large is what they would welcome.
This approach exists elsewhere. Libraries, for example, may be split by subject at the specialist level, but at the entry level – in the community – they are not. Where they still exist, they do so at the heart of the community, and central membership at one entry point allows you to browse all options. If science fiction isn’t for you, then perhaps ornithology is. Comic books work for some, Joyce for others. Once you have found your passion, you may want to specialise further – or you may not. You may follow a career, or you may just read for the joy of it. Either way, you can dip in and out as suits your mood and leisure time, balancing what is on offer with the demands of your life. That is roughly what an ideal world for community sport should look like: local, visible, varied, and easy to enter and leave.
But before we get carried away, we need to remember why libraries themselves are closing.
Why we cannot start with bricks and mortar
The idyllic picture of sports hubs delivering participation in the same way that libraries once delivered knowledge ignores a simple constraint: capital. Even if £10m per Youth Zone is hardly prohibitive in the context of government budgets, the reality is that no solution that depends on an up-front capital programme is going to get off the starting blocks.
So multi-sport hubs are for the future - part of a plan that could be developed into the next decade, once the sort of cultural change that is required to make the investment worthwhile has been created. It cannot be the starting point, and we do not need it to be. While the impact that new and fit-for-purpose facilities can have in helping achieve the goals of reducing inactivity and increasing participation has already been recognised in government,[2] they are not the only lever – and they are certainly not the one that will give the quickest return.
Principles for a different system
The quickest return comes from recognising that plenty of facilities already exist. It is the opportunity to use them that does not.
We can change that if we act on the practical principles that follow. Each is a correction of how the current system operates.
First, the system has to be built around the people who currently don’t participate. At present we design almost everything – school PE, club competitions, talent pathways – around the naturally sporty, and then try to bolt inclusion on afterwards. In a country where so many adults decided by the age of eleven that sport was “not for them”, that order needs to be reversed.
Second, breadth of choice has to come early. As we have seen, the skills that make you a good footballer are not the same as those that make you a good archer, climber or rower. A system that offers only a narrow range of options should not be surprised when large numbers disengage.
Third, the job is not to invent entirely new structures, but to connect what already exists. Britain already has both sides of the equation, but they are not joined up. On one side sit schools and communities: institutions that see young people every day, understand their needs, and are under constant pressure to improve health, behaviour and attainment. On the other sit clubs and facilities: organisations with pitches, boats, halls and coaches, operating in their own time and on their own terms, and understandably wary of being overwhelmed or exploited. Between them sit parents, teachers and doctors who have no clear way of connecting the two.
The reason for that is clear: there is almost no infrastructure between them. Schools cannot easily see what is available, under what conditions, or how to start; clubs have no simple way of deciding what capacity they are willing to make available, to whom, and on what terms. The missing piece – and the focus of the next chapters – is the connective tissue: the system that makes it easy for schools and communities to see and use what clubs and facilities are willing to offer, without either side needing to become something it is not.
The current reality – and what is missing
What that looks like in practice is straightforward. At the moment, the reality of “community sport” in the United Kingdom is that an individual (or, more likely, a parent) has to go out and find it. Youth community projects and facilities provided by the likes of OnSide Youth Zones connect with sports clubs only at the behest of individual management teams, and on a per-project basis. What should be happening is that people should be frictionlessly connected with the widest possible number of options, visible and accessible at little more than the touch of a button.
It is not just sports clubs and schools that should be linked but aren’t. Sports clubs and health centres are not linked; sports clubs and areas of deprivation are not linked; even sports clubs themselves are not linked. Outside football, and away from limited and unambitious school requirements, engagement in sport is perhaps unsurprisingly remarkably weak - particularly among young people. According to recent UK Sport figures, 51% of people aged between 18 and 24 think that the Olympic Games are “uncool”; 66% consider them elitist; and just over half would be “ashamed” if their friends knew that they took an interest in them.
There are lots of obvious reasons for this, bucketed simply into facilities, volunteers, coaches, and the development of all three – while sitting above everything, of course, is money. But the fragmented picture of multiple local projects – all very targeted, but effectively creating a postcode lottery dependent on energetic and can-do individuals who create and deliver their own ideas – is not inevitable.
A different kind of infrastructure
A modern strategy, consistent with the vision set out above, would start not with new buildings but with new connective tissue.
On the schools and communities side, that means building a clear, navigable picture of what already exists: a way for every school, youth project and GP surgery to see which sports clubs and facilities sit within reach, what each of them offers, who to contact, how to get there, and – where cost is a barrier – what pots of funding might help.
On the clubs and facilities side, it means giving each organisation a simple way to decide what it is willing to make available beyond its existing membership (to schools, to former members, to beginners), and on what terms – without undermining its core identity or overwhelming its volunteers. In other sectors, when we want to make better use of under-utilised assets, we create straightforward inventory and booking systems. Sport, at the community level, has nothing comparable.
Between those two sides sits the missing infrastructure: the systems, roles and incentives that make it easy for schools and clubs to work together routinely, rather than only when a heroic headteacher happens to know a heroic club captain. In later chapters, I will outline what that connective tissue might look like in practice: how schools could be supported to act as hubs for opportunity, and how clubs could be supported and incentivised to open up some of their capacity.
For now, the essential point is that this is not a utopian vision – and not just because aspects of it exist in other countries. Even without an off-the-shelf model to copy, this kind of change is achievable over a generation – and we can begin with a series of simple and inexpensive steps that make a tangible difference over the next five years.
The key is to start by transforming the breadth of the sporting offering to young people, using existing infrastructure, and in the process radically altering the way that sport and sports clubs are viewed by people from all walks of life. That would have a significant impact on people’s involvement in sport in later life, and it is not difficult to create.
The next chapter looks at where that journey realistically begins: in schools. And at how we might, finally, build a system that connects every school to the full range of sporting life and physical activity that surrounds it.
[1] Published in September 2023
[2]Sporting Future: A New Strategy for an Active Nation, the Government sport’s strategy published in 2015, stated that, ‘where old and tired existing facilities have been replaced by new ones, the number of people using them can go up by up to 400%, and where leisure is co-located with other community services, up to 25% of the increase is from previously inactive people’. See http://data.parliament.uk/DepositedPapers/Files/DEP2015-0984/Sporting_Future_Strategy-_FINAL.pdf