Finding the social value of sport and physical activity

The Government's sports strategy placed a lot of importance on the social value of sport and physical activity. Robert Gill, Policy Support Officer, has taken a closer look at what this means.

As you would have seen, Minister for Sport Tracey Crouch MP announced a “new focus on social outcomes” in the Government’s sports strategy by including ‘social and community development’ as one of the five key outcomes by which the Government will now use to measure how to fund sports projects and organisations. It is clear that the role sport can play in achieving social good will become of greater importance to the sports sector over the coming years.

Sports clubs up and down the country do a lot of work around getting people in their local communities to participate sport, but in recent years a greater focus has been paid on the wider value that playing sport can bring.

Improving people’s physical and mental health is one the best known examples of this, but sport can also provide a social value. Engaging in sport and physical activity can help individuals from disadvantaged communities steer clear from crime or be used as a vehicle for young people to develop key skills that will help them get employed.

With the new sports strategy now requiring organisations who want to access public money for sporting activities to meet these new outcomes around the social value of sport, national governing bodies and other providers will have to focus more on how their activities help promote these social values. Many of our members already do great work in this area, such as England Boxing and the Angling Trust, so there is already a growing body of good practice out there that members can draw upon to inspire them to get more involved in this area.

Indeed, the Sport and Recreation Alliance, as part of its Fit for the Future programme, will be running a ‘social value of sport’ themed month in the New Year, as a way of highlighting what the sector does best around social community and development and generating discussion about what more can be done.

The strategy also identifies how social investment from individuals and institutional investors can play a greater role in funding the sport and recreation sector. The Government will support the establishment of a social impact fund for investment into sport based on the Arts Impact Fund, a partnership between Arts Council England and several companies that support arts organisations.

The Government also committed to exploring the potential use of Social Impact Bonds (an outcome-based commissioning model that can be used to leverage social investment to test or scale interventions tackling complex social issues) to fund projects that help overcome social challenges. If successful, this could provide another avenue for Alliance members to receive funding for their social community work. This is an area the Alliance is keen to explore.

Other key points around social community and development mentioned in the strategy include:
•tA focus on getting under-represented groups more active and in particular recognising the “breadth of causes” into why these groups have low participation levels when designing solutions such as cost and availability barriers as well as emotional barriers around perceptions of safety and ownership of local space. Given social value work will play a big role in under-represented and disadvantaged areas, overcoming these barriers will be crucial in making social value work in sport work.
•tSport England will have a new coaching plan that will “expand what we mean by ‘coach’”. Feedback from social development programmes often stress the role that the coach can play in helping inspire a participant to improve themselves. Coaches are therefore a key component in sport fulfilling its social development role
•tVolunteers are also identified as a “good opportunity to build social inclusion and community cohesion” as it helps people develop skills to be used to gain employment. Sport England will publish a new volunteering strategy for sport and physical activity in 2016
•tThe Government also identifies the need to better measure the way sport can impact on social and community development, something the Alliance called for in our Game of Life report.

They commit to “develop a robust understanding of how sport contributes that will form the basis for how impact is measured”
With organisations now required to actively show how their sport and recreational activities can play a role in social and community development, they will undoubtedly face challenges in making their sport achieve the noble aims of the strategy around ensuring the social value of sport is realised. But opportunities also exist for the sport and recreation sector to contribute towards social value work that will help make their activity more popular and ultimately more successful.

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