The equaliser - equality and diversity in the sport strategy

Robert Gill, Policy Support Officer, has taken a look at the Government's commitment to promoting equality and diversity in sport through the new sport strategy.

So far we have published blogs looking at the governance, broadcasting, major events and integrity, health and inactivity, outdoor recreation and social and community development aspects of the Government’s sports strategy. Today, I will look at another key theme to come out of the strategy, equality and diversity.

Sport England’s most recent Active People’s Survey revealed that, despite the overall increase in participation figures, differences between groups remain. The gender gap between the number of men and women playing sport is 1.73 million. Only 25.9% of people in the lowest socio-economic group play sport once a week compared to 39.1% from the most affluent.

Similarly, despite the success of the London Paralympic Games in 2012 and the increased focus on disability sport that has occurred since, a disabled person is still half as likely to play sport as a non-disabled person.

To help bridge this gap, the Government has pledged to redistribute funding “to focus on those people who tend not to take part in sport” to help narrow the differences in participation that still exist between these different groups. A key output of this redistribution of funding will be more people “from every background regularly and meaningfully taking part in sport and physical activity, volunteering and experiencing live sport”.

Indeed, the Government recognises in the strategy that there is often a range of different factors and reasons behind why these groups have lower participation rates.

It is good therefore to see the Government recognising campaigns such as Sport England’s ‘This Girl Can’ and the positive effect they can have in helping to bring down the barriers preventing underrepresented groups from taking part in sport and recreation, especially as it is something the Alliance lobbied the Government to do as part of its response to the strategy consultation.

Further, the Government has committed to work together with Sport England and Public Health England to use message development and marketing “to create a compelling environment that encourages everybody, especially people in underrepresented groups” to get more active.

The Government also pledges to support work based on rigorous insight and evidence, such as the English Federation of Disability Sport’s ‘Talk to Me’ principles. The Alliance is pleased that the Government is recognising that future programs should be based on proven evidence of what works, which we also called for in our response to the Government’s consultation on the strategy.

The strategy also mentions diversity in the sporting workplace. My colleague Rob Tate has explored this in his blog on governance, but to summarise more broadly what the strategy calls for in this area:

•tAll organisations receiving government funding will have a carry out a staff survey to measure the diversity of their workforce
•tSport England and UK Sport will work together to tackle the lack of diversity in senior positions across the sports sector, for example only half of NGB’s have met a target of 25% women on their boards
•tIn particular, the strategy says that all publically funded bodies will have to use tools such as Women in Sport’s Checklist for Change to improve the levels of diversity across all under-represented groups in leadership positions
•tSport England will also expand the data it collects on diversity in senior leadership positions in sport to include LGB&T people
•tUK Sport are to review what steps can be taken to remove the barriers to women and minority groups being appointed to high performance coaching roles

Other notable announcements on equality and diversity in the strategy include:

•tSport England will develop a new coaching plan that will make coaching more accessible to a wider range of people
•tSport England will be publishing a new volunteering strategy that aims to ensure that volunteers are “suitably representative of the entire population”. It will be interesting to see therefore how a new strategy will engage disadvantaged groups
•tThe Sports Ground Safety Authority (SGSA) will take on a more formal role in helping sports grounds providing reasonable adjustments for disabled access
•tThe Government has extended the commitment to guarantee funding for ParalympicsGB at the Rio Paralympics later this year and for the next Paralympics in 2020 in Tokyo
•tSport England will place equal emphasis on the support for LGB&T people in sport as it does for other characteristics protected by the Equality Act

It’s pleasing to see that the Government is committed to increasing levels of diversity and equality within the sports sector, through increased participation levels and both at boardroom and coaching levels. In particular, it is good that the Government is recognising the need to broaden the current understanding of diversity beyond female representation to include groups such as BME, disability and LGB&T.

It will be interesting to see how equality and diversity actions are held accountable through the KPIs, as there is no specific key performance indicator, aside from KPI 8, which calls for the demographics of volunteers to become more diverse, that mentions increasing levels of equality and diversity levels.

A commitment from the Government towards making the sports sector more diverse is something which the Alliance called for in its consultation response and there’s no shortage of resolve within the sector to make this aim a reality.

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