The role of volunteers in Sport England's Towards an Active Nation

As you will have seen, the Government’s sports strategy – Sporting Future - for the first time recognised volunteering as a form of specific engagement in sport and as a way for people to develop skills whilst building community and social cohesion. The Government tasked Sport England with increasing the number of people who volunteer in the sport and recreation sector and making sure the demographics of volunteers become more representative of society as a whole.   They asked Sport England to release a new volunteering strategy for sport and physical activity in 2016, detailing how they will achieve these two aims. 

This blog looks at Sport England’s recently released strategy Towards an Active Nation and its plans for volunteering.

Investment in volunteering

With 3.2m volunteers across the country, volunteering in sport is the biggest single sector (approximately 20%) and is estimated to be worth £53 billion. We know that many grassroots activities would not happen without volunteers. It is therefore no surprise to see Sport England give particular prominence to volunteering by making it one of their seven investment programmes in its new strategy- “Towards an Active Nation”. Sport England has also attached a projected investment of 3% of its 2017-21 budget to this area, with additional funds invested through the core market programme.

Volunteering strategy

Towards an Active Nation reveals that Sport England will publish a new volunteering strategy for sport and physical activity by November 2016. The new strategy will look in greater depth at how Sport England will increase the number of people volunteering and make the volunteering demographic more diverse.

The forthcoming volunteering strategy will also include:

• Improving digital information on volunteering opportunities
• Support for employee volunteering through a matching service to local clubs
• A reward system for volunteers including ‘gold ticket’ opportunities to volunteer at major events
• Make up to £30 million available over the next four years to support the implementation of this strategy

Sport England is also committing to:

• Develop a more customer-focused approach to volunteering, using behaviour change principles to gain a more detailed understanding of the volunteering market & to maximise the benefits of volunteering
• Supporting the voluntary work done by sports clubs officials and administrators by providing tools and support such as Clubs Matters to help them run their community clubs successfully

Delivering against Government targets

The main focus from Sport England is on meeting the two key performance indicators set by the Government in Sporting Future:.   

KPI 7: Increase in the number of people volunteering in sport at least twice in the last year.

To meet this target Sport England is pledging  to focus on making volunteering in the sport and recreation sector more flexible to fit in with our busy lifestyles that make it so hard for individuals to regularly commit to volunteer every week.  It will specifically do this by prioritising the motivation and needs of volunteers and by encouraging new thinking about volunteering, which will value both short and long-term engagement.

This focus on flexibility is welcome and one that the Alliance and many others in the sport and recreation sector advocated in their responses to the consultation Sport England ran.  

KPI 8: The demographics of volunteers in sport to become more representative of society as a whole.

In line with sport and recreation participation generally, Sport England will prioritise making the demographics of sports volunteers more representative of society as a whole. It will deliver this by engaging more with under-represented groups. This is another win for the Alliance and our members, having called for Sport England to engage more with under-represented groups in our consultation response.

Most volunteers in sport are white, male and from more affluent backgrounds- research shows that the proportion of men who volunteer in the sports sector is more than double the proportion of women.  So increasing the diversity of volunteers in the sport and recreation sector will allow them to become more representative of society as a whole.

To assist the sector in meeting the two KPI’s, Sport England will increase its insight in this area. It will look at who volunteers, what they do, what they get out of it and how we can best measure these outcomes. This fits in with the theme of the need to design programmes around insight in ‘Towards an Active Nation’ that Jennie Price, CEO of Sport England, emphasised at our Sports Summit in May. 

Overall, Towards an Active Nation is a good start and makes lots of promising noises about increasing both the number and the diversity of volunteers in sport and recreation. It’s now up to Sport England to deliver a dedicated volunteers strategy that will increase the diversity of volunteers and fulfil the social value of volunteering to individuals and communities.

The sport and recreation sector can help to deliver this by:

• making their volunteering opportunities flexible and varied to cater for people’s busy lifestyles
• work with under-represented groups to encourage more people from a wider range of backgrounds to volunteer
• Gather insight to inform their volunteer recruitment strategies and publish to allow your insight to be used to create innovative platforms that make it easier for people to volunteer- as we have been encouraging you to do during our tech and insight month

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