Exploratory Landscape
Tackling inequality in sport through best practice
Client overview
Sport England’s “Uniting the Movement” is a 10-year strategy focused on transforming lives and communities through sport and physical activity. It aims to make activity a normal part of life for everyone in England by addressing inequalities and maximising the benefits of movement. To best enable leaders across Sport England to fulfil the initiative, the ‘Leading the Movement’ project was established to better empower leaders to tackle inequalities in sport. To support this, there was a need to identify, collate and analyse examples of non-UK initiatives supporting inclusivity. Inequalities of relevance included age, gender, ethnicity, social, disability, and economic. Whilst initiatives could be sport-focussed, examples from sectors such as the arts and education were of equal interest. Perceived barriers to participation, drivers for success and key learnings on design, deployment and evaluation were to be detailed in a stimulus report and shared with leaders.
The search
Strategic Allies Ltd (SAL) started the search by identifying and evaluating inclusion initiatives from geographies outside the UK. A range of initiatives were identified promoting inclusion in sport, education, public health initiatives, art, drama and community activities. From these examples, SAL extracted insights on the perceived barriers to participation for minority groups and subsequently determined factors that influenced likelihood of success. SAL then produced an in-depth PowerPoint document, detailing key learnings, based on the collated data, that would act as stimulus for leaders across Sport England to provoke curiosity, new thoughts, different reactions, and discussion. Each learning was paired with a series of questions for consideration by leaders to help them assess how and why the learnings could be embedded within their own organisation to drive inclusion, and who else within Sport England or beyond, they could engage or partner with to create change or improve likelihood of success. The findings were presented to Sport England upon conclusion of the work, and were to be further disseminated to leaders across the organisation as part of Leading the Movement.
“We’re getting a good landscape picture”
“[You are] educating us to look and think about things in a different way”
Outcome
Around 40 case study examples were collated, from a range of geographies worldwide that were designed to address different inequalities, both physical and cultural.
A comprehensive stimulus document was developed to broaden thinking and drive discussion within Sport England to help leaders better fulfil the inclusivity objectives of Leading the Movement.