Strategic Priority
Sport & Physical Activity
Active lifestyles turbo-charge wellbeing, prevent illness, relieve NHS pressure and boost economic growth. Active Essex are driving to protect and invest in opportunities to play sport and be active, particularly for those communities that face the most barriers in taking part.
The annual social value of participation in sport and physical activity in Essex is almost 3.5 billion and Active Essex are committed to ensuring the sector provides the inclusive, safe and accessible opportunities for all communities, whether that be working, volunteering or playing; their People, Culture, Skills framework continues to lead their efforts in this space.
Priorities for this strategic priority this year:
- Skills and employability
- Inclusive and resilient organisations
- Inclusive and safe community sport
The skills within our sector
This year, the Skills Advisory Board (SAB) was officially recognised as one of the LSIP employer boards. Active Essex, CIMSPA, and the Essex Chambers of Commerce were excited to announce a new partnership that brings the Sport and Physical Activity SAB under the umbrella of the Local Skills Improvement Plan (LSIP), as one of their Sub Sector groups. This collaboration also establishes the board as a sub-committee of CIMSPA’s Professional Development Board.
It is the hope that the integration with LSIP, will provide the board with a stronger platform to influence and implement the necessary change to ensure continued growth.
Young people are central to Active Essex’s future ambitions. They must be equipped with clear examples and pathways into careers in the sector. This includes upskilling careers advisors, ensuring training is fit for purpose, and making opportunities accessible and inclusive. Without a pipeline of enthusiastic young people, the sport and physical activity sector will face significant challenges in the coming years.
Building on from the Career Magazine that was co-designed and developed with CareerMap, a Careers Hub webpage was created, in order to be a central point for potential employees of the sector to explore. The Hub hosts a new library of pathway videos following feedback from young people.
With a huge presence at career events across the county, Active Essex have been able to help showcase the many careers within our sector, giving detailed information, advice and guidance to young people, their carers and career advisors. An important step within this, was being asked to attend the Essex University Careers seminar where a panel of local employers, including Active Essex, spoke about careers and journeys in the sector, highlighting the skills needed and the pathways that could be taken.
In addition, the Essex Apprenticeship Hub had identified an increasing number of young people wanting to start an apprenticeship in the sport and physical activity sector, so an important relationship was forged. Connecting the hub with the Essex University Careers Lead has led to their attendance at the Skills Advisory Board which is now helping to better connect young talent with employers.
There has been an incredible amount of engagement work take place this year, from the careers magazine, young leaders work and the career hub. The increase we’re seeing in the number of young people wanting to be apprentices in our sector, is a huge success for the efforts of the past 18 months.Emma Lewis, Active Essex Board Member sponsors People Culture Skills in Essex
Building on the career pathway offer for young people, Active Essex rebranded the Young Leaders volunteers programme to sit in line with the #MoveWithUs campaign. The #MoveWithUs Leaders Academy saw 12 organisations, host 92 young people across summer HAF clubs. However, some important feedback highlighted the need for recognised qualifications for 13-16 years olds, which Active Essex are feeding back and working on with the Skills Board.
This programme can support young people into apprentices. Active Essex continue to work closely with Coach Core to bring their programme to Essex, where 11 Level 2 apprentices are currently developing their skills with local employers.
Read more about the work on skills and employability.
Careers Hub
The library of pathway videos, signposts and careers magazine
Building capacity, learnings and understanding ripple effects
To achieve an ambition of tackling inactivity, it is vital to have a thriving sector, equipped to offer inclusive, safe and accessible opportunities. Active Essex have continued to develop their capacity building offer for the network of delivery partners across the county, providing them with the tools, knowledge and capability to grow.
The Organisational Development programme provides organisations with bespoke support following the completion of a diagnostics, report, 1;1 coaching, and peer learning spaces. Local organisations were also able to access training, safeguarding support, networks and development grants thanks to the partnership with London Marathon Foundation.
In order to understand and evaluate the impact of the interventions, Active Essex organised independent interviews with 10 people from different organisations and administered a survey. Below you can see the findings from this evaluation, as well as read more about the evaluation collated.
What Active Essex have learnt from this programme to date:
- Trust emerged as a key theme in the interviews. The PCS interventions has forced a change in relationships between Active Essex and organisations, fostering more open, transparent and candid interactions.
- Interviews revealed that organisations already on the path of organisational development, but didn’t necessarily know how to do this, benefited the most from the interventions. Active Essex cannot transform organisations overnight but must meet them at their current stage.
- The PCS interventions have helped Active Essex to listen to organisations, identify their challenges and understand how these challenges impact an organisation’s staff. This better understanding has allowed Active Essex to provide tangible solutions to overcome these obstacles effectively.
- Leaders/Founders of these organisations are often hugely passionate individuals, wanting to make a difference but not always having business and organisational development skills.
- The flexibility of PCS interventions was vital and highly appreciated by the organisations. Each organisation is unique, with different capacities, understandings, and schedules, so a flexible approach encouraged buy-in and engagement, allowing organisations to attend sessions that fit their needs and schedules, self-selecting what was most relevant to them.
Our offer has matured this year, learning from last year and making changes to reflect this. We heart that this support helped organisations build knowledge around HR support, and provided better options for their workforce. In essence, it ensured these organisations could really take time to reflect, look forward and plan.Hollie Wood, Active Essex Strategic Lead for Sport and Physical Activity
Read more about the work on capacity building:
Organisational Development Programme
Read our topline case study on the design of the programme here.
Impulse Leisure
The impact of the People Culture Skills framework
Youth Unity
The impact of the People Culture Skills framework
Canvey Island Youth Project
The impact of the People Culture Skills framework
Sport for Confidence
The impact of the People Culture Skills framework
Making sport safe, inclusive and accessible
The SPA team have supported Find Your Active Networks to redesign how they managed and distributed funds, which has seen a huge improvement in the applications received. Networks have been reestablished to better support community organisations within their places to provide the opportunities highlighted by their locality. In turn, this is helping Active Essex have a line of sight to hyper local communities within and across the county.
Since the Networks have gone through this new application process for funding, it has helped them to think about their ambitions, priorities and how they will achieve their goals.
Relationships have been further strengthened with NGBs in Essex, aligning priorities across sports according to local energy. Helping to broker the relationship between NGBs and the School Games Organiser network has resulted in a whole school approach, and a commitment from the NGBs to better align children and young people work across Essex.
In addition, the NGB forum has created a Community Sport Development Plan for Essex outlining 3 focus areas.
The Community Sport Development Plan focuses on:
- EDI
- Safeguarding
- People, workforce and participation
- Facilities
Key learnings
Established by the leads, they have been instrumental in uncovering these learnings for the team.
Gaps in knowledge
Team workshop led by the leads established core misconceptions.
Quality assurance
Leads helped improve the LMF Find Your Active Small Grants process.
Team curiosity
Team members wanting to develop and make our practices safer.
Guidance is vital
Organisations need support on safeguarding, their role and governance.
Facing ourselves towards the mirror
Focusing on the developments for the sector has been important, but so has turning the mirror and ensuring Active Essex look within. In 2024, as part of Active Essex’s transformational learning journey, a small group, named the ‘Learning Huddle’, made a conscious effort to ensure the team spent time reflecting, learning, and challenging ourselves, ensuring the best foundations for fostering a robust learning culture across the team was created.
Everyone learns and wants to contribute in different ways, so Active Essex has focused on creating brave spaces, setting the tone within meetings, having a mixture of learning probes and making sure everyone’s voices have been heard.
The progress made this year, has helped deliver structured away days that promote reflection, collaboration, and learning in a safe and trusting environment. The Learning Huddle have created a comprehensive learning and development guide that ensures a systematic approach to enhancing the team’s skills, knowledge, and competencies, resulting in better performance and culture.Jason Fergus, Director of Active Essex
Dive in deeper to understand the Active Essex learning journey
Learning and Continuous Improvement Journey
A particular focus has been from within.
