Since 2001 there has been a requirement that organisations seeking financial support from Sport England must produce their own strategic plan. This plan must be the result of wide consultation and show how sport will play its part in the wider social context.
Sport England’s response to Game Plan: A Strategy for Delivering Government’s Sport and Physical Activity Objectives (2002) has produced the Framework for sport and accompanying Regional Plans for sport.
Sustainable Community Strategies and Local Area Agreements are now the vehicles for a broader community leadership role and partnership working. Whilst sport may not directly feature in the shared priorities underpinning these strategies, it does offer opportunities for sport to make its case for investment and deliver the broader social, physical activity, community safety and health objectives. The inclusion of sport in the CPA culture block brings increased focus on needs and impact assessment. This expanding policy hierarchy therefore necessitates that the case for sport must be made at regional and local level through the production of robust strategies, objectives and targets which will provide the evidence to position sport as a core service in the development and sustainability of community well-being. In addition, the development of local planning policy needs to be bucked up by a strong evidence base, which is reflected in PPG17 and recently supported by an Inspectors report for Lichfield DC.
Positioning the Sports Plan
Although Sport is a powerful means of delivering social objectives, planning for sport also aims to meet people’s individual needs for personal fitness, achievement and social contact. It is absolutely imperative therefore that the sports plan, designed around individual needs, sits complementary to other local and strategies and plans. Sports plan objectives must produce tangible evidence of contribution to regional and community objectives as well as your own council’s corporate objectives. See Planning for sport - Policy context for further information.
Consequently, it is equally imperative that sports plans are formulated as an output of in-depth consultation with all stakeholders. There must be a clear relationship between the sports plans objectives and those higher up in the policy hierarchy.
The Guide
The guide is for a wide range of users, from sports professional managers, to sport development officers, Planners, Elected members, policy officers, Local Strategic partnership officers and volunteers involved in sport who need to find their way around some of the related issues.
Within the guide there are clues linked to the sort of thing that users might be trying to achieve, for example, “if you are writing a sports strategy go to…” We recognise that the use of the guide may be more general, and that different types of user are likely to be interested in particular parts of it. We have therefore identified guides for different user groups, showing where they might find the information of most use to them in their professional or personal capacity:-
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We have designed the guide so that you don’t need to go through all the information in it to get to the parts that you need. Start by clicking on the relevant bubble in the diagram below, and then follow the route map which will provide links to information that you need. The guides give you an overview of the subject. Click on the links within the guides to get to sources of more detailed information on the subject.
The guide also provides a step by step process for the process of local sport & recreation strategy preparation which helps highlight the relevant sections in the guide at the various stages.
