A key role for Local Government is that of enabler i.e. empowering individuals, communities and local organisations to realise their potential as active citizens. To this end it is essential that the services and opportunities provided by local government are appropriate to local needs. Consultation with representatives of the local community is therefore essential in shaping community and council strategies and service plans. If you are interested in finding out more about what consultation is and why we should do it you can refer to the Audit Commission’s report 'Listen Up! – Effective Community Consultation' (Nov.1999).
Effective sport planning requires that you take account of community and corporate objectives and that you ensure you have the relevant data to help you determine the facility and service targets and performance indicators which will optimise your contribution to the fulfilment of these objectives. Designing services to meet expressed local need, together with robust evaluation, can help ensure that demand for your services is high and consequently that service delivery is cost effective and recognition of such is easily evidenced.
In addition to needs assessment, the necessity of consultation is further reinforced by the requirements of the Audit Commission’s CPA BVPI 119a, which focuses on customer satisfaction, Towards and Excellent Service (TAES), which has community engagement at its core, and the Sport England’s aspirations for sport set out in its National Framework for Sport.
It is your responsibility to actively generate and interrogate as much relevant data as possible to accurately identify the sporting needs of your community. This means that you need to be in a position to anticipate needs and to assess current needs. To do this you need to look at issues such as:
- national and local trends
- how your services compare with those of similar councils
- customer satisfaction levels
- customer complaints
Individual data sets can help you identify issues which may be relevant to more than one strategy or plan. For example:
Data relating to national participation and demographic trends can help you identify:
- how participation figures in your community compare with national trends
- if the most popular activities in your community follow national trends
- if the most common barriers to participation in sport are evident in your community
- equalities and diversity issues in terms of participation
- demographic changes
- customer profile
which may in turn help you identify
- potential issues for sports contribution to LAA key priorities or Community Plan objectives
- potential issues for next year’s revenue
- potential issues for contribution to Regional Plans for Sport
- potential issues relating to facilities
Examination of existing national data will help you identify what other information you need to gather from your local community. In the above example it may be necessary for you to investigate why participation is lower than national trends in young people in your area?
Visit Local links to existing data and Consultation toolkits to find out more about how to generate more specific local information
More
|
