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As we work alongside partners in Uniting the Movement, we have been deeply inspired by the brilliant youth voice initiatives across the sector that are supporting young people to make themselves heard. 

At the Leadership Skills Foundation, our own youth-voice journey is about reinforcing a core belief: that every young person can lead change if given the opportunity to develop their skills and confidence.  

Overcoming obstacles through communication

As part of our role as a Sport England system partner, we’ve been building understanding of the barriers young people face to accessing leadership opportunities and progressing into the sector's workforce. 

Youth voice has been an important part of this process and we’ve been testing a new accredited learning programme to empower young people to lead the conversation. 

The Speak Up Challenge aims to build young people’s skills and confidence through creative, participatory activities in classrooms, sports halls and youth clubs. 

Based on the Lundy model for youth participation, it gives young people a platform to communicate their views to influential professionals and policy-makers – all while also receiving feedback to help them understand the potential impact of their insights. 

As part of our pilot, colleagues at Sport England kindly agreed to listen and to provide video feedback as young people shared their perspectives on the barriers into sports volunteering and worked together to reimagine pathways into employment. 

Their ideas spanned transport difficulties, prohibitive costs, lack of role models, low confidence and negative perceptions of careers in sport. 

We’ve taken all the insights and created a summary for everybody to access and this is available on the Challenge page too. 

Our journey so far  

Inspired by Sport England’s Youth Voice Innovation Storybook, we began by running co-design and consultation sessions in a variety of community and academic settings.

The young people we worked with were both energised by the opportunity to lead change and motivated by the potential to earn accredited recognition for their participation, but they also shared their concerns: 

• Lack of time to commit to ongoing youth-voice activities. 
• Worries about standing out amongst their peers or being visible online. 
• Concerns around lacking the skills and confidence to make a difference. 

These insights helped form our core design principles: prioritise confidence-building, avoid long-term commitments, foster peer collaboration, protect privacy and recognise skill development through accreditation. 

We planned a small, iterative pilot to test and adapt as we learned during the first phase, and we were blown away by the depth of insights shared and the level of creativity displayed.

However, some less confident participants, particularly those from special educational needs and disability (SEND) and neurodivergent backgrounds, felt overly vulnerable and struggled to express their views.

Delivery staff reflected that participants needed more time to build trust and grow into the activities. 

Our second iteration focused more on building this base of skills and team rapport.

By improving scaffolding for mixed abilities, we saw positive signs that the programme was becoming more accessible and inclusive.  

Overall, our internal evaluation showed that 87% of participants believed the pilot helped them build skills to speak up for change, and the same percentage said they are now more confident speaking in front of others. 

These results reinforced our belief that the ability to form a viewpoint and effectively share it is a leadership skill that can be practiced, improved and recognised.  

Encouraging impact 

This project has strengthened our understanding of young people’s lived experiences and is informing how we design and deliver programmes for underrepresented groups. 

Participation has also had a meaningful impact on those involved.

It was a real joy to witness a room of boisterous 15-year-olds fall silent and react with smiles as they watched their views being addressed by colleagues from Sport England.

When we surveyed how they felt about the feedback, the overwhelming majority indicated they “definitely felt heard”.  

They were proud that their insights were taken seriously and this validation has acted as a springboard into other opportunities.

Following the challenge, we’ve seen participants inspired to launch online petitions for their MPs, to create new youth-led school clubs and to seek out other youth advocacy initiatives. 

Looking ahead 

As we move into the next phase of our development, we know we’ve still got some way to go, but we are excited to collaborate with other system partners to build on our learning and to support other related work from across the sector.  

Together we can make sure that every young person – regardless of background or circumstance – is able to lead positive change, so if you’d like to discuss our findings or how we can work together to empower young leaders to speak up, please contact us.  

We’re excited about continuing to grow together.

There are many ways in which people use digital on the journey to being active, but this can be challenging for those lacking access, skills or confidence to use online platforms.

Our new research explores these barriers and recommends actions for making sport and physical activity more digitally accessible.

But think about the last time you decided to try a new sport or activity.

The role of ‘digital’ in being active

Chances are you used the internet in one or more ways: to look for opportunities, to book and pay for a session, to plan travel to the venue, to participate in an online exercise session or to communicate with others about the activity.

‘Digital’ is now so entwined with the way we access and participate in physical activity that it’s hard to imagine being active without it.

In fact, in a recent Sport England Activity Check-in survey (Wave 19), 67% of respondents said they use digital tools to find out information about sport and physical activity.

At Good Things Foundation, we are committed to ensuring everyone can participate in our digital society, but there are still many people who face barriers to being online.

According to Lloyds' Essential Digital Skills 2025 report, around eight million people lack foundational-level digital skills in the UK, while data provided by Ofcom, the communications regulator in the UK, reveals that over a quarter of households struggled to afford mobile data and/or broadband in 2025.

Our 2025 desk research with Sport England showed that groups facing digital barriers also face inequalities in being active, so understanding how digital shapes participation is crucial to ensuring opportunities are inclusive and accessible for all.

Understanding digital barriers

We recently partnered again with Sport England to extend our research to better understand the experiences of people trying to be active when struggling with digital access and/or digital skills.

We also identified examples of good practice for reducing digital barriers from organisations supporting people with digital and physical activity.

Our research highlights four types of digital barriers that can make it difficult for people to be active:

• Access: not being able to afford mobile data, wifi connections and/or not having access to a suitable digital device.
• Skills and confidence: lacking skills to search for/or access information online and/or finding it hard to use different apps and platforms.
• Trust and safety: worrying about booking and paying online, and/or lacking trust in the reliability of information online.
• User experience: language and/or accessibility needs, which for many makes it harder to use online platforms, and/or poor user experience including a lack of relevant information on digital platforms.

Take Ewa, for example, who told us that she loves to be active but who, due to confidence and English language barriers, struggles to go online to find out information about suitable local opportunities.

She relies on support from a local community organisation and from her young son to help her access information and book sessions, such as at the local swimming pool because, as she shared: “If it is online, I have to ask someone to help me. I don’t feel confident doing this myself.”

Recommended steps

Our research also highlighted great examples of how organisations are taking steps to support digital inclusion in order to help people participate in sport and physical activity, with recommend actions such as:

• build understanding of digital barriers: embed simple questions on digital barriers, like the Indicators of Digital Inclusion, into customer or population surveys to understand needs and design sport and physical activity services accordingly
• provide or signpost to local, trusted support for digital help, like organisations in the National Digital Inclusion Network building digital access and skills among local communities
• make it easier for people to use online platforms: sport and physical activity platforms should be designed with the needs of people with low digital skills in mind. Besides, non-digital pathways for information (such as printed leaflets) and booking options should also be provided
• build partnerships for place-based support: as digital barriers are not limited to the sport and physical activity sector, collaboration across local systems like the health and social prescribing services or the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector can help build digital capability.

A call for a digitally inclusive sector

Digital should be an enabler – not a barrier – to being active, so by understanding and addressing digital barriers we can ensure that everyone has the same opportunities for participating in sport and physical activity.

While many people still struggle with digital access and skills, our new research shows that organisations across the sport and physical activity sector can take action to make their services more digitally accessible.

Sport England has a critical role in this space too and by continuing to raise awareness of digital exclusion across the sector, championing best practices and raising expectations for commissioning inclusive services, they can ensure digital inclusion is baked into all sport and physical activity from the beginning and not just as an afterthought.