Taxonomy term

The fact that you are reading this blog means you have a good level of digital inclusion. You have access to a device (phone, laptop, tablet), connection to the internet and the skills and confidence to find this post.

Many people face barriers to getting online, experiencing what is known as ‘digital exclusion’.

But in a world where our smartphones can defrost the car from the comfort of our own home, a ring can track all of our health and activity data, and banks are operating solely online, digital connectivity is fundamental to how we now operate.

Not a ‘fixed state’

Digital exclusion is about not having the access, skills and/or confidence to use the internet and benefit fully from digital technology in everyday life.

This is a widespread issue, impacting millions of people across the UK and limiting the extent to which they’re able to participate in our ever-more digital society:

• 6.8 million UK households (24%) report difficulty affording communications services
• 1.5m of the adult population (3%) don’t have a smartphone, tablet or laptop
• 2m young people in the UK (14%) don’t have access to a digital device for learning
• 7.9m adults in the UK (15%) don’t have the eight foundational digital skills
• 3.7m UK households with children (45%) don’t meet the Minimum Digital Living Standard

Interestingly, though, being digitally excluded is not a ‘fixed state’.

People may face one or more digital barriers, to different degrees, at different times and related to other vulnerabilities or life events, plus people may gain or lose access, skills and/or confidence to do things digitally. 

Digital inclusion and physical activity

As a sector we must ensure we not only keep pace with new digital developments and the exciting opportunities these provide, because we also need to ensure that no-one is left behind.

We recently commissioned Good Things Foundation to conduct some research into the topic of digital inclusion in order to better understand how digital exclusion might contribute to inequalities in people getting active.

Good Things Foundation also investigated the role that digital inclusion could play in increasing people’s activity levels and looked into the opportunities for Sport England to support digital inclusion across the sector.

The research confirmed our assumption: while many of us enjoy the convenience and connectivity of a digital world, digital exclusion disproportionately affects the audiences we most want to support to enjoy the benefits of a physically active life.

We really appreciate the great work that Good Things Foundation have done on this and we are pleased to be able to share our key findings as well as the full report.

What did we learn?

There is an extensive report from this initial desktop research, but a few valuable findings include:

• sections of the population who are digitally excluded are very similar to those with the lowest activity levels and those facing health inequalities. This includes older adults, disabled people, people experiencing poverty and people living with long-term health conditions
• digital access, skills and accessibility all shape people’s journeys to being physically active. Growing reliance on digital platforms for accessing leisure and sport services means it is increasingly difficult for those without digital connectivity, devices and/or skills to engage with these services  
• we are investing in places where we need to consider digital inclusion and 84% of new Sport England's Place Expansion Partnerships are in areas where internet access is at its lowest.

Whilst digital exclusion isn’t the most influential factor in shaping people’s physical activity levels, it should still be a key consideration when designing new services to engage underserved audiences.

Otherwise, we could be inadvertently excluding people from getting active if we only use digital solutions to promote, design and provide access to sport and physical activity offers.

What next?

This is just the start of our understanding of digital inclusion and its role in tackling inequalities in sport and physical activity.

In the autumn we will be doing further research to deepen our understanding of the audiences most impacted, as well as partners’ experiences of addressing the challenge of digital exclusion in their work.

We would love to connect with a range of partners to understand how digital inclusion is being factored into their existing work as well as what the sector needs to ensure digital inclusion is considered when supporting people to get active.

So watch this space and please get in touch if you are interested in getting involved!
 

Imagine a world where physical activity behaviours are as routinely discussed within your NHS consultations as smoking, or 'prescribed' as routinely as medications.

One where your healthcare professional (HCP) helps connect you into ways of being active that work for you.

That’s the aim of the work we are doing with our health and physical activity partners, through our Uniting the Movement strategy, to strengthen the connections between sport and physical activity, and health and wellbeing.  

Through cross-sector collaboration we’re enabling the conditions for systemic change, the spread and scale of effective interventions and a coherent joined-up movement for change.

Working together for people's wellbeing

The NHS is one of the most trusted sources of physical activity advice for people with long-term health conditions and for disabled people who, according to our latest Active Lives Adult survey, are almost twice as likely to be inactive than those without health conditions or disability.

Modelling undertaken by our health team, using Active Lives data and the social value of sport and physical activity data, concluded that supporting the one in four people who say they would be more active if advised to do so by HCPs would mean 2.9 million fewer inactive adults and 550,000 fewer less-active children and young people in England, saving up to £0.9 billion from the healthcare system.

“Our voices were the most important thing in the room.”

This comment – part of the feedback from one of the 16 amazing young people that took part in the Youth Voice Design Jam in August 2024 – made me smile.

The Jam was a collaborative, joyful and intense three days where young people teamed up with Sport England and a range of sector partners.

Sport England and ukactive recently released the latest Digital Futures report, marking a successful fourth year of consultation.

It’s incredible to think that four years ago we didn’t have a true sense of our digital maturity as a sector, whereas now we’re at a place where we can see clear trends and focus areas for our future efforts.  

There are gaps that our sector needs to address, including the need for leveraging data and insights to deliver your business strategy, the importance of considering our organisations’ environmental impact as we invest in digital and the need to start to embed emerging technologies like open data and AI.

We are incredibly grateful to the 295 organisations that took part in the consultation by allowing us to understand their experience so far and that shared perspectives on their digital transformation journey.

A promising result but there's still lots to do

This year the average score for digital maturity and effectiveness among the surveyed UK organisations was 51% – an increase of 4% from 2023.

This level (40-59%) is defined as ‘Digital Experimenter’, typically meaning that organisations are making great strides forward but missing investment, goal alignment and rapid advances to yield a strong performance digitally.

However, many organisations are still at the start of their journey, where the importance of implementing strong and relevant foundations is absolutely critical, which is the point where we are at Sport England's digital journey.

The Sports4All Innovation Summit, held last week in Paris, marked the start of a critical mission that will run until the LA 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The event was initiated by Sportinnovator in the Netherlands, along with fellow frontrunners from other countries including Sport England, Sport Ireland, Danish Sports Federation, Indescat (Catalonia, Spain), National Resources Centre for Sports Innovations France and Sport Flanders.

The mission of the event was to demonstrate how innovation in sport and physical activity can contribute to addressing the societal inequalities that many communities experience.

There’s also a lack of dedicated support for the purpose-driven individuals and organisations who are designing to meet the particular needs of specific communities.

In fact, these social innovations are central to overcoming the policy-implementation gap.

The support they need is threefold:

• connections that are peer-based, but also public and private as the evidence of their impact grows
• investment to allow them to stay focused on the barriers they are solving rather than chasing the cash
• coaching to help them navigate the complexities of sustaining their business as it grows and to help them respond to change.

So I pose two questions: which local projects can you connect with and learn from? And who could you amplify and advocate for nationally?

2. Social innovation is more important that technology innovation

The term 'innovation' is often firstly associated with technology and new products, but what came across loud and clear in Paris was that innovation for inequalities needs to first have a social purpose, especially when we want to apply it to remove systemic barriers that exist in communities.

This aligns with how we define innovation at Sport England:

Innovation is applying a creative mindset, generating ideas and experimenting to make positive changes that improve people's experiences of physical activity. It is an approach that puts people’s needs at the heart, continually learning and adapting to remove the real-life barriers they are facing.

So think first about who you are seeking to help and then what problem or barrier you are removing for them, before you decide on the solutions that might work best for those communities.

Ideally those groups are also involved in the discovery and design processes, rather than having things done to them.

3. Support to scale the innovation process is key

As Cormac Macdonnell from Sport Ireland shared: "Good ideas and initiatives deserve to be shared and scaled across Europe". But, within the sport sector, it can sometimes feel like we are competing rather than collaborating.

So how can we help many more innovators experience the sharing spirit that our 15 projects experienced at the Summit?

They were offered the opportunity to learn from like-minded people who are trying to solve the same problems, but in different cultural contexts.

We need to do more to create the space for people to trial new approaches, fail fast but learn quickly, and to share that learning so that we are building motorways together, not roundabouts.

Thanks to John Hughes, Director of Partnerships at Community Integrated Care, who talked about an Inclusive Volunteering project that we funded, who shared this fantastic analogy.

Looking at the possibilities ahead

I think it is fair to say that we all left the Summit positive about the future, as what was evident in the room was that the passion for improving inequalities through purposeful innovation is alive and well.

But creating and nurturing the conditions where innovation can thrive will take patience and collective care, so what we really need to consider is whether we’re up to the challenge. I know Sport England is. Will you join us?

On behalf of Sport England, I would like to thank Sportinnovator for the opportunity, and Community Integrated Care, Intelligent Health UK and Planet Earth Games for joining us and sharing what they are learning about supporting disabled people, people on lower incomes and young people with others from across Europe.

If you’d like to learn more about how to take practical steps to apply innovation in order to remove barriers for specific audiences, please look at our innovation and digital resources, our latest research or get in touch with our team.
 

Earlier this month I was watching the London Marathon as runners navigated the streets of the city.

This is an inspiring event that always makes me think of the saying ‘Life is a marathon not a sprint’ and it's also a brilliant description of how I feel when reflecting on the journey that OpenActive has been on since we announced our partnership with the Open Data Institute (ODI) back in November 2016.

Our ambition – to make it easier for people in local communities to find the physical activity that works for them – hasn’t changed.

And that’s because we keep hearing – whether through our local delivery work, our campaigns, or speaking to health partners – that people can’t find the activities they want to do online.

This is a very real barrier and one of the main reasons why people don’t get active.

The most common solution I hear in response is "just build a single website that everyone can use!”

But having tried (and failed) to develop a single website as part of the London 2012 Olympic legacy (who remembers Spogo?!) it became clear that we needed to look at this problem differently.

This led us to open data, and our relationship with the ODI.

Day one was about ensuring teams ‘design the right thing’ through the proper research and framing of the challenge.

Teams conducted desktop research and interviews with their target audience and users were placed at the front and centre of the design process.

Specialists from partner organisations Disability Rights UK, Mermaids, Activity Alliance, Street Games, Sport England colleagues and individuals with lived experience provided support, guidance and feedback to the teams (either online or in person).

Teams also took to the streets of London to speak to members of the public: from faith leaders at local mosques, to parents waiting for the school pick-up or at the park.

Day two was all about ensuring teams designed ‘the thing right’, generating ideas and creating prototypes to put the stakeholders to test, learn and adapt.

One team spoke to two PE teachers who were so impressed with the concept, they asked for it to be pitched to their headteacher!

Theories of change, user journeys and pitches were created ready to wow the judging panel.

The ideas

The jam culminated in presentations from all six teams hoping to hit the criteria the judges were looking for: beauty, brains, heart, magic, mastery and bravery; plus Sport England’s values of being innovative, collaborative, inclusive and ambitious.

A whole range of tools including Lego, Canva documents and even pipe cleaners were used to bring ideas to life, always with the user in mind.

Reflections

It is hard to capture the energy, creativity and power of design-thinking that I witnessed over the two days, but my biggest takeaways are:

• Collaboration is key. It was brilliant to see the dynamics of the teams, with students working alongside professionals and service design experts, as well as individuals new to the subject, and all bringing a diverse range of lived experiences. It was this variety of backgrounds, working collaboratively on a shared brief, that created truly innovative magic.
• The power of partnerships. The insights that teams gathered from our partners, in person and online, made a huge difference to really grounding the concepts to build upon.
• The importance of freedom. From live user research, ideation, testing prototypes and forming presentations, it was truly remarkable what the teams achieved in just two days to tackle such complex system challenges when seeing barriers to innovation disappear.

What’s next?

These are truly exciting times!

We will be sharing more information and some of the brilliant ideas and concepts that came from the jam over the next few months, so keep an eye on our channels.

Thank you to all our partners and those who joined our efforts during the jam.

If you want to keep learning about innovation, we’d love to hear from you.

How can we define the innovation we want to see in sport and physical activity? And what works to support, stimulate and spread innovation to address inequalities in sport and physical activity?

Two years ago, we set out to answer these questions by partnering with our first ever innovation learning partner - the brilliant Innovation Unit.

With phase one of the work concluded, we’re excited to share with you the approach we took and what made our partnership such a success, as well as some practical resources we’ve developed to help you apply innovation to your work.

Why we set out on this journey

Sport England has a strong track record of delivering and supporting innovative work (like This Girl Can, the Innovation open call and our local delivery pilots).

Indeed, “Being Innovative” is one of our four organisational values!

But we recognised that there was some valuable, untapped learning we could gather to help us refine the role innovation can play to address the big issues at the heart of our long-term strategy, Uniting the Movement.

We chose to work with Innovation Unit as they brought a wealth of experience both in innovation (the clue’s in the name!) and working as a learning partner.
 

They also hold an impressive portfolio of current and former partners including Arts Council England, The Health Foundation and The National Lottery Community Fund.

What we did

It’s hard to summarise two years of work in a single blog, but thankfully we don’t have to!

We’ve created an overview of our Innovation Learning Journey, that you can find at the bottom of this page, which shares what we did, what we learned and where we’re going next.

An overview of the key phases we went through together can be seen in the visual below.

The digital divide is caused by barriers such as a lack of digital skills, but also low access to devices, internet connectivity and poorly planned accessibility for disabled people.

So this is something we want to highlight and make sure we help overcome by using the right approaches to help people engage with sport and physical activity, be it with non-digital or digital skills support, to ensure no-one is left behind.    

We have explored alternatives to digital support in campaigns like We Are Undefeatable and TV and tabloid press have been highlighted as good alternatives to reaching people who are digitally excluded.

But if we agree digital platforms are useful and go with the digital direction of travel, we need to be teaching people the skills to use them.

This is a strong need, not only from a human perspective, but also from an economic one.

The benefits of being online

The Centre for Economics and Business Research has calculated that just shy of £10 of economic profit is achieved for every £1 invested in digital skills.

The problem is that traditional digital skills courses sometimes overlook the importance of teaching people how to use digital platforms to be physically active - be that by finding things like equipment, booking pitches or using online workout platforms.

But a good example of solving this issue is the Get Out Get Active initiative. This campaign provided activity sessions for disabled people alongside digital skills sessions to help them grow in confidence and find other suitable activities.

This is the kind of blended approach that we need to follow to make sure everybody is able to make the most of any digital opportunities.