Yesterday we published the final report for Impact ’25 programme, our Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 legacy programme.
The programme was delivered by the Rugby Football Union (RFU) in partnership with the UK government, Sport England and UK Sport.
Backed by £14.55 million of government investment, and driven by the incredible commitment of clubs, volunteers, coaches, match officials and players, Impact '25 has helped transform opportunities for women and girls across England.
It goes without saying that a key strand of the work was getting more women and girls into playing rugby. But that wasn’t our only focus.
We wanted to encourage and support more women to get into coaching, match official and leadership positions, and to invest in club facilities to improve the experiences for women and girls involved in rugby.
We also aimed to use the opportunity of the World Cup to connect communities and welcome new fans to the sport we love and to support the development of high-performance pathways in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
We wanted to transform the sport for women and girls.
Around 40,000 girls aged six to 12 were introduced to rugby.
Girls' club participation has increased by 49%, growing from around 18,000 to 26,800 players, and women's participation at supported universities has risen by 38%.
More than 5,400 coaching and match official courses have been completed by women, with nearly a third funded through Impact '25.
Women now account for 28% of newly qualified coaches and match officials, compared to just 9% before the programme, and the number completing advanced coaching and refereeing qualifications has increased more than five-fold.
Thanks to the programme, 607 clubs received 1,078 facility grants between them.
These grants were used to develop or upgrade changing rooms, upgrade toilets, refurbish social spaces, enhance female sanitary provisions at clubs, or to make other improvements that could create a more female-friendly club environment.
These things really matter as they directly impact the experiences of women and girls involved in the sport and their sense of belonging.
We also aimed to use the opportunity of the World Cup to connect communities and welcome new fans to the sport we love and to support the development of high-performance pathways in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
There is a huge amount to celebrate with Impact ’25. But we can’t stop there.
Through Every Rose: Our Time, the RFU's five-year action plan published shortly after last year’s Women’s World Cup, we set an ambitious target of reaching 100,000 active female players by 2030, including 70,000 club-registered players.
Last year, almost 48,000 women and girls were playing at rugby clubs across England, and now schools, colleges and universities will play a critical role in reaching that ambition in the next four years.
Our growing workforce across the education sector is introducing more young people to the game through T1 Rugby, an accessible non-contact format that retains the unique characteristics of rugby union while providing an easy entry point into the sport.
Partnerships with organisations such as Scouts and Guides are helping us reach new audiences, while the growth in girls' and women's sections at rugby clubs means there are now more opportunities than ever for participants to continue their rugby journey.
Alongside participation growth, we are committed to ensuring women and girls can thrive in the game.
And our work on female health and wellbeing continues to develop.
This summer we announced a landmark partnership with Women in Sport and became the first major British sport to launch a standalone anti-sexism and misogyny policy, part of a broader commitment to making rugby safer, more inclusive and more welcoming.
The success of Impact '25, and what’s been happening since, demonstrate what can be achieved when different organisations and the wider community game come together behind a shared vision to drive the women’s and girls’ games forward.
We’re hugely grateful to Sport England for their involvement in Impact ’25 and value their ongoing support.
There remains huge potential in women’s and girls’ rugby, and we must not take our foot off the pedal.
A new report on the legacy of the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 shows more women and girls are playing, coaching and officiating rugby union than ever before.
Clubs
Facilities
Funding
Gender
National governing bodies
The government is investing £22.5m in enrichment activities for young people at more than 400 secondary schools in disadvantaged communities.
Children and young people
Funding
Government
Lower socio-economic groups
If you type National Lottery into any internet search engine, you’ll immediately be greeted with the strapline 'Changing Lives Every Day'.
And while for most, immediate thoughts might turn to the joy of winning a life-changing jackpot, for nearly 20 years I have been privileged to work at the heart of an organisation that distributes Good Causes funding.
This has allowed me to see every day how National Lottery money helps people and communities change lives.
In Sport England’s investment management team, we recognise how lucky we are to have a role that supports organisations and communities to make a positive difference through National Lottery funding.
And we also accept the responsibility and diligence that comes with the role, given that we are investing lottery players’ and public money.
Every day we see the very best of our communities – in the ideas that they talk to us about, in the applications that they send to us and through the impact their funded projects have.
And as the total number of people reached by projects funded by the Movement Fund nears 500,000, it is evident how National Lottery funding is helping communities become more active every day.
In Sport England’s investment management team, we recognise how lucky we are to have a role that supports organisations and communities to make a positive difference through National Lottery funding.
Making it easier for everybody to apply for Sport England funding is a key pledge in our Uniting the Movement strategy.
The Movement Fund now operates with more open and less restrictive criteria, and it has become a single point of entry for grants and crowdfunding opportunities.
Applicants also have clearer expectations of our process and, as a result, we’re seeing National Lottery funding support a diverse range of projects.
Whether we're talking about first-time applicants, organisations that have received funding before or organisations that are brand new or well-established, the Movement Fund is helping more communities access the funding to make their projects a reality.
Like Par Track, which was awarded £10,000 to professionally deep clean and reline Cornwall's only UK Athletics licensed athletics track, helping them sustain opportunities for athletics, but also to support people of all ages to be active and to come together as a community.
The simplicity and openness of our Movement Fund is giving communities and organisations the freedom to identify local needs and to bring forward their own ideas too, enabling us to get National Lottery funding to where it is needed the most.
And 72% of funded projects through the Movement Fund are reaching people who are less likely to be active and that are in places where more need exists.
Funding is also helping organisations break down barriers to physical activity in their communities.
For example, Dance Mojo have been able to expand their Zumba sessions and have more impact in their community through their National Lottery funding support.
Additional targeted sessions have also helped the organisation remove financial barriers to participation, enabling people experiencing financial hardship or accessibility challenges to access tailored activities that otherwise would have been out of reach.
Within the investment management team, we try to spend as much time as possible talking with the communities and visiting them too.
Whether that’s attending local events and funding fairs, or working with trusted local partners to share information and data about what we fund and where it goes.
Since January our dedicated investment advisers have had more than 38,500 interactions with people contacting our funding advice service for support and guidance.
Meeting more people and their communities where they are at, helps us understand their needs and it ensures we fund projects that provide opportunities for people to be themselves, like the activities delivered by The Joshua Tree.
Their National Lottery funding has enabled them to offer an inclusive physical activity and wellness programme for children and families affected by cancer, giving children a sense of their childhood back.
Something that’s key, because as explained by the organisation:
“When a child’s life is filled with hospitals (…) and worry, the opportunity to feel in control of their body, use it positively, and experience joy and confidence is incredibly powerful."
National Lottery funding really makes a huge difference by helping people feel welcome, confident, connected and able to take part in sport and physical activity in ways that work and matter to them.
This is why, every day, we feel privileged to play our part in turning lottery players’ contributions into opportunities that help communities change lives.
If we want more people to be active, we need to start by understanding them and the places where they live.
It’s an important shift in how we think about physical activity, because being active is not just about whether there is a sports facility nearby or whether someone knows about a local exercise class.
It is shaped by the environment around us, our circumstances, our confidence, our connections and whether we feel that opportunities to be active are really for people like us.
That is why our investment in places is putting communities at the heart of our approach.
Through our place-based investment, made possible through National Lottery funding alongside Exchequer investment, we are working with communities across England where levels of inactivity are highest and where people can face some of the greatest barriers to being active.
The starting point is listening, because locals understand their communities better than anyone.
They know what works, what doesn't, which places feel welcoming and which ones don't, and what gets in the way of being active. They also know the strengths that already exist – the people, organisations, spaces and relationships that can make a difference.
Our job is to help bring those strengths together.
That’s why we’re working alongside local authorities, Active Partnerships, health organisations, voluntary and community groups, schools, sport and physical activity organisations and most importantly local residents, to get more people active.
Rather than deciding what a community needs from the outside, we’re creating the space for people locally to help shape the solutions themselves.
We can see what this looks like across the places we work.
In Doncaster, more than 2,500 residents have helped create a community-run 'Friends of' group that now independently delivers physical activity events in local parks.
In Bradford, the JU:MP programme has used insight from children, families and schools to shape action, contributing to more than 70 additional minutes of physical activity per child each week.
And in Blackpool, a youth leadership programme, co-designed with 16-25-year-olds, has brought 20 young people into leadership spaces to help shape decisions.
These are places with different challenges, but the common thread is that local people are helping to define both the problem and its solutions, which is important in communities where inactivity is closely connected to wider inequalities.
In this sense, our Active Lives research shows that those from lower-income households, some ethnic minority communities, disabled people and older adults can face additional barriers to being active.
And our latest data brings this into sharp focus: 53.8% of adults in the least affluent groups are active, compared with 73.2% of the most affluent.
Through our place-based investment, made possible through National Lottery funding alongside Exchequer investment, we are working with communities across England where levels of inactivity are highest and where people can face some of the greatest barriers to being active.
Those barriers are rarely about motivation alone.
They can include cost, transport, safety, confidence, access to facilities and green spaces, caring responsibilities or simply not feeling that traditional opportunities are designed with them in mind.
Our place-based approach allows us to look at those issues from the ground up and it’s where the power of local knowledge becomes so important.
Because a solution that works brilliantly in one community may not work in another.
The role of place-based investment is therefore not to impose a single model, but to support communities to develop approaches that reflect their own needs and assets.
Rather than simply funding individual activities, we’re investing in the relationships, infrastructure and local leadership that are helping change how communities think about and support physical activity.
That is a different kind of investment and one that takes time.
We need to understand not just whether people have taken part in an activity, but whether the local system around them is changing.
There are many questions involved, including:
These are the changes that will help make our progress sustainable.
There is also a wider opportunity here because when people come together around physical activity, the benefits can extend beyond being active itself.
Community activities can create social connections, reduce isolation, help people feel more connected to where they live and improve their health.
Our 'Social value' research shows that active lifestyles could prevent more than 3.3 million cases of chronic health conditions each year, including depression, back pain and type 2 diabetes, plus delivering an estimated £8 billion in direct net savings to the healthcare system by preventing illness and reducing pressure on the NHS.
That is why our investment in places is about more than sport.
It is about creating the conditions in which being active can become part of everyday life and about ensuring that people have an opportunity to influence what happens in their communities.
We've linked up with the Youth Sport Trust and Greenhouse Sports to launch Elevate, which aims to identify and develop 45 talented young people in sport, whatever their background.
Children and young people
Funding
We all know instinctively some of the things that help us feel mentally well – walking, talking, sharing, connecting with others, spending time outdoors and doing things we enjoy.
The evidence supports this too.
Every year, more than a million people in England access NHS Talking therapies, a free NHS service that helps people recover and manage common mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression, through evidence-based treatments including counselling, guided self-help and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
We also know that physical activity has a powerful role to play in improving mental wellbeing.
Whether it's walking in nature, joining a local activity group, taking part in sport, or simply moving more in everyday life, being active can boost mood, reduce stress and support recovery. It's also recommended among the treatment options for adult depression within NICE guidelines.
So we asked ourselves a simple question: ‘What difference could we make if physical activity became a routine part of mental health support, rather than something people were encouraged to do separately?’
That question sits at the heart of a new Active Talking Therapies Trailblazer programme we've been developing over the past six months.
In 2019, Sport England commissioned research to explore whether integrating physical activity into NHS Talking Therapies could improve outcomes for people experiencing anxiety and depression.
Pilot projects in Camden & Islington and Buckinghamshire produced encouraging results.
But perhaps the most important finding wasn't the data alone. It was the level of enthusiasm from both practitioners and people accessing the services.
There was a clear appetite to do more but whilst demand to connect patients with physical activity was extremely high, this wasn’t happening in practice due to low confidence and lack of guidance on how to do this.
So, we built on what we learned.
We asked ourselves a simple question: ‘What difference could we make if physical activity became a routine part of mental health support, rather than something people were encouraged to do separately?’
We have partnered with NHS Talking Therapies services, City & Hackney Talking Therapies (Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust), LSCFT Talking Therapies (Blackburn with Darwen) and Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust (RDaSH) to explore how physical activity could be embedded into treatment pathways in ways that reflected local needs, communities and strengths.
All sites are part of existing Sport England Place Partnerships with a shared ambition to tackle inequalities in sport and physical activity.
Rather than creating a single national model, each area was given the freedom to develop its own approach.
Every Trailblazer site looks different, because every community is different.
In Hackney, through the Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, the Talking Therapies service supports around 4,500 people each year, the team has integrated physical activity directly into therapeutic support.
Alongside the existing ‘Boost Your Mood’ offer for people receiving lower-intensity support, the service introduced ‘Move Your Mood’, delivered by a physical activity practitioner working as part of the clinical team.
The approach combines psychological support with opportunities to build movement into daily life.
In Blackburn with Darwen, where levels of physical inactivity are higher than the national average, NHS Talking Therapies partnered with the council's Health and Wellbeing Service and social prescribing team to co-deliver a behavioural activation programme.
Movement was integrated throughout the programme, using trusted community settings such as parks, leisure centres and local venues to help participants feel comfortable and supported.
Doncaster developed a model centred around workforce development and sustainable change.
A dedicated physical activity co-ordinator was embedded within the Talking Therapies service at the Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust (RDaSH) to help introduce simple and accessible movement opportunities within group sessions while also building the confidence and skills of practitioners to have meaningful conversations about physical activity with the people they support.
The evidence from our earlier pilot work suggests that physical activity may improve recovery outcomes and support a more preventative approach to healthcare.
The Trailblazer programme is taking those findings and testing how they can be applied, adapted and sustained in different communities.
Crucially, this is about making physical activity part of recovery and ongoing management, not an optional extra.
For the more than one million people who access NHS Talking Therapies every year, that means creating supported and achievable opportunities to move more, in ways that work for them.
This reflects a core principle of Sport England's Uniting the Movement strategy – that movement and health are fundamentally connected, something that’s appreciated by both patients and staff, which includes 94% of practitioners reporting that physical activity was very important in supporting mental health and wellbeing.
The next phase of the Trailblazer programme will focus on strengthening the evidence base.
Over the next two years, we will continue to work alongside local sites, tracking outcomes and learning through a multi-site research programme.
Working with our delivery partner, Transformation Partners in Health and Care (TPHC), and our academic evaluation partner, the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, we will use this learning to inform national best practice and develop resources that can support wider adoption across local NHS Talking Therapies services.
We'll share more as the programme develops.
For now, our thanks go to the teams in Hackney, Blackburn with Darwen and Doncaster, and to all the practitioners, partners and participants helping to turn this ambition into reality.
Because when movement becomes part of mental health support, more people have the opportunity not just to recover, but to thrive.
The Prime Minister plans to give local people more control over investment in sport and physical activity in their regions.
Funding
Government
Local authorities
With the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games in full swing, we look back to the positive legacy of the last Games and how we’re backing this year’s event.
Coaching
Disability
Funding
Lower socio-economic groups
National governing bodies
Outdoors
Place-based working
Sustainability
Volunteering
We profile some of the Team England athletes and teams competing at the Commonwealth Games whose development has been supported by our Backing the Best funding.
Funding
Lower socio-economic groups
National governing bodies
Read the findings from our match-funding pilot schemes in partnership with Crowdfunder, exploring the role of crowdfunding in supporting community clubs and organisations.
Clubs
Facilities
Funding
Governance
The Government wants to understand how Lottery funding can continue to reflect people’s priorities, reach the communities that need it most and make funding easier to access.
Funding
Government
I can’t wait for the Commonwealth Games, which this year will be held in Glasgow at the end of July, and to the much-needed uplifting news and excitement they’ll bring us.
The games are an opportunity for athletes from across the Commonwealth to compete at the highest level and for people everywhere to enjoy the spectacle, which will extend over 11 days of sport and festivities.
But among all the excitement we can't forget that for some of the athletes, actually getting to the point of competing has been tough and the effects on their training by climate change means it’s only getting tougher.
For instance, on the Maldives, sea-level rise is a real problem with saltwater encroaching on facilities and extreme weather stopping play, whereas in India it’s simply too hot to train in the summer, so its athletes must live and train elsewhere if they want to compete.
For those still unsure about the impact of climate change on sport, it’s worth attending a screening of the National Emergency Briefing and having a look at The Well-Adapted UK report, as both documents warn us about the importance of preparing for new temperatures, extreme rainfall and the changing of the seasons.
Sport and physical activity are threatened by a changing climate, not just at elite level but at grassroots level too.
As winters become wetter we are seeing pitches and courts flooded with increasing frequency, leaving them unusable for any training, competition or enjoyment.
Conflict elsewhere is another factor affecting our sector, as it’s leading to wildly fluctuating energy prices that threaten the clubs and sports organisations’ ability to keep the lights and heat on in the facilities, something that particularly affects swimming pools.
And as we approach the summer we'll see how extreme heat is increasingly going to be a key threat, particularly for disabled people, the elderly or those with a long-term health condition.
Plus for those living in densely-populated areas, the lack of shading will deter people from taking exercise as it’s hard for many to be active when the heat makes you ill.
Sport and physical activity are threatened by a changing climate, not just at elite level but at grassroots level too.
Given that during the Covid pandemic physical activity was one of the few legitimate reasons we were allowed to leave our homes – along with essential shopping, medical needs and travel to work for key workers - it is clear how important exercise is to individuals and to any nation.
That realisation has become an accelerator for action and it’s encouraging that we are starting to work on measures to reduce our impact on the environment, to stop climate change getting any worse, and – just as importantly – to plan for the future.
Here at Sport England we are developing a report, which should be available by late summer, looking at the hazards caused to sport and physical activity by a changing climate.
But while there’s still work that needs to be done, it’s reassuring that people are considering climate change and that we’re are already taking action.
This is only a first step because we know we need to understand how this will vary across the country, how it’ll affect different activities and – perhaps more importantly – how different people and communities will behave in more extreme weather conditions.
I could see this when I visited Malmesbury Bowls Club earlier this month as part of the King’s Baton Relay, which sees delegates of the 74 competing nations and territories travel across their home lands before finishing at the host city of the Commonwealth Games, Glasgow.
I was there with Sally-Ann Lewis-Wall, representing Team England in para-bowls at the Games, and with TV presenter Radzi Chinyanganya, to hear about the importance of sport at both elite and grassroots level being more sustainable and preparing for the future.
It was great seeing the work done, supported by our Movement Fund, to install an artificial green and then restore it when it was damaged by severe flooding last year.
The bowls club are working with others in the area to take a wider look at the flooding issue.
They have identified tree-planting and other nature-based solutions upstream to slow the flow of water to the town to enable play to continue, meaning that the members of the club will be able to keep enjoying the exercise and the good company.
It is with thousands of these small actions across England and the Commonwealth that we can ensure we’ll all be able to keep enjoying sport and activity now and into the future.
Every little win against climate change counts and I, for one, will be watching the Games closely and listening out for other inspirational projects.
The Government has announced a £1 billion investment in PE and school sport to ensure equal access for every child and tackle childhood obesity.
Children and young people
Funding
Government
Tackling inactivity
We’re bringing environmental sustainability to the forefront during this week’s King’s Baton Relay ahead of the Commonwealth Games in July.
Funding
Sustainability
What better way to start the new year than with an exciting new role to get your teeth into?
In January, I joined the Richmond Group of Charities as the new programme director leading the We Are Undefeatable physical activity programme following a significant stint running behaviour change programmes in the active travel sector.
With Sport England funding recently confirmed up to March 2028, it was a great time to join the team and get cracking.
We Are Undefeatable is a game-changing programme, bringing together an impactful behaviour change campaign with thought-leading policy, and influencing work to support and encourage people with long-term health conditions to be active in ways that work for them.
Throw in a new strand of place-based pilot work starting later this year, plus lived experience voices underpinning all we do, and we’ve got a huge amount to offer the sector and our key audiences.
So, unsurprisingly, this year is shaping up to be an exciting one already.
To kick us off in January we launched our new place-based approach, inviting expressions of interest from a range of areas, all of whom are already connected to the Sport England place expansion work.
Our place-based work will build on our experiences so far working with Blackburn with Darwen and Lancashire on local versions of the We Are Undefeatable campaign to support places to embed systems change, increase opportunities for movement and frictionless pathways to physical activity for those with long-term health conditions. We look forward to announcing our new partnerships in the spring.
Earlier in February, we held our inaugural Lived Experience Network session.
This group will be pivotal as we move into the next phases of the programme, ensuring we are keeping the experiences and perspectives of our key audiences at the heart of our deliverables.
It’s also already proving valuable to our partners (including the Faculty of Sport and Exercise Medicine and the Active Partnerships National Organisation on the Moving Together programme), tapping into key expertise as meaningful contributors to work in development.
We’ll be lining up more opportunities for this collaborative working over the year and will continue to demonstrate to our network the impacts of their involvement.
In January we launched our new place-based approach, inviting expressions of interest from a range of areas, all of whom are already connected to the Sport England place expansion work.
The power of storytelling feeds through to our marketing efforts, with a social media influencer campaign and summer activation in development.
For it, we’ll be building on our previous successes with one in five people taking action having seen the campaign, 64% of people finding our advertising relatable and 66% agreeing that the campaign stands out from other advertising. Our insight hub offers more details about the response to the campaign.
And, while more details will come in due course, keep an eye out for a summer campaign and how you, and your networks, can get behind it.
While a lot of our lobbying and influencing work goes on behind the scenes, we’re particularly excited to kick start work on a follow up to our impactful Millions More Moving report from 2024 to see progress made against the policy shifts we set out to influence.
This time we’ll be going into it with greater depth on how and why to get millions more moving.
We’re also proud of our continued work on shaping the implementation of the 10 Year Health Plan, which will provide a focus for our lobbying and influencing work.
Our Lived Experience Insights Dashboard helps to inform our influencing work, so we’re delighted that this resource continues to be freely available for anyone who wants to access it as it now spans several years’ worth of data from 13,000 respondents with long-term conditions.
And finally (yep, there’s still more!), we’re heading into year two of having our very own app, which we’re about to get the first 12-month evaluation back from (thanks to GoodBoost and London Metropolitan University for working with us on that).
A sneak peek shows increases in physical activity for those engaging with the app and increases in personal motivation to be more active, which we’re thrilled to see.
With over 13,000 users registered already, this is a promising start to a fundamental part of the behaviour change journey for our audiences.
With such a busy year ahead there’s great cause for optimism that in 12 months' time we’ll have taken huge strides to achieving our goals within our role as a system partner and across our wider sector.
Oxfordshire is one of ten early testers for Place Universal Offer (PUO) funding in England and we’ve used this support to turbo-charge our community-driven work to tackle systemic inequalities and to get more people moving.
With Oxfordshire becoming a Marmot Place, proportionate universalism is writ large in our work as a system.
PUO investment gives us a practical opportunity to provide a universal offer of leadership training, supporting work in culturally-competent ways, upscaling what works and sharing learning; all whilst, simultaneously, focusing more intensely on where needs are greatest and inequalities are most stark.
Our belief is that the closer we are to the challenges, the nearer we are to finding their solutions too.
PUO work is more than simply starting from scratch or creating new projects or programmes.
Instead, it’s about identifying community leaders in priority areas who already understand their barriers and have trust within their own communities.
PUO is also about working with and through them to create the biggest impact, and it’s about listening far more than talking and being ready to learn and shift the way that we work to optimise processes and results.
That’s why we have made a deliberate choice to work with a small number of Community Anchor Organisations in our priority neighbourhoods, including Oxford Community Action.
By working in this way, we can put lived experiences at the front and centre in the creation of solutions.
Whilst it is early days for our PUO journey, we are seeing some positive early signs that reinforce how it’s possible to enable both short-term action and long-term systemic shifts.
PUO is about identifying community leaders in priority areas who already understand their barriers and have trust within their own communities.
Communities can’t wait years for change, and they shouldn’t have to, but PUO funding has enabled us to start creating the environments needed for long-term change to empower action now.
The conditions defining these new environments are:
So how has all this work helped us grow?
These are the key learnings that we’d like to share in case they can help others too:
We are six months into our three-year PUO journey and are really excited by early learnings and future potential.
This is a system-wide effort, with organisations like Oxford Community Action at the heart of change and, together, we are working to create healthier futures for the residents of Oxfordshire.
Learn about the role we play in backing aspiring winter sports athletes through our investment of National Lottery and Government funding into talent and support programmes.
Disability
Funding
National governing bodies
Boxing is my religion. Like all spiritual journeys it began with a moment of divine inspiration and my baptism was conducted whilst watching Muhammed Ali defeat George Foreman in “The Rumble In The Jungle”.
I grew up in boxing gyms with the sport giving me purpose, discipline and titles – including representing my country on numerous occasions.
These days it offers me the chance to inspire the next generation of boxers and to help anyone who walks through the gym door, to believe in themselves and choose a positive path in life.
When people ask me why boxing matters so much to me, my answer is simple: it changes and saves lives.
Of course, it also improves health and builds confidence, but boxing keeps people – especially young people – away from anti-social behaviour and crime, something that I can personally verify as a former Youth Justice Manager.
With the number of proven offences committed by children seeing an increase of 4%, change has never been so important and there are many ways boxing helps fight crime.
Firstly, boxing gives young people structure and boundaries.
Many of the children and young people who walk through the doors of a boxing gym – like mine in Oldham, Greater Manchester – come from difficult backgrounds and have challenging lives.
Having little or no access to opportunities and therefore a lack of agency in the world, may result in challenging behaviours. But not dealing with these pressures means they risk spilling out onto the streets and that’s where crime starts.
Not because young people are 'bad', but because they have nowhere positive to pour their energy into. But boxing gyms can change that, as these spaces are built on discipline, respect, routine and team spirit.
Boxing gyms offer me the chance to inspire the next generation of boxers and anyone who walks through the gym door, to believe in themselves and choose a positive path in life.
You don’t just turn up to your gym whenever you feel like it. Instead, you’re expected to train on time, plus you have to listen to your coach, and you learn that effort leads to results and that shortcuts rarely work.
These lessons transfer directly into everyday life and children who understand discipline in a boxing gym are far less likely to make reckless decisions outside it.
Boxing also teaches emotional control, becasue contrary to what some may think, this sport helps a young person understand how to control their emotions, particularly aggression, and how to think and act under pressure.
I’ve seen it first hand – children who once lashed out can calm themselves because boxing gave them an outlet for their emotions and that allows them to thrive.
Boxing is a good metaphor for life and can help to develop those personal and social skills that people need, contributing to tackling deep seated worklessness and low aspirations.
The sport also fosters the development of positive character, self-esteem, self-discipline, courage, perseverance and resilience.
Instead of throwing punches on the street, they hit the pads, the bags and their coach or opponent inside the ring, but always with respect to the sport’s rules, under supervision and with a reason.
Boxing also teaches respect — for yourself and for others. You shake hands, you follow rules and you learn that real strength comes from self-control, not intimidation. These values reduce crime at its roots.
Another factor that's key is the sense of belonging among those practising the sport. A boxing gym offers identity and loyalty because, at a gym, you’re part of a team.
You train together, look out for each other and you wear the gym name with pride. That sense of identity can pull someone away from a path that leads to anti-social behaviour and crime.
I’ve seen boxing change lives in Oldham and Greater Manchester, where young people that were heading toward trouble now have focus and a reason to stay on the straight and narrow, and I’ve also seen young people who had no confidence, find self-belief.
Not all these children will become a champion boxer and that's okay.
The real victories happen when a young person chooses to stay in school, can find a job or simply chooses not to commit a crime because they don’t want to let their gym or coach down.
At our newly refurbished Greater Manchester Boxing and Development Hub, we’ve been lucky enough to benefit from Sport England funding.
To my mind, our investors aren’t just putting money into a boxing club and community gym. They’re investing in crime prevention and harm minimisation.
It costs less to fund a gym than it does to deal with the consequences of crime and anti-social behaviour – policing, court cases, prison and reform – as recent estimates place the total economic and social cost of serious youth violence at £11 billion between 2009 and 2020.
For me, boxing is more than titles and trophies, it’s about giving people a chance.
Every time a young person chooses to walk into a gym and away from 'the road', I believe that’s crime prevention in action and that’s why boxing will always matter.
As one of the 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester, Oldham forms part of Sport England’s Place Partnership with Greater Manchester Moving and other local bodies to implement Sport England's Uniting the Movement strategy for getting people active.
I’m proud of what boxing can do to change lives.
In the words of the iconic social activist, pacifist and politician, Nelson Mandela: “Sport can awaken hope where there was previously only despair.”
Every day, I get to see the truth in these great words in action.
As the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games start we would like to extend our very best wishes to the athletes and the support team behind Team GB (and in the coming weeks ParalympicsGB) as the spotlight of Olympic and Paralympic sport shines upon them.
It is worth remembering that during the 2018-22 cycle the winter sports and athletes were particularly impacted by the resultant post-Brexit travel restrictions and also (how soon we forget!) by the Covid pandemic.
UK Sport and the British Olympic Association have an ambitious target this year and I think, and hope, that at this iteration of the ‘winters’ we will see our athletes and sports realise their aspirations as they showcase the rich and diverse sporting offer we have in England and across the UK.
At Sport England we are extremely proud of the role that we play in supporting partners and thereby enabling aspiring athletes in winter sports to explore and fulfil their potential, but what does that support look like and why does it matter?
Starting with the second question first, let’s address the elephant in the room – why winter sports?
There is a rather lazy misconception that we don’t have winter sports facilities and that those sports are exclusively the pursuit of people from affluent backgrounds – the truth, like many things in life, is much more nuanced that that.
Starting with the sliding sports (bobsleigh, skeleton or luge to name a few) there is an established track record of athletes coming from the British Army - shout out at this point to our colleagues at British Army Sport which continues to be a key partner of and contributor to the UK High Performance System - or from track and field athletics.
These athletes often transition in to sliding sports (or should it be pushing sports!) through established UK Sport-led talent ID programmes such as Find Your Greatness, and those sports have brilliant pathways to take them all the way to the podium.
At Sport England we are extremely proud of the role that we play in supporting partners and thereby enabling aspiring athletes in winter sports to explore and fulfil their potential.
The skating sports are typically populated with athletes who started their careers at ice rinks and ice centres scattered across the major ‘second cities’ of England.
The National Ice Centre in Nottingham has long since been the base for aspiring short track speed skaters and a great partnership between Sport England, Nottingham City Council and recently British Ice Skating, who received Sport England talent funding into their pathways.
Other English rinks feature prominently in the athletes’ biographies and it was great to see Sheffield hosting the recent Figure Skating European Championships as part of the build up to the Games.
English Snowsport athletes often start their careers at outdoor ‘dry’ (not so much in the rain!) ski slopes, which continue to be popular and affordable community sport facilities, enabling athletes such as the Summerhayes sisters or, for Milan-Cortina, veteran James ‘Woodsy’ Woods (who will compete at his fourth Olympic Winter Games) to progress from Sheffield Ski Village to the X-Games podium.
Arguably Great Britain's most successful ever Alpine skier, Dave Ryding will contest his fifth Olympic Winter Games, having purportedly earned his stripes at a dry ski-facility up at Pendle Ski Club, a member-owned club located in the Ribble Valley, Lancashire.
Sport England investment supports the talent pathways in a range of winter sports to ensure that performance pathways in these sports are accessible and inclusive, well-led and managed, and that they offer the support needed to allow our aspiring young people to progress to the very highest level.
Through our funded partners, most prominently SportsAid, we also fund programmes such as Backing The Best and the TASS programme that collectively provide direct financial and athlete support services, such as strength and conditioning, physiotherapy and sports medicine services to enable our players to be fit, healthy and optimally prepared for graduation into high performance programmes and success at major events and games.
As an example, of the Team GB class of 2026 in Milan-Cortina, at least 10 athletes (including Dave ‘The Rocket’ Ryding) have received Sport England support through TASS - five of which are current TASS-supported athletes enabling them to be in the very best of health as they embark on one of the biggest events of their careers.
Finally, as we look ahead to the winter Paralympics, we could not be prouder of the English athletes who will represent PGB as the spotlight shines on them from 6 March, I am particularly looking forward to seeing trailblazing English wheelchair curlers: Yorkshire’s Jo Butterfield, Newcastle’s Jason Kean, Wigan’s Karen Aspey and Northumbria’s Stewart Pimblett.
Collectively, they will make history as the first English curlers ever to take to the ice at the ‘winters’.
Their inspirational journey (look them up, their stories are remarkable) was enabled through an innovative partnership with British Curling, which saw Sport England invest in performance pathways in the sport for the very first time.
Best of luck to all our athletes. No need to ask you to make us proud. We already are.
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Children and young people today are creative, passionate, and full of potential.
Their energy and ambition feel hopeful in a world that often feels uncertain and unstable.
But they’re also facing new challenges: social media addiction, rising mental health concerns, climate anxiety.
In 2025, parents, teachers, and leaders across the country voiced concerns about a growing disconnect between online and offline life.
School absence is rising; wellbeing is worsening. And physical inactivity remains a stubborn problem: more than half of children aren’t active enough.
The inequalities are stark. Children from less affluent families are far less likely to be active than wealthier peers.
Girls remain less active than boys, and Black and Asian children are less likely to be active than White children.
If these trends continue at pace, we could be heading for a children’s health crisis within a decade.
The Youth Sport Trust’s (YST) Class of 2035 report warns that without robust action, we’ll see soaring screen time, rising obesity, disengagement from education, and more children diagnosed with diseases like Type 2 diabetes – a condition once almost exclusive to adulthood.
But this isn’t a story of despair, it’s a call to action.
And the good news? We are making progress - and 2025 was testament to this.
In December 2025, Sport England data shows children’s activity levels are now at their highest since the first Active Lives Survey in 2018.
Half a million more children are meeting the UK Chief Medical Officers’ guideline of 60 minutes of activity a day compared to seven years ago.
That’s thanks to the incredible work of schools, clubs, and community organisations and the people that run them.
Government action has also been integral.
The National Youth Strategy can be a landmark moment, creating more opportunities for young people to connect offline - and sport has a huge role to play.
Its emphasis on being shaped by young people is vital: policy done with young people, not to them.
The commitment to halt the decline in PE and ensure at least two hours of reimagined PE each week is another big step forward, as is the ambition to increase access to enrichment activities.
If these trends continue at pace, we could be heading for a children’s health crisis within a decade.
The new PE and School Sport Partnerships Network can build on past progress.
Campaigns like Let’s Move from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and YST’s Inclusion 2028 programme (funded by the Department for Education) show what’s possible when national leadership meets local delivery.
Let’s Move is inspiring families to get active together.
Inclusion 2028 is empowering children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) to thrive through PE, school sport, and physical activity.
These initiatives prove that inclusive change is possible - and it’s already happening.
All this is happening against the backdrop Sport England’s £250m investment in place-based partnerships across more than 90 communities.
Physical activity is often called the 'miracle cure' by medical experts - and for excellent reason.
It boosts physical and mental health, reduces stress and improves mood. And it’s a social salve too, helping to forge friendships and build connection across communities in the face of the polarising online world.
It’s also fantastic for people and the public purse; every £1 invested in community sport and activity generates over £4 for the economy and society.
School and community sport aren’t 'nice to have'; they’re essential for healthy development.
Research consistently shows us that active children are happier, more resilient and perform better at school.
And building good activity habits young is key for our country’s future health and wealth: active children are more likely to become active adults who enjoy better health, greater productivity and place less strain on the NHS.
That’s why we need to make movement easy and normal everywhere: in schools, communities, families, parks, and urban spaces.
This means working with partners beyond education, like UK Youth and community sport organisations, to embed activity into where young people live and socialise.
Sport England’s place partnerships have some fantastic examples of this happening from the ground up – from JU:MP in Braford to Move Together Blackpool.
Young people must be at the heart of this change. They want experiences that are fun and engaging; not just minutes of activity to be ticked off to hit targets.
Here’s what we think just some of the opportunities to achieve getting every child active in 2026 are:
By rethinking existing policy and being bold, we can create system-wide changes that deliver a healthier, happier future for every child.
Our mission is clear: to inspire a generation that loves to move by making physical activity and everyday movement a normal part of life - giving every child 60 minutes of PE, sport, and play every day.
This is a cornerstone of Youth Sport Trust’s Inspiring Changemakers, Building Belonging strategy and Sport England’s next phase of Uniting the Movement. Working with schools, communities and families, we will redouble our efforts to create experiences that build the foundations for an active life.
Together, we can create a future where every child and young person has the opportunity to move, connect and thrive through sport and physical activity.
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The Premier League, The FA and the Government’s Football Foundation, backed by us, is supporting the creation of more football clubs and organisations for women and girls in England.
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