In 2009, Sport England ran a pilot called Sporting Ltd, they sought to identify a programme for young people that would change behaviour around taking part in sport on a regular basis. Following the evaluation this programme, the new programme Sportivate was developed as the Olympic Legacy programme through Sport England. The programme was a 12-week sport specific provision for young people aged 14 to 25. The programme was coordinated through the 45 Active Partnerships (formerly County Sports Partnerships), and we secured the tender for the programme evaluation and impact assessment. Our approach in partnership with our technical providers Nemesis, provided a real-time monitoring of the programme....
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Active Partnerships inputted the attendance data into the online portal, which updated the providers details, participants names, demographic profiles and attendance rates. The initial tender aimed to target 125,000 participants, however the programme at the end of the seven years had over 900,000 participants. In the first year, we identified that most of the programmes were engaging ‘low hanging fruit’ i.e. 15-year-old boys participating in football activity. Because of the real time nature of the evaluation reporting that we were providing, we quickly advised Sport England that this provision needed to change if an impact on underrepresentation was to take place....
In working with Sport England, we identified the need to develop a measure to identify the impact of the programme, in particular behaviour change. We developed the sporty – semi sporty – non-sporty model. We built into the portal a longitudinal assessment of participants, to identify whether they were still participating in the activity three, six and nine months following the programme intervention. We also asked participants to assess themselves; whether they were sporty – semi-sporty – non-sporty, as the target group highlighted it was non-sporty people. The research model identified a movement of 10% from non-sporty to semi-sporty and the same from semi -sporty to sporty in the longitudinal assessment. This model has influenced how Sport England assess across all activity programmes....
Throughout the life cycle of the programme, a number of case studies of good practice were developed. One of these was specifically looking at female activity and this case study identified that although young females wish to participate in physical activity, their participation was more likely when they joined a club or a group activity. We also recorded the effectiveness of piggybacking on the back of major initiatives, such as This Girl Can programmes. The 900,000 participants recorded on the Sportivate portal is the largest whole participation population programme ever collected by Sport England and provides ongoing data analysis to compare and contrast with other programmes. The video and case studies are still used today! The methodology through qualitative and quantitative research that we undertook in this programme has led us to be seen as experts in the interpretation of data in a sports development context....
