Can it be true that there are new, radical moves at play across all levels of sport based on a fresh, innovative philosophy: allowing sport to be fun again? In the buildup to the first Ashes Test, Ben Stokes revealed the philosophy and culture of the England cricket team’s turnaround has been to “make it as fun as you can”. No mention of sophisticated marginal gains or advanced data analytics. And at the other end of sport, there are serious (and long overdue) moves to boost children’s activity levels through improving how youngsters experience sport.
Sport England recently launched a national campaign, Play Their Way, to put “children’s enjoyment at the heart of all sport and physical activity”. But the fact we need a national campaign to do this offers a damning indictment of the state of youth sport and activity. What has gone wrong, what have we learned, and what is actually going to make this work?
The Youth Sport Trust recently published its annual report, hammering home the fact that our children are unhealthier, unhappier and more distracted than ever – and desperately in need of regular activity to help them with all aspects of their physical, mental and emotional development.
Less than half of young people in England are meeting minimum physical activity levels and PE hours have fallen in the last decade (alongside the number of PE teachers). We need to wake up to the consequences of how children are experiencing sport, if they are experiencing it at all. Access and opportunities to get active are too narrow with costs and financial barriers increasing. Many are turned away or turned off by predominant talent‑identification, trialling and selection processes, and elite programmes at an ever-younger age.
Too often, youth sport has become about adult priorities and anxieties. In a world where adults usually lead sports sessions, an approach of treating children in sport like mini-adults has evolved over recent decades.
When I embarked on the path to trialling for the Olympic team after leaving university, I remember national coaches telling me: “Don’t expect to have fun. This is serious now. You’ll have fun when you reach the top step of the podium.” I naively thought that this must be the route to high performance. A gymnast parent told me her daughter was told to get serious at the age of four. But this narrative has an increasingly hollow and sinister ring to it, particularly with the reminder from double Olympic champion Adam Peaty, who recently spoke out about his mental health challenges and declared: “Gold medals won’t solve my problems.”
Do we actually understand what putting fun into activity for young people involves any more? In one research study into the causes of fun in sport, the top answers were: trying hard, positive team dynamics and positive coaching. There’s no mention of winning, selection or talent here – for children, it’s all about the experience and their development journey.
But what will make this campaign more successful than past efforts to engage the next generation in activity? There’s one really important principle behind the work of the passionate, forward‑thinking coaches, educators and advocates in the Children’s Coaching Collaborative (CCC) who sit at the heart of the Play Their Way campaign – they focus on putting the child’s voice first, respecting their decisions, whatever “talent” level or age group, underpinned by a rights-based framework.
Child-first coaching is recognised by UK Coaching (the national coaching body) as the best, evidence‑informed way to prioritise the fundamental rights of all children and young people in sport and activity. There are three key ingredients underpinned by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: for the child’s voice to be heard; for them to choose how they play; and for them to be supported to develop as the key ongoing objective (ie it is not just about making the top team or talent pathway).
Debbie Sayers, founder and coach at Salisbury Rovers FC, is a member of the CCC. She was determined to create a fundamentally different option for her son to play football, having been appalled by what was on offer – children receiving instructions repeatedly shouted at them, stuck playing in certain positions with touchline parenting and coaching creating a toxic environment with a myopic focus on winning.
Salisbury Rovers lives and breathes a child-centred approach, basing activities around the needs of the children, framed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. “We believe that any child who wants to get better at anything needs to love what they do and be driven by their own self-motivation, not the desires of others.” Uninhibited by the way children have been coached to play football over decades, Sayers developed a child-led (rather than coach-fed) play model that put the motivation of children front and centre. She is now rightly in demand to feed into future thinking at the highest levels of Fifa, the FA and Sport England. At the club itself, demand to play is greater than they can accommodate.
Gone are endless dribbling drills around cones, in are tag games, street football games, scenario games, child‑led games and lots of free play. Coaches are encouraged to use questions, not give direction, with the overriding warning: “If you intervene, you better be adding value!”
The CCC is quietly trying to bring about a revolution in coaching in order to change how young people experience being active and transform the culture of sport. It’s simple, though not easy, to implement and requires us to challenge accepted practice. It fits into shifts at elite levels too, to reimagine performance sport, as Stokes and his team are doing. Play Their Way opens up the opportunity to create not just a healthier, more active nation, but also to develop future citizens with a voice, respect for others and the determination to make a contribution.
Cath Bishop is a former Olympic rower, leadership and culture coach, adviser to The True Athlete Project and author of The Long Win.
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