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Have you made your #PledgeToPlay?

As National School Sports Week draws to a close, our senior manager children and young people highlights the ongoing importance of the latest campaign by the Youth Sports Trust.

23rd June 2023

by Charlie Crane
Senior manager children and young people, Sport England

If you’re a parent or you have children around, you know this is a busy part of the year.

As the summer holidays approach, diaries up and down the country are bursting with reminders of recitals, plays, school fairs and, of course, a Sport England favourite – sports days!

And in the midst of it all, this week has been National School Sports Week (NSSW), the flagship campaign by Youth Sport Trust’s (YST), one of our system partners and the UK charity aiming to improve young people’s education and development through sport and play.

This year’s campaign –  #PledgeToPlay – focuses on raising awareness of the Chief Medical Officers’ (CMO) recommendation that all children should be active for an average of at least 60 minutes a day, across the week.

A boy and a girl train on an open-air tennis field under the supervision of their coaches.

Our latest Active Lives Children and Young People research shows that children’s activity levels have recovered to pre-pandemic levels, however, only 47% of children are meeting CMO Guidelines.

So this year, the YST wants to raise awareness of the CMO guidelines by asking families, businesses and other organisations in the PE, school sport and physical activity sector to ‘play for fun, play for 60’ and take the #PledgeToPlay.

The campaign makes it very easy for pledgers by giving them access to a great collection of resources, including a weekly planner so that young people can take ownership and keep track of their active minutes.

Schools will also receive case study videos from other centres sharing how they have weaved physical activity into their school day.
 


This year’s campaign focuses on the Chief Medical Officers’ (CMO) recommendation that all children should be active for an average of at least 60 minutes a day, across the week.

As a parent, it only took me a minute to get my family signed up to the campaign.

Now I’m looking forward to trying some new activities as a family, like using a pop-up badminton set for the garden and helping my daughter - who is keen to learn how to skate (although her balance still needs some work, so wish us luck!).

I’ve also been raising awareness of #PledgeToPlay with my children’s local school, friends and family as this is a great excuse for everybody to give some new activities a go and be more active together.

As I mentioned, YST is one of our system partners, and they’re doing some fantastic work that aligns perfectly to our long-term strategy Uniting the Movement and one of it's big issues, providing positive experiences for children and young people.

The below are just a brief list of the many things YST have worked on and have contributed to our sector so far:

  • Involvement in our physical literacy consensus work and leadership in the education space
  • Positioning the Laura Lundy model as part of their approach to youth engagement in the recently launched Play their Way coaching campaign.
  • Proactively advocating for the contribution and value that sport, activity and play makes to the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people
  • Evolving the School Sport and Activity Sector Forum to bring together key stakeholders across this landscape to collaborate on systemic issues.
  • Exploring how they can work at a hyper-local level with schools, adopting place-based approaches.
  • Supporting the School Games Organiser network to put positive experiences and tackling inequalities at the heart of everything they do.

I’m proud to be supporting NSSW both as a parent and as part of the children and young people team at Sport England.

This campaign shines a spotlight on the importance and value of children and young people engaging and enjoying being active in school and communities. 

As a sector, campaigns like this are what unite us in our shared ambition to get children and young people to be more active, especially those who need the most support to take part in physical activity.

So whether you are a parent, a teacher, a coach or someone working within our sector, we hope you have made a #PledgeToPlay this week... and beyond.
 

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