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Strategic outcomes planning and leisure services delivery

Our Strategic Outcomes Planning and Leisure Services Delivery guidance documents help you to make effective investments into facilities and services, as well as capital projects.

A strategic approach to sport and physical activity services and provision, which identifies and delivers local priorities, can make such a difference. A clear, strategic and sustainable approach to guide you when developing capital projects can play an important role in making sure investments into services and facilities are effective. 

Our guidance explores the key principles and important aspects of delivering strategic plans for leisure provisions and services, from the all-important early vision through to design, procurement and sustainable operation.

Girls guarding shooter during basketball game

Strategic Outcomes Planning Guidance 

In order to make an effective investment into facilities and services, it’s essential to have a clear, strategic and sustainable approach to sport and physical activity. While all local authorities will have some or most of this work in place, this cannot be a ‘one size fits all’ approach. 

Our Strategic Outcomes Planning Guidance is designed to help you create a focus and vision on local outcomes informed by customer insight. This will deliver interventions that affect behavioural change in your target audience, ultimately delivering the desired results for your local authority. 

The guidance describes the bespoke approach required to ensure investment best meets local strategic outcomes and the needs of your community. Split across four stages, it seeks to provide key principles to support your journey,  while recognising the resourcing challenges facing local authorities. The four stages are outcomes, insight, interventions and commitment.

At each stage, the guidance signposts where additional help or advice can be found, dependent on the local authority’s current circumstances. This could be at the beginning of a commissioning cycle, at the change of a political administration, or when new facilities or service deliveries are required.

Read our full guidance on how to ensure your investment best meets local strategic outcomes and the needs of your community.

Leisure Services Delivery Guidance

Alongside making effective investments in capital projects, ensuring good quality, affordable sport and leisure facilities are also important in getting more people active and tackling multifaceted issues such as educational attainment, obesity and social isolation.

With that in mind, it's vital for local authorities to select the most appropriate facility management model and ensure it's delivered in the best possible manner.

The LSDG is a walkthrough of the different facility management options available to local authorities. It aims to help you adopt a strategic approach to investment in sport so you can to deliver desired local outcomes in a financially sustainable way.

Moving Communities

Along with the government, we recognise the vital role gyms and leisure centres play in helping people to be active.

In order to fully understand this role, we’ve developed the Moving Communities tool to track participation at public leisure facilities and provide new evidence to monitor the sector’s performance, sustainability and social value.

The Moving Communities tool is the first and largest data set ever gathered on the local leisure sector.

This data will assist local authorities, leisure providers and policymakers to support the recovery of public gyms and leisure centres, taking informed decisions about where time, effort and money is best invested in order to benefit local communities and the audiences that need the most help.

Find out more

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