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Four years of Uniting the Movement

How we’ve progressed over the last 12 months of our long-term strategy to transform lives through the power of sport and physical activity.

27th January 2025

Today we're marking four years since we launched Uniting the Movement, our 10-year mission to ensure everyone in England can access the transformative benefits of sport and physical activity.

The strategy describes our vision of a nation where people live happier, healthier and more fulfilled lives, and our role in bringing the sector together to achieve this. 

We continue to focus unashamedly on tackling the disparities in our society that make it harder for some people to reap the rewards of being active – because opportunities are still too dependent on your background, gender, bank balance and postcode.

A young boy chases a girl during a game of tag rugby, with both players sporting wide smiles.

And while our chief executive, Tim Hollingsworth, knows we’ve made great strides in the first four years of our strategy, he acknowledges there’s still much work to be done.

"As we near the halfway point of Uniting the Movement, we have a great deal to be proud of, both individually and collectively," he said.

"As an organisation, we’ve been the driving force for changing the narrative around sport’s potential and the way the sport and physical activity sector sees its purpose: bringing the focus squarely onto the tackling of inequalities in provision at every level and creating real change in how we invest the resources we have to support it.

"Alongside a more long-term, systemic relationship with major partners, our new single point of access to our funding has expanded its remit to new audiences, while we’re collaborating with partners in more and more local communities to ensure those in greatest need can be physically active. This is all backed up by a more targeted approach to our highly effective campaigns.

"We know our work is far from done. There are still too many people who feel excluded from sport and physical activity because the right options and opportunities aren’t there.

"However, as a sector, I believe that we are heading firmly in the right direction to bring about the change we desire. Created in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, I am personally proud of how Uniting the Movement is a strategy that still holds true to the ambition we set at launch: to ensure that everyone has an equal chance to be active – no matter who you are, where you come from or what your background is."

Uniting the Movement: what have we achieved?

Facts and figures illustrating our work towards achieving the goals of Uniting the Movement in 2024:

Infographic featuring facts and figures about Sport England's achievements in 2024.

In the last 12 months of our strategy, we have:

"I am personally proud of how Uniting the Movement is a strategy that still holds true to the ambition we set at launch: to ensure that everyone has an equal chance to be active – no matter who you are, where you come from or what your background is."

Tim Hollingsworth

Chief executive, Sport England

Place-based work

Working closely with places of greatest need has been a big part of our work over the last year. We’re continuing to expand our reach into local communities across England to help more people to be physically active by breaking down the barriers that get in the way.  

In collaboration with local partners, we’re investing up to £250 million of National Lottery and Exchequer funding into more than 90 Place Partnerships across England that have the highest inactivity levels and other social need indicators.

You can learn more about our work with the Get Doncaster Moving partnership in the video below.

Tackling the big issues

In our strategy we identified five big issues – areas where we see the greatest potential for preventing and tackling inequalities in sport and physical activity.

The following statistics illustrate some of the work we’ve done so far during the period of Uniting the Movement to address those issues:

  • Positive experiences for children and young people

    Physical literacy

    • Over 100 attendees participated in the Spotlight on Physical Literacy event (2023).
    • 90 partners joined the physical literacy working group, re-establishing the Ireland and UK Physical Literacy Forum after 10 years (2023–2024).
    • 51 applications received for the Patchwork Programme, with 12 interdisciplinary teams selected for co-designing movement initiatives (2024).

    Youth voice engagement

    • Engaged 79 partners and up to 80 young people through activities like the Youth Voice Design Jam (2023–2024).
    • 87% of Active Partnerships now focus on championing youth voice (2024).
    • Introduced the first-ever youth voice question into the Active Lives Children and Young People Survey (2024).
    • Influenced 793 responses from community organisations via a youth voice question in the Spring 2024 pulse survey.

    Play Their Way campaign

    • 78% of coaches reflected on their practices because of the campaign, and 75% were inspired to make changes, benefiting an estimated 89,000 children (2022–2023).

    Children and Young People Mental Health Evidence Review

    • Engaged 480 people from a variety of sectors in a webinar to announce the findings of the review undertaken by Edge Hill University, which shows the positive effects that sport and physical activity has on the diagnosed mental health problems of children and young people (2024).
    Read less
  • Connecting with health and wellbeing

    We Are Undefeatable campaign

    • 43% of people with long-term health conditions aware of the campaign reported taking action to become more active (2019–2024).

    Training healthcare professionals

    • Over 157,000 healthcare professionals accessed the Moving Healthcare Professionals programme resources (2019–2022).
    • An additional 4,200 healthcare professionals completed clinical champion training (2023–2024).

    NICE Guidelines Advocacy

    Local delivery pilots

    • 10 out of 12 pilots successfully integrated physical activity into health pathways (2022–2024).
    Read less
  • Active environments

    Green infrastructure and social prescribing

    • Nine events delivered in 2023/24 engaged over 250 professionals to promote forest-based activities for health and wellbeing (2023–2024).
    • River Cole Community Commons Project completed, creating a network of green spaces to encourage physical activity (2023).

    Infrastructure projects

    • 250 high-quality football and multi-sport projects funded, bringing the total to nearly 4,000 (2022–2023).

    Active Design

    • Active Design principles embedded in 14 local authority plans (2021–2022), with 11 more confirmed for adoption (2023).

    Playing Out campaign

    • Over 100 local authorities adopted play street policies, allowing residents to close streets for children’s play and physical activity (2022–2024).

    Environmental sustainability

    Read less
  • Recover and reinvent

    Workforce

    Due to our investment in local skills hubs:

    • 35 local skill accountability boards have been developed.
    • Almost 1,000 employers are undertaking training needs analysis, accounting for 80,000 employees in sport and physical activity.
    Read less

What impact has it had on activity levels?

Our Active Lives surveys show that there are two million more adults getting active on a regular basis through sport and physical activity than in 2016, while children and young people’s activity levels remained stable across the 2023-24 academic year

However, there are still major differences between demographic groups and places when it comes to activity levels, with women, those from lower socio-economic groups and Black and Asian people still less likely to be active than others.

This is why Uniting the Movement has such a strong focus on tackling those inequalities and why we’re investing more in the people and places that need extra support.

An older man holding a football talks to a girl in a sports hall.

Looking ahead to 2025

We’ll be focusing on fewer and more specific areas of policy to concentrate our work on the issues that matter most.

We’ll continue to target our efforts and investment towards areas of greatest need, and ensure what we do is clearly linked to the government’s health and opportunity missions.

We'll be launching a new leadership community to support decision-makers at every level to focus on tackling inequalities. 

And we’ll continue to work closely with our partners and government to advocate for the role of sport and physical activity in addressing the big issues in society.
 

Explore our strategy

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