We needed to focus on retention – how can we make the experience great? How can we help to shine a light on those providing brilliant experiences? How can we challenge some of the culturally resilient attitudes and beliefs that had come to become normalised in sport?
The sort of beliefs that accepted children being ‘encouraged’ to train for hours and hours at crazy times, children being selected and deselected for ‘elite squads’, children sitting through games as substitutes and not getting to play as much as others, children being forced to do laps, getting lectured or waiting in line, children having to do drills and only getting a game if ‘they behaved’.
But how do you address culture? How do you challenge the status quo when it’s so embedded?
There is an old African saying, ‘if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together’, and this was in the minds when we brought together a group of organisations that had all expressed a desire to address this challenge.
The ‘Children’s Coaching Collaborative’ was born.
Developing Play Their Way
We spent time working through the issues and one thing we found that kept coming up in the discussion was the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
A few of the articles jumped out: the right to play, the right to be heard, the right to appropriate education, the right to be free of discrimination and abuse.
These rights became our ‘truths’.
We looked for ways to articulate these ideals simply and embrace some of the other research we had explored.
We landed on ‘voice’, ‘choice’ and ‘journey’ – more on those later.
We call this way of thinking and being ‘Child-first coaching’ – it is an approach that is less ‘coach-created’ and more ‘co-created’, less ‘coach down’ more ‘child up’.
I would love to invite colleagues to be part of this movement and going to the ‘Support the movement’ tab on the Play Their Way website will allow you to access the digital toolkit and start to spread the word.
Child-first coaching
Play their way is a movement of child-first coaches, organisations and people changing the game from the ground up.
Child-first coaching is an evidence-informed approach that prioritises the fundamental rights of all children and young people in sport and activity.
There are three key ingredients of this approach which reflect the rights of children and young people to be heard, to play and to develop:
- Voice – space to share their views, which are acted on together in a meaningful way.
- Choice – they how they play and participate.
- Journey – they develop holistically, in their own way.
Long-term benefit
Coaches are the unsung heroes of our society, with evidence shows that children who receive coaching are 82% happier (Coaching in the UK, 2019).
We believe that building a grassroots movement of child-first coaches across the country is the key to getting more children active.
Many of the 2.6 million coaches across the country will already use a child-first approach and Play Their Way will further provide the support and resources they need to achieve our shared vision of increasing activity levels of children and young people, and giving more of them a positive experience of physical activity and sport.
Great coaching has the ability to inspire every young person. Our goal is for all children and young people to develop a genuine and lifelong love for being active.
Whether as parents, coaches or young people, we all have a role to play in helping create a huge cultural shift in the way we engage children in physical activity, to help them become healthier and happier and to develop them as people.
