Over the last few years, since Active Humber has delivered its Sporting Context Survey we have received amazing numbers of responses allowing us to assess the health of sports clubs, organisations and individual providers. From these responses, it was evident that these 'contexts' as we call them, wanted and needed training and support in areas such as marketing, attracting participants and more. Comments from clubs included ones such as "we need more easily accessible training to fit around work for volunteers". The Humber has issues as people travelling for training is more challenging with it being large and the Humber making it more difficult to navigate. Face to face courses are cancelled and it's the usual suspects attending.
We wanted more people to access training, learning and development. But not formal training, such as a three hour course in club management; that doesn't need to be attended by everyone in the club. I saw the training that was needed differently, more relaxed and bitesize. But I knew that face-to-face courses just weren't being attended.
Also, there are so many great resources online and through key organisations, but as clubs told us "they're volunteers" and "lead busy lives", do they have time on an evening to trawl the internet looking for information? So, how can we as experts impart the help they need to work through the best and most up to date information. Online learning was taking off and more people using it, but again, the training the I personally had done, was very individual with the tutor maybe an actor reading off an autocue. Or very text driven making it easy to skim and find the 'next' button.
I wanted something engaging and fresh. Something that can be watched un-begrudgingly and in under one hour. That inspired people to make a couple of changes to their sessions or organisations. That used experts in their field and examples from closer to home so that our contexts and workforce can hear from someone like them. But it needs to be interactive and reflective, so the tutor will be asking questions and setting tasks. Use of a discussion board and hints to watch the content with someone else or at a club training session. And then those key resources and links that can be kept for when someone needs a refresher.
In April 2019 Active Humber were successful with a collaboration bid with the other Yorkshire Active Partnerships to Sport England and received funding to explore and develop an online learning tool. Yorkshire & Humber Learning Community was created. As we're approaching a launch date, we've live modules including;
Using Facebook to Increase your Membership
GDPR and your Club
Raising the Issue about a Healthy Weight
Understanding Young People and Getting them Active
Engaging Women & Girls in Sport and Physical Activity
With Strengthening your Club through Volunteers coming for the launch.
We've also linked to the Primary Premium work and host a range of learning opportunities for PE teacher and Leads. We've also worked with an external organisation who wanted to get their learning to clubs and schools and have been able to work with us to create the Raising the Issue module.
Watch this space when we launch, and we want feedback and ideas for more modules so we really can make it a fit for purpose resource. Happy learning!
Robin Lavin, Workforce Development Manager
