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Opening School Facilities
ukactive are the qualitative evaluation partner for the third iteration of Opening Schools Facilities (OSF), running from October 2022-March 2025.
Opening Schools Facilities (OSF) is a Department for Education (DfE) school funding programme to meet the goals of the Government’s School Sport and Activity Action Plan (SSAAP). The aim is to help schools to open their existing sport facilities, including school swimming pools, for a broader range of young people and to support the wider community by partnering with sporting organisations, who can help deliver activities in these settings.
The three-year investment will ensure that local solutions are sought collaboratively that identify long term changes in behaviour, leading to more people being active in areas that need it the most. Led by the national network of Active Partnerships and supported by ukactive, StreetGames and the Youth Sport Trust, all nine regions of England will benefit from this programme.
There are certain objectives that the programme, these include:
- To support schools to open their facilities outside of the normal school day
- To open school swimming pools focusing on swimming and water safety lessons both during and outside the school day
- Participants are provided with a range of stimulating and enjoyable opportunities to take part in physical activity and sport (e.g., new and additional extra-curricular activities).
- Participants are signposted to take part in the same or similar activities in their local community, following the end of their participation in the programme.
The ukactive Research Institue are capturing youth voice through an in-depth qualitative data collection approach. We want to accurately tell rich and sensitive stories that reflect the complexity of lived experience of youth voice, and their relationship with engaging in the OSF programme. Youth voice is considered to have a bi-directional influence on systematic behaviour change, with the ability to influence both upwards (e.g. policy, national guidance) and downwards (e.g. directly to local community).
Qualitative data capture has been chosen because it allows us to tell rich and sensitive stories that reflect the complexity of lived experience of youth voice. This will span over entire delivery period of the OSF, and will involve: It will likely involve, but is not limited to:
- Immersive participatory fieldwork – first hand observing, participating and reflecting from the ukactive project team
- Regular participant input – from children and community users
- Observation of wider group members – from session leaders, teachers, and parents who have regular interaction with the children taking part
- Provide training opportunities focussing on data collection to the 43 APs
We will be communicating the findings in a way that resonates and represents the young people they are about and aim to do this through working with the youth representatives to share outputs in creative formats. Several different formats will be developed, including an evaluation report, case studies and video diaries.