SportScotland 'Active Schools' event

Speaking very briefly at a SportsScotland Active Schools event later this morning ... more details about the event can be found at this Scottish Executive news link.

Patricia Ferguson MSP (Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport) was the principal guest and speaker and I'm pretty amazed by the increase in primary school participation, as she announced and you can read via the news link above.

My prompt notes were relatively brief, and follow below, but do also indicate a hugely successful couple of years for Active Schools in Edinburgh:

• I should start by thanking the Minister, and Scottish Executive, and Stewart, and SportScotland, for their funding and partnership support for the Active Schools programme. It is very much a partnership and the success in Edinburgh simply would not have happened without the support of the Executive and SportScotland
• And very briefly, it’s that success of the ActiveSchool programme in Edinburgh that I want to touch on – just to try and make ‘real’ the very significant impact and benefits of the programme for one part of Scotland – I’m certain what I’m about to illustrate has been replicated all over the country
• The ActiveSchools programme has been running for some 2-years now in Edinburgh
• I cannot stress enough, that although entitled ActiveSchools, the programme has had a much wider community impact through links that have ensured participation in a wide variety of activities has continued into the after-school hours and weekends
• In this way the 'changes in choices' that young people are making about their activities are indeed being embedded into their wider community lives and not just being given up at the school gate
• The funding for the programme has enabled Edinburgh to have an ActiveSchool team of some 16 full-time primary co-ordinators, 23 part-time secondary coordinators and 2 Additional Support Needs coordinators
• This has led to a very wide range of activities being on offer, not just the traditional football and hockey but climbing, sailing, dancing and many, many more alternatives
• The programme, in just the one year of 2006, has led directly to the participation of literally tens of thousands (over 40,000) of Edinburgh’s young people in a variety of some 33 different activities
• 55% of the participants have been male and 45% female
• and over 1,200 people have helped physically deliver the programme, with over half of that number being volunteers
• there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the vast majority of these tens of thousands of young people simply would not have had access to such a variety of opportunities had the ActiveSchools programme not been running
• it is relatively straightforward, as I’ve briefly done, to quantify actual participant numbers in the programme in Edinburgh – it’s much more difficult to quantify the benefits, both physical and emotional, of the scale of participation that the ActiveSchools programme has allowed in Edinburgh. It will be of vast, long-term benefit … of that there can be little doubt
• So, I very much welcome the ongoing support of the Executive and SportsScotland in the ActiveSchools programme and do hope that it will continue over the coming years so that Edinburgh – and the rest of Scotland – can build on the undoubted success of our first two years.

... not sure about putting this much text in an entry, but it is an interesting success story ;-)