As a sport we are very fortunate to have people who are passionate about Volleyball in leadership roles in other sporting organisations.

One such individual is Will Roberts, player, coach and Chair of Newcastle Staffs Volleyball Club, but also Chief Operating Officer at the Youth Sport Trust.

Here he shares the role Youth Sport Trust played in securing the Primary School PE and Sport Premium and how clubs might be able to link to primary schools to provide a fun volleyball experience.

Primary School PE and Sport Premium

I’ve have been asked to comment in both a professional and club perspective on the announcement made on the continuation of the Primary School PE and Sport Premium which DfE confirmed on Sunday 5th July.

The Youth Sport Trust played a central role in lobbying for the continuation of this funding which goes to all primary schools in England to be spent on PE and Sport, and we really welcome it. PE, school sport, play and physical activity are fundamental to the physical, social and emotional health of young people – and whilst the government has a focus on school outcome measures that reduce the breadth of the curriculum and put huge pressure on school leaders, our YouGov polling of parents of Primary and Secondary School young people this spring (pre-Covid19 lockdown) made very clear that parents are more concerned with the health and happiness of their children than their exam results. Further, there is compelling evidence that poor wellbeing outcomes for young people reduce their ability to learn – so we should be pushing on an open door for more activity in schools. Our priorities for the spending of the Premium are:

• Sustainability so schools are not reliant on outsourcing their PE delivery 

• Up-skilling of every teacher to be able to deliver high quality PE 

• Quality Assurance checks of any deliverer in the PE or School Sport in your schoo

As a club, this is not something we have ever done a great deal with. The de-centralisation on monies directly to schools since 2010 makes it much harder than it was prior to then when the School Sports Partnerships were in place and we could build a relationship with one Partnership Development Manager for all schools in the Newcastle-under-Lyme area – instead of now looking at having to do this with multiple primary schools one by one. That said, my advice to any club looking to help Primary School aged children fall in love with our sport would be as follows:

• If it isn’t fun, forget it. Don’t try to build volleyball players, but use volleyball to create fun activity that the children fall in love with and want more.

• Don’t try to ‘get into PE lessons’ but do support schools and teachers to include appropriate development volleyball into the curriculum. Put on a course in the small sided games we developed back in the early-mid 2000’s when I was working for Volleyball England and that were recently updated. But respect PE and teaching – it is not the same as coaching!

• If as a club you don’t have volunteers that can run a Primary School session 3-15pm-4pm – look into local private coaching companies that have relationships with schools. Perhaps you can develop a partnership with them whereby you up-skill their coaches, they deliver in schools as part of the package they provide, and they sign-post young people to your club as a result