The core PfS objectives are: • raising achievement in literacy, numeracy and ICT; • encouraging independent learning; • improving motivation to learn; • developing self-esteem and confidence; • developing new skills. The five outcomes for young people set out in ‘Every Child Matters: Change for Children’ (2004) remain at the heart of the programmes offered through PfS. These are: • Be healthy • Stay safe • Enjoy and achieve • Make a positive contribution • Achieve economic well-being.

Many PfS centres offer extended learning opportunities in addition to the study support sessions that are their core purpose and have developed programmes using the same principles and ethos that underpin PfS. These range from daytime, holiday and weekend programmes offered to pupils (Key Stages 1 to 4), to family learning and mentor accreditation opportunities.

LAs are involving PfS more strategically to link up with other agendas and initiatives and provide a structured approach to supporting schools, children and young people. Everton FC’s PfS centre in Liverpool has linked with the football club, Healthy Schools, the NHS, the youth service, Parent Partnership, John Moores University and the LA to buy a Healthy Schools bus. The bus distributes resource packs and information to local schools to support the programme. It also offers opportunities for pupils, teachers and parents to take part in healthy eating demonstrations, cookery lessons and dietary advice with a nutritionist, and football coaching and related education activities.

For each aspect of ECM there are numerous activities on offer around the country:

Be healthy

Barnsley FC’s PfS centre, in partnership with Football in the Community, held four neighbourhood summer-learning activity days that benefited 200 pupils and their families. Activities included healthy active lifestyle, mental and physical challenges on computers and the astro turf, and a stadium treasure hunt, quiz and ground tour. At Aston Villa FC, Thomas Sorenson and Craig Gardner opened the Villa Park gym, leading the way to ensuring local school children become ‘fit, not fat’. Opened in conjunction with Birmingham NHS Primary Care Trust, The Villan Radio and the Villan Learning Zone PfS centre, this children’s gym is the first in the country at a Premiership ground. PfS centre students are encouraged to record their progress, to monitor their fitness levels and to use this information as part of the data-handling element of the PfS curriculum.

Keeper Sorenson, a Danish international, said: “I think the gym equipment is as good if not better than we use in training. It is a fantastic opportunity for the children to get fit and also to learn about a healthy lifestyle as part of their education.”

Craig Gardner said, “I advise people all the time what I do to train and it encourages them. They think that if it works for professionals it will work for them. Some of the lads at Villa have mentioned already that they will be popping into the gym when passing.” Delaware Adventure Zone for Learning (DAZL) combines sporting and physical activity into its programmes of study.

Stay safe

Many PfS centres, including Featherstone Rovers RLFC and Castleford Tigers, offer programmes tackling bullying, anti-social behaviour and the rise in knife culture. Wakefield Trinity Wildcats RLFC’s PfS centre offers an anti-bullying session at assembly in primary schools using the club mascot ‘Daddy Cool’. An accompanying video shows players giving key messages on how to deal with bullies.

Enjoy and achieve

 A fundamental principle underlying PfS is that pupils’ enjoyment of the programme is key to achievement. Feedback from pupils right across the spectrum of projects confirms this.

Make a positive contribution

PfS centres encourage their pupils to contribute to this aspect of ECM through mentoring and volunteering programmes, student councils, student-led graduation events, students involved in reviewing and planning future programmes and the anti-racism Kick it Out campaign. The Children’s Fund Ambassador Group of young people in Barnsley has worked alongside the club’s PfS centre and it is hoped that they will become volunteer mentors for PfS as part of its strategy to encourage young people to become more personally involved in education and their local communities.

Achieve economic well-being

Enterprise and business projects within the PfS curriculum utilise the club’s resources and pupils plan activities designed to monitor budgets and expenditure and to learn and understand the value of money. Schools are increasingly responding to the vision and principles of providing extended services by working in clusters to offer: • year-round high quality childcare, between 8am and 6pm; • a varied menu of study support activities; • parenting support; • swift and easy access to specialist support services; • wider community access.

Playing for Success can be an integral part of this offer, with opportunities for LAs to use the PfS model to support the core offer of extended services. The partnership between PfS and school clusters has made a positive impact in a number of areas including sharing resources and expertise, increasing support and recognition of achievements, encouraging communications and sharing vision and purpose. Recent NFER research indicates that the link back to school is important in developing and sustaining the longer term impact of the benefits of PfS. PfS centres provide a number of opportunities for pupils to build on and continue their skills through graduate and returner programmes and schools are building on the PfS ethos and personalised learning approaches by encouraging pupils to continue peer tutoring. Boston United FC’s PfS centre has developed a Year 8 programme with a local secondary school called ‘Onside – Offsite’ where PfS staff work with teachers as part of the school’s extended learning provision. Centre and school staff worked together to develop and plan a 10-week PfS pilot outreach programme at the school.

Batley Bulldogs RLFC’s PfS centre offers a Friday club at a community based PfS satellite centre involving two primary schools from a deprived area working together to improve pupils’ literacy and numeracy skills. Dewsbury Rams RLFC and Huddersfield Town FC’s PfS centres extend PfS outreach into neighbourhood learning centres and ethnic minority-based groups to promote community cohesion. Strategic links with school priorities have developed where PfS has made an impact and has influenced and provided activities that contribute to removing barriers to achievement, such as disaffection, crime and behaviour and establishing links to the wider community. Evidence of this can be seen in School Improvement Plans and Self-Evaluation Frameworks where PfS is included as a strategy to help to raise standards and to meet the outcomes of ECM as part of extended services. At LA level, PfS centres are being routinely visited as part of the Joint Area Review. The most recent PfS study by the NFER found that: “the ‘more effective centres’ were paying very detailed attention to liaison and partnership with schools, as well as to the quality of the programme provided at the centre. The study identified specific strategies adopted before, during and after the pupils attended PfS that helped pupils to transfer their learning to the school environment”.

Sport and the PfS curriculum

More sports than ever are now represented in PfS. While the basic premise of the initiative – to utilise the motivating power of sport to encourage learning – is consistent across all centres, each sport has developed in its own unique agenda.

Basketball

 The recently re-named Sheffield Sharks (formerly the Westfield Sharks) is the sport’s sole representative team in PfS. The PfS centre is located in its own building, situated very close to the club’s two playing venues. The centre reflects the fast-moving and exciting nature of the sport in the development and delivery of its curriculum. Strong emphasis is placed on bringing learning to life with a programme that includes activities involving the playing staff, many of whom are overseas university graduates. In recent years the club has developed an award-winning community education programme of which PfS is an integral element. The players who contribute as mentors help raise pupils’ aspirations and develop and extend the pupils’ knowledge of life. Future plans include developing a partnership with the National Basketball Association, the professional basketball league in the USA, which is opening a London office. One aim of this work will be to explore links with the North American and/or European leagues.

Horseracing

The context of a racecourse and racing provides many opportunities to develop a diverse PfS curriculum; children from inner city urban areas may never have seen a horse and this experience alone can be fascinating for them. The racecourse environment can provide an ideal stimulus for young inquisitive and imaginative minds. Resources include the racetrack itself, the weighing room and the paddock as well as the club and other ancillary facilities and activities. Numeracy opportunities include measuring the track, distance and weight conversions, speed/distance and time calculations for individual races and the concept of jockeys’ handicap. Horses’ journey and distance times to and from the racecourse can also be calculated and plotted. At Wolverhampton the children watch races, time the horses and calculate their speeds over the previously measured distance of the track. Inside the centre, pupils carry out budgeting exercises on the costs of owning their own horse using the internet and equestrian catalogues for research. The racecourse environment encourages literacy and descriptive writing. Pupils design hospitality brochures, create advertisements for special events, and, using digital film,record and write about a day in the life of a particular jockey or horse. Race commentaries provide an exciting resource for the students to gather new adjectives and figures of speech which they then use to write their own commentaries; these can be recorded on PCs as a podcast and are particularly successful activities for schools in boosting speaking and listening skills.

Adventure Centres

In Cornwall, two PfS centres have been established in Outdoor Education Centres, delivering literacy and numeracy using the curriculum of adventure activities. They are the Delaware Adventure Zone for Learning (DAZL) and Porthpean Outdoor Education Centre. Both centres believe that helping to build confidence and self-esteem is a high priority in motivating youngsters back into learning. Each centre has established outdoor classrooms that are used as an alternative environment for the pupils to work on their MacBooks with full access to wireless networks. The curriculum programme includes using archery in mental mathematics, poetry composed on night visits to Dartmoor as well as canoeing and coastal sea kayaking. Pupils monitor heart activity before, during and after abseiling, converting the data into graphs. The centres have been championed by Pete Goss MBE whose survival and sailing achievements are used as part of the curriculum. They followed his sea adventures last year as part of the Round Britain race and have received visits from polar explorers with their equipment.

Cricket

There are now ten PfS centres at County Cricket clubs. These centres use their own education resource, Cricket Explorer. This enables pupils to develop key geography skills through an interactive CD-rom based on clubs in the English County Cricket leagues. In addition, the centres have collaborated closely with npower to deliver npower cricket days and support the Urban Cricket Scheme. England cricket team tours often coincide with PfS term times and centres have taken advantage of this to link with Australia, the West Indies and Sri Lanka for cricket related projects. Specific projects in PfS centres include: ‘Cricket Roots’ at Kent County Cricket Club involving pupils researching overseas cricketers who have appeared for the county and then working with local calypso artist and former Zimbabwean test cricketer Henry Olonga to create and perform their own cricket calypsos. ‘Men Behaving Dadly’ at Yorkshire County Cricket Club involving father and sons who work together on a Saturday morning project to improve ICT and cricket skills as well as summer schools focusing on healthy and positive lifestyles. A sports wall built into the recently opened Derbyshire County Cricket Club enables pupils to develop mind alertness and fitness skills. Leicestershire County Cricket Club’s PfS learning centre has developed question and answer sessions, involving first team and academy players.

Ice Sports

There are currently three PfS centres based at ice centres, which use ice hockey, speed skating and ice dance to enhance their educational programmes. At the National Ice Centre in Nottingham, pupils have been able to experience and report on what it is like to wear the extremely bulky and heavy ice hockey kit and pupils have interviewed members of the Nottingham Panthers team and elite dance skaters. Pupils at Telford Tigers have produced videos focusing on a number of aspects of work at the ice rink including how the ice is made and maintained, figure skating attire and the meanings behind ice hockey terms. At the John Nike Leisuresport Complex pupils have been able to work with Bracknell Bees’ players and ski coaches on whom they have practised their interview techniques.

Water Sports

At the Ripple Effect Study Centre, based at Oulton Broad Water Sports Centre in Suffolk, pupils take part in kayaking or sailing sessions which helps to improve their self-confidence and self-esteem and provides a motivation for literacy activities which include producing a comic using Comic Life to encourage others to take up kayaking. Numeracy activities all have a practical element. These include racing model remote-controlled boats on the Broad where pupils time the races and calculate the averages, and rigging a sailing boat, measuring the different parts and then drawing a scaled diagram. Literacy activities include preparing and presenting weather forecasts for sailors, and producing an information video using photos, videos and notes gathered during a power boat tour of the Broad.

Tennis

The tennis-based PfS centres use a variety of approaches to develop key literacy, numeracy and ICT skills. At the All England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon many activities are inspired by a visit to the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum and a number of problem-solving and teamwork challenges have been designed, linked to the venue for example, pupils take part in an ACTIVote challenge as part of a stadium tour and undertake team memory challenges back at the centre. Pupils also take part in budgeting and spending challenges in the club shop. At Nottingham Tennis Centre, pupils have established a link with Jayant Mistry, Britain’s leading wheelchair tennis player, who has attended graduations and communicated with centre pupils via a blog on his website. Pupils have also been involved in creating promotional videos for The Nottingham Open and the PfS centre. At Thongsbridge Tennis Club, pupils use international tennis player itineraries to calculate the distances they must travel in the course of a season and have created a number of trivia quizzes based on questions such as the longest match, quantity of strawberries eaten and number of strings in a racket. They have also created adverts to promote the tennis club using Movie Maker.

Speedway Racing

The King’s Lynn Stars In March 2007, the King’s Lynn Stars Speedway Study Centre was officially opened by the Chairman of Norfolk County Council, Patrick Hacon. Speedway is used to motivate students with their literacy, numeracy and ICT through visits to the Norfolk Arena where they interview riders and managers. In preparation for the visit, students consider appropriate questions to obtain an accurate profile and, based on this work together with photographs, compile magazine articles using ‘Publisher’ software. They also produce PowerPoint presentations based on their research. The curriculum includes measuring the track, working out speed, distance and lap times and further numeracy work includes filling in programmes where bonus and accumulated scores have to be calculated. The centre enjoys strong support from the club, its riders and managers. Given the nature of the sport, the centre was keen to develop sessions supported by paramedics based on first aid and the use of protective clothing. These sessions are developed in consultation with Nathan Hollands, the Club Community Officer and are accredited; all students receive a certificate of participation at the termly celebration events held at the arena. Students acquire many new skills through the centre’s programme and return to school with renewed vigour, raised self-esteem and positive attitudes; this has been confirmed by many of the participating schools’ head teachers. Based on the success of this first speedway-based PfS centre, a second centre opened in Glasgow during the year.

Rugby

This year has seen continued development across the rugby club-based PfS centres.

Examples are:

 (i) An increase in the number of rugby PfS centres Five new clubs have been welcomed into PfS, two from Rugby Union (Worcester Warriors and North Walsham) and four from Rugby League (Doncaster Lakers, Hull Kingston Rovers, Keighley Cougars and Hunslet Hawks).

(ii) The ‘Tackle Learning’ resource pack Good use continues to be made of this PfS resource pack, particularly at Bath Rugby, Northampton Saints and the Viking Learning Centre at North Walsham RUFC. In addition, Newcastle Falcons has a community worker with the sole responsibility of delivering Tackle Learning activities to schools.

(iii) Developing new practices for PfS programmes These include: • the introduction of three-hour sessions at a number of centres including the Cornish Pirates, which help to address the challenges of transport across a rural catchment area; • improved communication between centres and schools in Bath and Wakefield through the introduction of e-mail newsletters; • introducing the Higher Level Teaching Assistant qualification (HLTA) for a centre worker at Bath; • Key Stage 3 pupils mentoring the Key Stage 2 programme at Hull KR; • international links between Leicester Tigers PfS centre and schools in New Zealand; • video conferencing across the Hunslet, Bradford, Wakefield and Featherstone centres.

(iv) An increase in daytime programmes New programmes include anger management and counselling support for pupils at risk of exclusion at Bath RFC, a community cohesion programme at Batley bringing a mainly Asian boys’ high school to work with a largely white mixed high school to create a website on the subject of bullying, and mini PfS programmes for Key Stage 2 pupils at Dewsbury Rams and Batley Bulldogs.

(v) Collaborative practices with the host club This takes two forms. First, the programmes promoted by the centre and club’s community team work together to respond to identified local needs. The initiatives that target pupils at risk of disaffection at Northampton Saints and Rotherham Titans are one example, whilst another is the joint summer camps and summer schools arranged at Wakefield Wildcats. Secondly, there are programmes that promote and support the club, for example, the daytime Gifted and Talented programme at Bradford Bulls which offers pupils the challenge of promoting a forthcoming Super League match. In addition, such is the value placed upon PfS at Featherstone, that the centre manager is now an associate member of the club’s board of directors.

Motor Racing

Pupils who attend Silverstone’s PfS centre experience a tour of the press box, control room, pit stops and medical centre and have their photographs taken celebrating on the Formula 1 podium. Curriculum sessions include opportunities to create race commentaries for a Formula 1 race using iMovie, designing tracks, ‘hot seating’ drivers and mechanics and group challenges such as building the tallest control towers. The ‘Top Gear’ challenge includes internet research around the cars at Silverstone to create a three-minute film based on the programme style, using the centre’s video resources. Pupils also construct robot cars using ‘Robolab’ to complete additional challenges that the pupils find exhilarating and motivating, including 360-degree spins, manoeuvring into different parking spaces and accelerating up ramps.

Football

Football Playing for Success centres were first established in partnership with football clubs using the sport as the context for learning. Most PfS centres in football clubs incorporate a tour of the ground in their learning programmes and the clubs, where possible, offer tickets to first team matches; in addition, first team players contribute in a number of different ways including being interviewed by the pupils. Burnley FC’s PfS centre rewards pupils’ attendance with two match tickets each, while at the PfS centre at Chelsea FC, goalkeeper Carlo Cudicini and ex-defender turned football pundit Graeme Le Saux presented awards to pupils at their celebration event. At a number of PfS centres player appearances are evolving into player involvement, for example at West Bromwich Albion FC’s PfS centre international players are encouraged to speak their native language during interviews and newly-arrived pupils have acted as translators. Double Club resources are updated on a weekly basis to reflect breaking news at their partner clubs and young people also use current newspapers as a stimulus to learn. Liverpool FC’s PfS centre has a dedicated curriculum development officer whose role is to constantly update and evolve a learning programme reflecting up-tothe- minute events and activities both on and off the pitch. Northampton Town FC’s PfS centre (The Cobblers) encourages young people to play a virtual football match on the centre’s Playstation that is used as a stimulus to then draft a match report from the press seats in the stadium. At Oldham Athletics FC’s PfS centre, and in response to pupils’ feedback, animation has featured more regularly in its learning programme; similarly, in response to the personalised learning agenda, Leyton Orient FC’s PfS centre gives pupils the option to design a PowerPoint presentation, a website and to produce a dance track or film a clay animation.

Stockport County FC’s PfS centre has a sound-proofed media room enabling it to further develop its curriculum through the creative use of digital film and radio. Pupils are able to record podcasts, create animated films and storyboard mini-movies in a football based environment. Football analogies are used within sessions across PfS centres, offering pupils a ‘half time’ break, ‘full time’ reports and, at Preston North End FC’s PfS centre, earning ‘away goals’ for achievements back in their school.

Athletics

The addition of athletics has brought increased diversity and inclusion to PfS, as access to, and participation in, the sport attracts a broad sweep of society. An example of this is the fact that many more girls and women gain recognition and media attention through athletics than in other sports, providing female role models to inspire and motivate. There are now two PfS centres partnered with athletics clubs. Both clubs have a very successful history and have embraced the PfS ethos as an extension to their community work. The first centre was the Green Zone, partnered with Sale Harriers Manchester Athletic Club, and opened by Olympic champion Darren Campbell, and the second centre to open was at Lee Valley Athletics Centre. The increasing profile of Paralympics events has helped to raise pupils’ awareness and understanding of disability. PfS pupils and parents from the Green Zone attended the Visa Paralympics World Cup in Manchester this year, where amongst other events they watched Dame Tanni Grey- Thompson compete for the last time and saw Oscar Pistorius win the100 metres race. It was an immensely inspirational experience, giving rise to overwhelming support and admiration from the entire crowd. The Sale Harriers Manchester and Lee Valley PfS centres are keen to extend the ethos of support through partnership work including visits and shared curriculum activities. The centre managers work together to harness the growing enthusiasm and excitement of the Olympics 2012 to motivate PfS pupils through athletics.