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Boards spar over school sport
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The tense relationship between NOF and Sport England threatened to deteriorate into something more damaging during January, as Sport England officers were apparently advised officially not to share platforms, talk to NOF staff or take any part in stage 1 of NOF’s roll-out of its huge PE and Sport in Schools
programme. The effect, in London at least, was that local authority officers found themselves being invited to ‘rival’ seminars on the same
programme. As Honore Kitenge, Community and Commercial Partnerships Officer at Waltham Forest, said: ‘We were very confused. First NOF invited us to a PE and Sport seminar and then Sport England invited us to another one – they had to explain that it was the same scheme.’ Kitenge said an invited Sport England speaker did not turn up at the NOF seminar he attended.
Another seminar participant, Margaret Campbell from LB Havering, said: ‘It was all a bit silly. It hasn’t affected us, but it could do, were NOF to come up with a completely different set of criteria from Sport England.’
David Payne, Sport England Lottery director, dismissed the notion of ‘rival’ seminars. On the matter of advice to staff not to cooperate with NOF, he said: ‘We needed to be very careful about saying to people that we didn’t yet know how it was going to work. It has taken longer than it should have done to get a working agreement. But we have reached that now.’
Richard Hill, NOF’s head of policy, said: ‘We’ve been encouraging LEAs to take advice from a number of people including Sport England, who have lots of experience in this area. The message we’ve tried to send is that this is an inclusive programme.’
Sport England’s new chief executive, David Moffett, met with his counterpart from NOF, Stephen Dunmore, in mid January and agreed terms for working together on the programme.