Space for Sport and the Arts

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The lottery has been running another experimental cross-distributor scheme for the past three years, involving NOF, Sport England and ACE, together with the DCMS and the DfES. 

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Space for Sport and the Arts was a capital programme to build or renovate primary school sport and arts facilities in 65 of England’s most deprived authorities. Unlike Community Buildings, SSA was not exactly an ‘elective’ piece of joined-up work by the distributors, more a case of force-majeure by government, included within its ‘Sporting Future for All’ sports strategy. The lottery matched £65m of exchequer funding from DfES and DCMS with £55m of its own, split between Sport England (£25m), ACE (£5m) and NOF (£25m). Sport England administered the scheme, which was launched in October 2000.

Each LEA had an indicative allocation of between £1.25m and £3.5m, and had to develop proposals for its primaries, up to a maximum of £500,000 per school. The first awards for successful project bids were announced in March 2002; to date 20 of the 291 funded projects have been completed. All schemes should be finished by the end of 2003. The facilities will undergo evaluation through a 10-year impact study, for which MORI is to undertake the first phase of research. Applications were approved by a joint SSA board, comprising representatives from each distributor plus DfES, and chaired by DCMS.

Unlike the Community Buildings pilot, all the SSA funding went into a single pot, allowing the scheme to respond to priority needs without having to worry about one chunk or other of funding running out. As it turned out, 42% of projects had an even mix of sport and arts; 8% were all sport; 11% were all arts; 26% were mainly sport; and 13% mainly arts. One of the most innovative of the awards went to the Music Zone, a city-wide music education project in Plymouth, which was awarded £437,000 to build a new facility on the site of an old British Legion club in the heart of the regeneration zone. The building opened three months ago, and Matt Griffiths, director of Music Zone, is delighted at the extension to the work they can now do with children and young people