Sport England has claimed that its multi-million pound This Girl Can advertising campaign has helped drive an increase in the number of women playing sport, amid continued scrutiny of the promised London 2012 legacy.
Following a slump in the number of people playing sport at least once a week that caused the sports minister Tracey Crouch to launch a wholesale strategy review, an increase of 148,700 in the number of women participating helped return the numbers to where they were a year ago. A total of 15.74 million people aged 14 and over played sport at least once a week in the 12 months to the end of September.
“This represents a stabilisation. If we want another big jump we need to move on. We need to do some different things,” said Jennie Price, the Sport England chief executive, before a new Department of Culture, Media and Sport strategy due to be published next week.
It is expected to put more emphasis on exercise and activity at the expense of formal sport, while also introducing new measurement mechanisms and targeting sport’s ability to achieve social change. That would represent a shift in focus from the current strategy of pouring more than half its money through sports governing bodies.
The Sport England figures published on Thursday show that participation figures among lower socio-economic groups and the disabled are failing to rise. They show 25.9% of people in the lowest socio-economic groups play sport once a week, a marginal increase on the 25.7% recorded in June 2015. This compares to more affluent socio-economic groups where 39.1% of people are now active.
Sport England’s £325m annual funding was largely protected in the government’s recent comprehensive spending review but with huge cuts of up to 56% to local authority budgets, there are fears that grassroots facilities and programmes will be negatively impacted.
The biggest increase, according to Sport England’s Active People survey, was in the number of people running, up by 98,700 to 2.3 million. Cricket, tennis, gymnastics, boxing and rugby union also recorded increases.
The number of people swimming, down by 39,000 to just over 2.5 million, continued to fall – the sport has lost around 500,000 participants since Sport England began measuring in 2005 – and football recorded the biggest fall of 66,000.
Much of the rise in participants in sports like athletics has been driven by organisations such as Park Run and mass-participation events that receive little Sport England funding.
Price insisted that Sport England’s new approach, likely to be unveiled after the government announces its sports strategy, would be able to shift the dial among lower socio-economic groups despite cuts to local authority budgets.
“When we really zero in to a particular part of the population and do something quite intensive and quite novel, it is possible to change,” she said, referring to the This Girl Can campaign. “If we were to apply the same kind of thinking, working with a different range of partners, we can make a difference.”
The Lawn Tennis Association, under pressure following Andy Murray’s comments in the wake of Great Britain’s Davis Cup victory, said that a modest increase in participation following years of decline was evidence that its strategy was bearing fruit.
“We welcome today’s APS figures which provide some encouraging news around our weekly and monthly participation figures across the last year,” said the chief executive Michael Downey. “That said, we also recognise there is still a lot of work to do to grow our game and we will continue to work closely with those partners to deliver on our mission of bringing tennis into more communities, schools and clubs, and growing the game in this country.”
