CASE STUDY: POOLE AND PARKSTONE GRAMMAR SCHOOLS
nis provision in her area last year. “Our tennis activities at nearby schools, since our involve-
S
ment with the AEGON Teacher Training programme, have primarily been led by the girls from Parkstone Grammar School, although my Young Ambassadors from the boys’ school have also been a part of the delivery team,” says Wheatley. “This team includes 60 sports leaders from years 10 to 13. The ease with which the activities have been delivered in schools has been due to the easy access to appropriate equipment, the willingness and ability of the sports leaders and the encourage- ment received from the Tennis Foundation (TF). “One of the activities the sports leaders have helped to run is
the tennis activity afternoons, which target every year two pu- pil in eight local primary schools (600 in total). Using an AEGON
chool Sport Partnership co-ordinator for Poole Grammar School for Boys and Parkstone Grammar School for Girls, Deborah Wheatley, won the AEGON award for School Ten-
equipment bag with activity ideas based on the ‘tennis activity week’ resource available from the TF website, each event allows 60-70 children to try six tennis-related activities in a fun and challenging way within an inter-school competition format. “The sports leaders also helped co-ordinate the year three
and the year four AEGON tennis competitions – comprising a total of 70 participants from five local schools and officiated by year seven sport leaders from Hamworthy Middle School and Talbot Combined School. “Students from the languages department at Parkstone
Grammar School also helped year three children link tennis with simple vocabulary from six different countries, at a tennis festival on National Olympic Day last year. Each primary school represented a different country, made representative flags and took part in an Olympic-style march past. The children were awarded points for using both their language and tennis skills during the event, both contributing to their overall team score.”
Sport leaders in Poole, Dorset, helped to organise tennis activity afternoons and inter-school competitions
the hope that teachers would be able to pick them up and run with them,” he explains. “We had a team of 15 teach- ers involved in shaping the programme’s content to what’s actually required with- in a school environment and being aware of the barriers and confines – such as large groups of children working around the piano and nativity play props in the school hall,” he says.
Healthy competition Part of the original School Tennis strat- egy was to develop a sophisticated competition framework, which included a (already fairly established) national strand as well as a local strand. These are delivered by the YST field team and competition manager network in
Issue 1 2011 © cybertrek 2011
partnership with the LTA county- based field teams. “Basically com-
petition is a performance measure to see how well you do against someone else, which is a great motivator to stay with the game,” Regan explains. “Our priority age groups are years three and four at primary level and years seven and eight at secondary level – although we also of- fer the tools to deliver the sport to other age groups. Over 41,000 children took part in dedicated inter-school competi- tions in the last academic year, showing a year on year growth of 14 per cent.” Well aware that the younger a child is
introduced to a sport, the more chance there is for them to progress through the
performance frame-
work, Regan says the TF, working with field teams, clubs and coaches, makes sure the talent attraction takes place within the school gates and that talent ID and development takes place within the Places to Play. “When I first started in this role, the YST accused the LTA of only being interested in cherry picking the talented kids. Now we’re very much focussed on the whole school agenda to get every child involved and encouraged to link with affordable places to play – where everybody has an opportunity to get involved with the sport.” ●
Read Sports Management online
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