Today we spoke to Steven Beharall who is competition manager for Newcastle School Sport Partnership. He outlined how they are utilising Active throughout their SSP and also his views as a Competition Manager.

How does Newcastle SSP use Active?

We’re using it as part of our Primary Schools Intervention strategy to target any of the schools in the Newcastle area that are falling below the 41% competition participation average in order to raise that statistic to 60% and over.

What kind of competitions are being set?

One of the PESSYP questions this year raised the issue of how regularly competitions were taking place.  When using Active to target a failing school, Steve sets a virtual competition for skipping consisting of 3 rounds (1 min skip per round).  The highest score is then taken to be representative of the school’s score so that the primary schools have taken part in both Intra and Inter competitive school sports.  Using Active for the skipping competition solves several issues that failing schools often have with competitive sports:

• Cost of equipment
• Cost of travel
• Unable to provide teachers that have the skills to supervise

With these competitions:

• All you need is a timer and a skipping rope
• You can do it in school grounds, within your own schedule
• Any teacher can supervise

What about the future?

Although Steve emphasizes that he doesn’t want to see school sports taking a departure from the social interactive side of competitive sports, he also insists that ‘virtual competitions are the only truly sustainable type of competition’, because it breaks down so many barriers:

• Buy the package as a whole
• No transport costs
• No organisational costs
• Reaches out to people that are marginalized by traditional forms of competitive sports

Widening Participation

Steve is also involved with the Tyne and Wear Disability Sports Forum.  He sees virtual competition as the perfect means to get students with disabilities involved with sports, especially students who are in attendance at mainstream schools and are not given the time and resources to take part at a grass-roots level.