PROJECT BACKGROUND
London Sport, on behalf of the Department for Education (DfE), distributed the Opening Schools Facilities (OSF) Fund across London from 2023-2025.
The programme was designed to help schools open their existing sport facilities, including school swimming pools, for a broader range of young people and the wider community by partnering with sporting organisations to help deliver activities in these settings.
The programme has involved three funding rounds:
Round 1: January 2023 – March 2023
Round 2: April 2023 – March 2024
Round 3: April 2024 – March 2025
In total across all three funding rounds in London, the OSF programme funded 195 schools, supporting a total of 1,048 projects to deliver a total of 24,064 sport and physical activity sessions.
Young people: over 30,000 taking part on 480,000 occasions
community users: over 3,800 individuals taking part on 36,000 occasions.
Key Findings
The main barriers reported to opening school facilities include:
- Needing to purchase fixed equipment (e.g. fixed outdoor gym equipment or pitch re-surfacing) and not being able to (as per the funding guidance from the Department for Education).
- Making repairs to sport facilities (e.g. court markings).
- Making repairs to school facilities to aid opening sport facilities (e.g. to school infrastructure, fixing fences, providing more storage, or providing access systems).
- Buying additional sports and activity equipment (e.g. balls, moveable nets, bats).
- Staff capacity/resourcing (e.g. paying staff overtime – out of hours opening).
- Developing a stronger community offer.
- Being able to open school facilities after-school hours, in holidays, and at weekends.
- Viability: Costs vs profit (e.g. operational costs, staffing costs, business planning).
Click the button below to read the rest of this report