London Sport, on behalf of the Department for Education (DfE), distributed the Opening Schools Facilities (OSF) Fund across London from 2023 to 2025. The programme was designed to help schools open their existing sport facilities, including school swimming pools, to a broader range of young people and the wider community by partnering with sporting organisations.
In total across all three funding rounds in London the OSF programme:
- Funded 195 schools (vs target of 151) from 29 boroughs
- Supported a total of 1,048 projects
- Delivered a total of 24,064 sport and physical activity sessions
- Exceeded participation targets for children and young people (30,605 vs 29,167)
- Partially met participation targets for community users (3,880 vs 9,723)
- The most popular activities that schools wanted to fund from OSF were multi-sports, football, basketball, table tennis, swimming, dance, and boxing
Our learnings:
- Funding could be targeted more strategically: Use desk research to identify ‘gaps’ where there are fewer facilities for local residents to be active.
- Schools need support to open facilities: Considerations need to be made when opening to the wider community – such as security and accessibility.
- Many settings need funding for capital repairs: Schools could not spend OSF funding on capital repairs, which would be needed to open their facilities. Consider adapting the grant funding programme to remove this restriction.
- Schools need support to identify coaches and organisational users: There is an opportunity for local councils or other organisations, like London Sport, to act as a convenor and/or introduce local coaches or organisations.
- Administrative demands on schools should be costed: OSF can lead to additional administrative work for schools. Programme funders should consider incorporating administrative costs into funding applications. External lettings organisations provide an alternative, but there are costs associated. Organisations such as London Sport could support schools who are managing their facilities in-house by providing a checklist of policies or best practice examples.
- Future project management arrangements should allow more time for application review and invoice processing: Tasks such as processing invoices or reviewing applications are resource heavy. Build in time to the project plan for such ‘pinch points’.