UPDATES

School Swimming & Water Safety

School Swimming & Water Safety sits within the core Lead Inclusion School offer this year. To support you in your role, Kelly has created this video explaining the key requirements and what you will be asked to report on.

Termly Reporting

You will have recently received your unique termly reporting link so you can start to fill in the survey. The deadline for this term is Thursday 19 December. Please ensure the survey is fully complete and submitted by this deadline. Any questions, please email [email protected].

Ask Research QR Code

A reminder to please share this website link or QR code with the partners and schools you work with so they can provide feedback to ASK Research on the Inclusion 24 programme. For example, teachers attending your inclusive sport festivals can fill this in whilst at the event. This information helps ASK Research produce a report on the impact of the programme, demonstrating the great work you do around the country.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Inclusion Live 2025 – Bookings are now open!

Our fourth Inclusion Live week takes place between Monday 27 January and Friday 31 January 2025. Each day we will host a free online session of virtual CPD for all practitioners working with young people with SEND.

The five sessions are:

• Monday 27 January 2025, 15:30-16:30 - Neurodiversity in PE and school sport - Creating inclusive experiences
• Tuesday 28 January 2025, 15:30-16:30 - The Paralympics legacy - Embedding inclusive values in school sport
• Wednesday 29 January 2025, 15:30-16:30 - Physical activity for progress - Improving attendance and behaviour
• Thursday 30 January 2025, 15:30-16:30 - A practitioner’s guide to inclusive physical activity - Resources and recommendations
• Friday 31 January 2025, 12:15-13:15 - Move like me - Creating inclusive physical activities for young people with SEND

You can sign up to each event here. We have also created a toolkit of graphics and text templates that you can use to promote the week to your networks. You can access the toolkit here, but this is only for Lead Inclusion Schools.

Please use this toolkit to spread the word and follow the @YouthSportTrust social media accounts for speaker announcements nearer the time.

Monthly Networking Calls November Hot Topic: Termly Reporting

For this month’s networking calls we will be focusing on termly reporting, with ASK Research joining us to help answer any of your questions. Although we do have a hot topic this month, if you have any questions or updates you would like to share unrelated to termly reporting we would still love to hear them!

• Lead Inclusion School Networking Call, Tuesday 19 November, 12pm. Sign up here.
• Lead Inclusion School Networking Call, Thursday 21 November, 3:45pm. Sign up here. 

SEND Shooting Stars

Please continue to share the links with your networks to sign up to these training sessions.

• SEND Shooting Stars (2) - Thursday 5 December, 2:30-4:30pm, Virtual. Please share with your networks. Sign up here.
• SEND Shooting Stars (3) - Tuesday 11 February, 2:30-4:30pm, Virtual. Please share with your networks. Sign up here.

Special Olympics Coach Webinar Series this December

These webinars aim to help elevate your knowledge and insight around inclusive sports coaching. They are free and include two inclusive coach education webinars and four sport specific adapted coaching workshops.

Inclusive Coach Dducation Webinars:

• Tuesday 3 December- Athlete Centered Coaching, with Dr Rebecca Shangraw
• Thursday 5 December- Good Coaching Practices, with ICOACHKIDS

Sport Specific Workshops:

• Monday 9 December 9 - Floorball, with Steen Houman
• Tuesday 10 December - Badminton, with Badminton World Federation
• Wednesday 11 December - Swimming, with Michael Phelps Foundation
• Thursday 12 December - Athletics, with World Athletics

You can register for these events here. 

RESOURCES

Neurodiverse Young People and Inclusion 2024

The ‘promoting inclusion for neurodiverse young people’ toolkit co-created with Neurodiverse Sport has now been released! This provides an overview of neurodiversity and key top tips to create an inclusive environment in PE and school sport for neurodivergent young people to support teachers, coaches, teaching assistants, SGOs and wider coaches in their practice. We will also be featuring this toolkit during a workshop in our Inclusion Live week. You can find the toolkit here.

All About Autism

All About Autism E-Learning is now live again on our website! You can access the All About Autism E-Learning Course here. 

Diabetes Support

JDRF is a global Type 1 Diabetes charity with a range of resources to support schools, parents and carers, and coaches with delivering physical activity to children with diabetes. We have highlighted a few resources below which may be of interest to you and your schools:

Football and diabetes resource pack 
Schools pack
Diabetes fact sheet developed in collaboration with the LTA 
Free CPD certified e-learning module for schools 

New Disability Football Strategy 'Football Without Limits'

The FA have announced their new four-year strategy for disability football in England, setting out plans to grow disability football participation by more than a third. There are seven key pillars within their long-term plan. To help achieve this, they aim to provide further opportunities for disabled people to have access to local grassroots clubs tailored to their needs, including upscaling the new Comets programme. You can find out more about the strategy here.

OPPORTUNITIES

Swim England Assessment Tool

As part of the Inclusion 2024 project, Swim England has been working with an organisation called Sporting Insights to produce an online assessment tool for schools and swimming lesson providers.

The aim of the assessment tool is to allow swimming lesson providers and schools opportunity to identify the strengths of their school swimming programme and to recognise any areas of potential development. The assessment tool is an online survey which will take approximately 10 to 15 minutes to complete.

Swim England is requesting the support of the Lead Inclusion Schools to complete the survey and to identify if there are any challenges/areas for improvement; we are anticipating initial teething problems with this tool which we will aim to improve/develop.

The long-term aim is for the survey to be available for all schools and swimming lesson providers, to support schools and lesson providers with future collaborative work and to support with the overall improvement of school swimming. To complete the survey please register here. 

Panathlon

The Youth Sport Trust Inclusion Leads in schools across the country are working with Panathlon to provide competitive sporting opportunities for young people with a range of additional needs. In Cumbria, there has been a notable uptake. During the 2023/24 academic year, across the county Panathlon operated a series of events across 32 days, attracting 1,625 competitors and 397 young leaders for a total of 2023 participants involved in face-to-face activity - with another 329 involved in virtual activity. All told, that is a grand total of 2,352 young people taking part altogether.

Karen Erikson who is the Inclusion DC for the area had this to say:

"The Sporting landscape remit has changed, and it is about targeting inequalities and offering more opportunities. Panathlon do that. Once they've experienced Panathlon, they see the joy that young people get from it and how capable they are, because one of the best things about Panathlon, even though it's a team event, it's still about personal best. The activities are fun and the children just love it. Once staff see that, they really want to be a part of it.

In the months after the pandemic our Lead Inclusion School in Cumbria, William Howard invited Panathlon to the school to help deliver a multi-sports event for the county, which has run every year since. The school now works with Panathlon and Active Cumbria to run a whole range of events.

To enable our students to go out and have all these sports opportunities makes a massive difference, and they often find things they're really good at, and they can excel at, and they can experience success which they are maybe not experiencing elsewhere, and it just means so much to them.”

Panathlon works with a large number of Lead Inclusion Schools across England to develop opportunities and increase participation for young people with SEND. For further information on how to get involved please contact Tony Waymouth, COO by email [email protected].