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Centre of Social Justice in Sport and Society
Active Through Football (ATF) is a £10m national five-year physical activity programme from Sport England, funded by the National Lottery and managed by The Football Foundation.
Active Through Football (ATF) is a £10m national five-year physical activity programme from Sport England, funded by the National Lottery and managed by The Football Foundation. The strategic goal of the programme is to increase participation in physical activity in areas of deprivation in England through a ‘place-based approach’, whilst also using the programme as a basis for addressing locally defined social issues through sport.
The programme funds 25 project areas, each of which are managed locally by a lead organisation and a consortium of stakeholders. There is no prescribed ‘one size fits all’ model of local ATF delivery. Instead, local programmes are resourced to engage in ongoing community engagement, thereby ensuring that the development and delivery of physical activity opportunities and prioritisation of social issues are tailored to a specific place.
The challenge for the research team is to understand ‘what works and why, for whom, and in what circumstances’, enabling the impact of ATF to be demonstrated at both local and national levels, and with learning for other place-based interventions shared nationally.
The research team were appointed as national evaluation and learning partner to The Football Foundation with the primary aim of understanding how ‘place-based’ working has enabled local ATF programmes to successfully engage individuals and groups in deprived communities in physical activity, as well as how programmes also address locally defined social issues through their provision.
The team are working with The Football Foundation, Sport England, other key strategic partners, as well as each of the local ATF programmes to implement place-specific evaluation and learning plans to establish the overall national impact of ATF. The team are driven by an approach to evaluation that enables practitioners and policymakers to understand not only if a project has an impact, but how and why (or why not!), with learning shared in an informative and accessible way. They have utilised a range of robust and creative evaluation techniques to capture impact, including for example, innovative Ripple Effect Mapping – a collaborative and visual method for identifying ‘pathways to impact’.
The teams approach enables a deep understanding of the key processes underpinning impactful place-based work, shared in a way that is accessible and informative for others who want to adopt this way of working in the future.
Evidencing the impact of sport for development programmes
In the first phase of their work the team have produced the ‘Active Through Football ‘Playbook’: a guide to place-based physical activity interventions’. This resource provides an evidence-based manual, detailing how to design and implement place-based physical activity interventions in diverse communities. This resource will support ongoing programme delivery and future interventions.
The team have also successfully piloted the use of Ripple Effect Mapping techniques as a novel participatory technique for understanding programme outcomes and pathways to impact. This has enabled local programmes to understand, not only if their work is having the desired impact, but how and why impact occurs.
Over the next three years, the team will continue working with each of the 25 local ATF programmes to combine robust quantitative data collection with rich qualitative insights; enabling each unique project to ‘tell their impact story’, whilst also demonstrating the overall impact of this significant national investment.
Both the ‘Active Through Football Playbook’ and ‘Ripple Effect Mapping’ reports will be made publicly available by The Football Foundation shortly.
A number of other outputs for academic publications are currently in the process of being peer-reviewed and will be made available soon.
The Ripple Effects Mapping workshop was a great opportunity for us as a team to regroup, take a step back and see how far we have come. We hadn’t realised just how much work we had done, seeing it all mapped out on a timeline with the various impacts was a really great moment for our whole team to think about all our hard work… We are still referring back to that session and that map now to think about our ongoing work today as it has helped us to see which of our activities have been highly impactful.
The research process has given me the opportunity to learn about how I do things and how what I am doing is impacting other peoples’ lives in a beneficial way… I truly believe that without the research component of the project and LBU’s involvement, we would have been just talking quantitatively about numbers of participants or value for money, without focussing on powerful examples of qualitative impacts. The LBU team has really helped us to explore some of the powerful local stories we have here.
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