Ahead of an event organised by our children and young people leads on Tuesday, I’ve been thinking about my journey from Youth Sport Development Officer (1998) to here. I’ve been involved in the work to support active lives for children for my whole career in lots of different ways and roles.
I have been asked to provide a short introduction to a workshop where we will consider the best of what has been in the children and young people area of work, before we look ahead and vision what is needed next and why.
As a born-again evangelist for journey mapping and ripple mapping, it has become quite the norm for me to reflect in this way. I have been around a while, it turns out!
The process of mapping a timeline, thinking about the key events, approaches, catalysts, points of friction and challenge over the years is so revealing.
I invite you to think about your role in the children and young people work and plot yourself on this timeline. Of course, this diagram doesn’t include every project or programme, or every approach we took. But it was a wonderful trip down memory lane. It reminded me of the very best work I have done and been involved in, in this area, and the very worst too.
But there is no failure, as we know. It’s all learning and it all evolves and folds into our future work. Especially if we take time to notice what happened, what difference it made, and what could be better in the future.
As we collectively evolve and mature our approaches to tackling inactivity and inequalities for children and young people, it is too easy to fall into the trap of assuming that when we say ‘what we did wasn’t working, so we need a new approach‘, that means that “everything we did was rubbish, we didn’t learn anything and we need to throw it all away and start afresh“. This is NOT TRUE.
This mindset can be an unintended consequence of having the courage to confront the realities of our limited impact at scale to date. There are systemic and structural inequalities that remain and our children and young people are experiencing inequalities and inactivity. So, yes. We do need new approaches. And we need to nurture and compost the best of what has been, into the future world we grow and create.
Part of my role on Tuesday, is to help us remember that together;
- We have done brilliant work to support children and young people’s activity over the years and we have changed lives and developed things that are still keeping children active nearly 30 years later.
- We also need to develop more holistic, whole of system approaches to build on and expand on what we have started.
- We need to understand the best of the approaches we have developed and delivered, so we don’t lose them as our new approaches mature.
AND, we need to be honest with ourselves and courageous enough to recognise that:
- The dominant worldview that created the prevailing culture of PE, youth sport and physical activity opportunity over the years has been traumatising for some, excluding for others and has served to reinforce cultural norms that drive inequality.
- The approach we have taken has been too narrow, and we need to widen the lens to address ALL the influences on children and young people’s movement.
- We have collectively perpetuated myths, assumptions, beliefs and mindsets that have held the problems of inactivity and inequality firmly in place.
But we have a huge opportunity now, with some emerging ways of thinking and leading this work that hold so much potential for change at scale and pace if we compost the best nutrients and let a thousands flowers bloom.
Just now, I am most excited about the potential of:
- The physical literacy consensus statement and it’s potential to change mindsets and beliefs about children and young people’s relationship with movement over their lives.
- The wider lens on our work with schools. Creating Active Schools as a framework, offers the opportunity to support all children and young people to move every day and enjoy a positive relationship with movement. It moves us beyond a narrow PE and programmes approach to something that holds so much potential for change.
- The opportunity to take a longer term view- aligned with the Healthy Britain Report and the ‘wellbeing of future generations’ thinking. This would be a game-changer.
- The recognition that there are many aligned missions that are all integrated and support a healthier, happier, greener planet and future for all children.
- The power of the crowd: there are believers and influencers for this work everywhere in local and national networks and communities. The opportunity that our networks of active education leads, voluntary and community sector youth organisations, our Bee Well team, the local place based teams, our health leaders working on children’s mental health and many many more. People with common purpose on aligned missions are changing the world.
I’ve used this diagram for a while. It’s called the two loops model by the Berkana Institute and it has helped me to understand and hold my nerve with our whole approach to GM Moving, and some specific areas of work within it, where old systems needed to ‘die off’ and new needed to emerge under the protection of greenhouses to protect them from the harsh elements.
There are repeated patterns in the processes of emergence that the two loops model clearly explains. It works really well alongside appreciative enquiry as we get to work with strengths and assets, identifying the best of what has been, and composting it into the soil to grow the future we need to create.
This video describes and explains it well.
Last week I was given a great guide to the two loops model that I’ve seen. It is effectively a ‘how to’ guide that we can follow in all our work. Much of this, we are doing already, but I am looking forward to Tuesday’s discussions about how we do this more intentionally.
“The two loops model is a tool for structuring the change from an old system to a new one. It lets you see the growing and decline of one way of doing things, and how the emergent new pattern can look like, and those two interconnectedness“.
“There is no incremental change where the same thing changes and continues on forever, there is rather discontinuous change that presents an structure shift. This means there is one thing that dies at the same time as something new starts to live. We need to look as much on the new emerging system as we much handle and take care of the old system, making the decline more smooth and with less resistance and crisis”.
I love this slide as it helps us to see how we need to create the conditions for the new to emerge. It’s possible to see how the best of our previous approaches on my journey map above, can be absorbed into the new, emerging, alternative approaches that better support cultural, systemic and structural change to support current and future generations.
What is emerging that needs to be named, connected, nourished and illuminated?
For me this includes:
- The need for a whole systems approach to children and young people’s health and wellbeing.
- The need to work on all the myriad influences on our children’s wellbeing and the role of movement within that.
- The need to name and work on the structural and systemic inequalities that hold the problems in place
- Change the culture of PE and Sport
- Recognise that the current culture excludes, traumatises and inhibits many children and young people.
- Name the inequalities that exist and persist and take positive action to address them: poverty, homophobia, class discrimination, gender stereotypes and much more.
- Shine a light on critical work and approaches that need to become the norm: trauma informed approaches, equity and social justice in the work, youth voice and lived experience in everything we do. Deep codesign and coproduction. Shifting power to young people to design and influence their own healthy futures.
The tough bit
And what needs to be allowed to die off? This is a question for us all to reflect on. I’m pretty sure that when we look back on our journey and hold the mirror up, most of us will see things we did, beliefs we held or approaches we took that were part of the problem. Many will lie beneath the surface in the beliefs, assumptions, mindsets, worldviews that dominated and that we consciously or subconsciously perpetuated.
Some will be in the way we worked, or were driven to work in a culture of competition, measurement and targets.
These will have influenced the approaches we took that reinforced stereotypes, inequalities, patterns, and trends that shaped the activities and events that we designed. I know I was part of the problem, when I look back. Despite the fact I also did some brilliant work that sustains itself today.
I can reflect on the early work I did as a Youth Sport Development Officer, then a Sports Development Officer for a whole borough, working with top down national programmes and learning how to create the conditions for them to respond to the needs and aspirations of people and communities rather than dictate to people what they should do and get.
I learnt so much in my early career that helps me today. I remember the points of friction, tension and challenge as a new culture and way of working clashed with entrenched, competitive, traditional approaches to PE, school sport and club development.
I also recognise that I had no influence or involvement then on active travel, or health systems. But I did connect closely with parks, open spaces, the national park, outdoor education, youth services and other sectors more naturally as part of the council. These relationships and connections across departments and sectors are vital to protect or re-grow where they have been lost.
I am looking forward to this workshop.
I wonder if I can find an old Millennium Youth Games t-shirt somewhere. We argued for ages over the boundaries and branding for those! I definitely have a painting jumper with a school sport partnership logo on somewhere.
I’m sure there is still a TOP Play bag in the out of school activity club at my local primary school. 20+ years ago I delivered TOPS training to midday supervisors (probably called dinner ladies then), after school club staff, football and cricket club coaches, teachers and teaching assistants). Those people are still some of the biggest supporters of active children and young people in my community today.
That is worth celebrating and illuminating, for sure.
I will need to be careful that my team and the audience don’t get bored with my stories of these past times.
It’s good to look back and learn, and it’s also time to move forwards together. They have brilliant ideas and approaches. They have better insight and understanding and are more deeply committed to tackling inequalities that I was back then.
We all know more, understand more, can be more honest- and we care deeply.
The next generation are leading the way to the future for future generations to thrive, my role is to help compost.
Hayley Lever 