Darllenwch y dudalen hon yn Cymraeg

The Sport Wales’ School Sport Survey will be back in 2018 and preparations are well underway for the April launch date.

The Team heading up the project which last round saw 116,000 youngsters share their views on physical activity in Wales, have been busy consulting with partners on potential changes and improvements.

Senior Insight Officer, Lauren Carter-Davies, talked us through the Survey and planned improvements…

The School Sport Survey is a brilliant opportunity for children and young people across Wales  to have their say on sport and wellbeing.  At a time when we are encouraging the population to give their views and opinions on this subject through the My Welsh Sport Conversation, it couldn’t be more important that we are providing our children with the ability to also do so.

In 2015 almost 1000 schools took part which is brilliant, and we want to see even more get involved this time round. With this in mind we’ve been looking at how we can make participation in the survey easier for schools in 2018.

Earlier this year, we sought feedback from a range of partners including schools, Local Authorities, National Governing Bodies of Sport, and Estyn. The review suggested that we could improve the school participation questionnaires by shortening the length and making the language more child-friendly.

In response to this feedback we plan to create one short, easy read participation questionnaire for all pupils in primary and secondary schools. This proposal will mean that all pupils will answer the same number of questions regardless of how many sports they do, and that the questionnaire is much shorter and simpler.

We will retain as many of the questions as possible, specifically those used by our partners and schools for planning purposes. Those that will stay include questions on frequency of extracurricular and community club sports participation, sports club membership, latent demand, and sport and wellbeing.

We will of course need to lose some questions from the traditional participation questionnaires, for example those on participation in competitive sport, places for sport outside of school, family and friends participation, other leisure time activities and active travel. These questions have been selected as they appear to be the least valuable in terms of offering useful information for planning purposes.

In response to partner feedback we also plan to add fishing, snow sports, fitness classes, squash and weightlifting to the list of sports for all ages in the participation survey.

The School Sport Survey process is a team effort which requires support from Local Authority Sport Development teams, schools, Young Ambassadors and pupils themselves.  We very much hope that these changes will make it simpler for all involved to provide the opportunities for young people to have their say on sport and wellbeing in Wales.

Further support and resources to help our partners prepare for the survey will be provided before it’s launched in April 2018.

If you would like to feedback on the proposed changes or have any questions, please email schoolsportsurvey@sport.wales by Friday 22nd December 2017.

Post by, Lauren Carter-Davies, Sport Wales