Blog: Rob Wright |
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Plymouth SSP News
sent on behalf of Colin Moore, Assistant Director
To all Headteachers and Principals
Dear colleagues
Planning is now well underway for the single sports partnership for the city. The Headteacher Group that is guiding the establishment of the single Plymouth Sports Partnership have met today and agreed a clear vision and strategy for the future partnership from September 2011 addressing equality of opportunity for Plymouth. This will build on the successful features of the two existing partnerships and create a single structure to deliver high quality sport for this city.
The structure will comprise new leadership roles and a team that will deliver a wide variety of opportunity for children in Plymouth. The aim is to create a new more flexible offer making the best use of the reduced funding available but also outward looking to bring additional funding into the city.
The steering group will ensure that there is clear evidence of value for money and impact. The group is confident that the model for the partnership will provide successful school sports provision for the city.
Further details and specific information concerning the offer to schools will follow.
Group members: Wendy Brett, David Farmer, Daisy Bailey, Kevin Norris and Nigel Sparrow.
Colin Moore
Assistant Director (Lifelong Learning)
Services for Children and Young People
Plymouth City Council
Plymouth PL1 2AA
Tel: (01752) 307464
Fax: (01752) 307462
Email: col.moore@plymouth.gov.uk
www.plymouth.gov.uk
The End of an Era!?
The Plymstock SSP will close at the end of the summer term 2011. Our Competition Manager and Gym CSC will be made redundant on 01/04/11. Today the PDM, Assistant PDM, SSCo's for DHSB, DHSG, Lipson and Heles and our Rowing CSC have been given notice that they will be made redundant on 31/08/11. The inclusion of our rowing coach in this list in a week when we have held the biggest ever Plymouth Schools Indoor Rowing Championships, secured £10,000 partnership funding for the 11/12 academic year from British Rowing for this post and seen the current post holder short listed for the Devon Coach of the Year Awards sends out a very clear message.
We are immensely proud of everything that we have achieved and hope that the new Plymouth SSP will choose to sustain at least some of our work. We also hope that we will be able to honour all the commitments we have made for the remainder of the academic year. The strategic steering group of Head teachers and Local Authority Officers will decide what this partnership will look like. Any colleagues who would like to influence this should speak to their Head Teacher. If Heads do not make their feelings clear to this group, now, they risk loosing most of the opportunities we are providing!
On a personal note I would like to thank everyone who has supported our work over the last 9 years, it has been a privilege to work with you. I would also like to apologize for failing to secure a sustainable legacy for all the outstanding work you have done. Sadly my attempts to secure the support of political leaders and local decision makers have been ineffective, .We have a very clear vision for the future which is realistic and achievable and will find out in the next few weeks if any or all of it will be able to happen. .
Plymouth SSP's to continue after 01/09/11!
We are heartened to hear that senior leaders in the city have allocated some financial support to help the work of the SSP's continue. In return for this support they have agreed that the city is best served by a single SSP with a strategic steering group.
This group will need to be balanced to include representation from both the current SSP's which have evolved in different ways over time. The Heads from all three of the city's Sports Colleges [It is essential we remember to include our Special School Sports College] should be invited to be part of the group [their support has allowed us to achieve what we have] with Senior Officers from both Education and Leisure and a Primary Head from each of the current partnerships. This model would ensure that the best parts of the existing partnerships are sustained as far as is possible with the new model.
When deciding where and how the Plymouth SSP will be hosted consideration needs to be given to the logistical support that is vital to make this work successful. The governors at Plymstock School have been outstanding in this respect, not just providing office space, administrative support and storage space for partnership resources but also being prepared to employ staff carrying out partnership work when the schools they directly impacted on were unable to. In 2002 before the school became a Sports College Plymstock agreed to host the PDM and offer to employ the SSCo's who worked at Sir John Hunt, Tamarside, Stoke Damerel and Parkside schools. Since the expansion of the programme in 2005 these schools have taken on this responsibility themselves but Plymstock still employ SSCo's for DHSB, DHSG, Lipson and Heles.
The new world in which we are operating may require all secondary schools to employ their SSCo themselves but will still need an organisation to employ the rest of the staff team that could include a PDM, Competition Manager and some Community Sports Coaches. These post holders will need to be based where the resources they are operating are kept, they will also require office space and administrative support. The key decision makers need to understand that If the governors of Plymstock School are willing to continue to support this work there is no other organisation in the city in a better position with a better record of supporting partner schools who can make this happen..
A speedy decision needs to be made about the range of services, activities and professional expertise the Plymouth SSP will offer if we are to sustain the best parts of the existing partnerships and move forward. When senior leaders have decided what is going to happen and cost how they will do this we will know what can be offered to the Children and Young People we support for the next financial year.
Our vision has been set out in previous news stories and blogs on this site. We have a clear vision and a strategy designed to achieve it, we believe that vision without action is dreaming, action without vision is passing time, but action with vision can change lives. We ask to be judged on our record, which is peerless, and implore the senior officers and others who decide our future to consider the above points!
The Department for Education Notice to SSP's and it's impact for our Partnership.
The e-mail below was sent to all SSP's over the Christmas Holiday;
21 December 2010 School Sport Partnerships
We promised to write to you about funding for school sport partnerships beyond February 2011; please accept our apologies that communication has been delayed. Thank you for your e-mails and calls about the issues involved; we appreciate the uncertainty you have faced, and the difficulties with planning and staffing. As you may already have seen, the Secretary of State announced, yesterday, his plans for school sport up to, and beyond, the end of this financial year. We hope that this factual note is helpful in setting out the position.
School year 2010/11.
He has confirmed funding of £47 million to school sport partnerships from the existing sport budget for financial year 2010-11, which covers the remainder of the spring term and the summer term also. This grant is for the purpose of providing physical education and sport, particularly to embed good practice from the previous Administration’s PE and Sport Strategy and to introduce new sport competitions for more pupils as part of the Coalition Government’s School Games.
The grant to partnerships will be calculated on the basis of the cost of: · Partnership Development Managers (PDMs); Assistant PDMs; School Sport Co-ordinators (SSCos); FE Sport Co-ordinators (FESCos); and Primary Link Teachers (PLTs) for the remainder of the spring term (up to 30 April 2011); and · PDMs; Assistant PDMs; SSCos; and FESCos for the summer term (up to 31 August 2011).
Competition managers
The cost of competition managers is not met through the grant to school sport partnerships. The Department paid the various local authorities and schools that employ competition managers at the beginning of the financial year 2010-11, as the final year of the previous spending period. The Department has no plans to fund competition managers in the next spending period from 2011, beyond March 2011.
School year 2011/12 and beyond.
As you know, the Secretary of State has announced that he will not continue to provide ring-fenced funding for school sport partnerships beyond the summer term 2011. Instead, he is making available £65 million of new funding for schools to provide more competitive sport for their pupils. This funding will be for secondary schools to release a PE teacher from timetable for one day a week in the school years 2011/12 and 2012/13. You can find further details of the Secretary of State's announcement at http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/pressnotices/a0071098/a-new-approach-for-school-sports-decentralising-power-incentivising-competition-trusting-teachers. The Department will announce further details about this in due course.
Please circulate this email to all schools in your partnership and to any other people who need to know.
Ian Broadbridge
PE and Sport Team
Department for Education
More of the specific details behind the government's plans will be confirmed in the New Year. However as can be seen above we will be loosing the services of our Competition Manager from the end of March 2011 at a time when schools will be expected to introduce new sport competitions for more pupils. We will also no longer have PLT funding after the Easter Holiday.The above changes will have implications for the work programmes and plans of all SSP schools for this academic year and the future of other infrastructure posts.
We hope 'Our vision for the Plymstock Partnership for 2011-14' will become operational at the start of the summer term. SSP Primary Age Schools need to review their plans for the summer term as they will not have funding from the partnership to support some of the activities which have taken place in previous years. The work of the Competiton Manager will be divided amongst the SSCo team, who will also have a sharper focus on Change4Life Sports Clubs and Bikeability, which will be suported for the rest of this Parliment. The government plans for the 2012 Legacy also include the SSP continuing to provide CPD for Primary Schools.
We are working hard to ensure that the amazing difference that the SSP makes to the education of the 18,000 Children and Young People attending partnership schools is sustained and that schools who will be loosing their support in the future can also benefit from our offer if they wish to. We hope to be able to have this confirmed during the first half of the spring term. If you have any questions please contact either Rob Wright [rpwright@plymstockschool.org.uk] or your representative on the Steering Group.
Letter to the Secretary of State for Education.
Rt Hon Michael Gove MP
Secretary of State
Department for Education
Sanctuary Buildings
Great Smith Street
LONDON
SW1P 3BT
Dear Secretary of State
We were very pleased that Mr Gary Streeter MP was able to visit us last Friday and meet a few of the Children and Young People we work with to get a real feel for the way the School Sport Partnership is impacting on their lives. We would like to invite you to visit us to see first hand how we have, are and can make valuable contributions to Key Government policies in education (1), Sport (1), employment (2), health (3) and the environment (4).
Eg (1) The Plymstock SSP Panathlon Challenge was an Olympic style Competition for schools with City, Regional and a National final.
(2) The Plymstock SSP employs 2 Modern Apprentices.
(3) The Plymstock SSP has been given a National Award by Sainsbury's for training people to lead physical activity for inactive groups and would welcome the chance to work with GP Fund Holders to develop this for 2012.
(4) In the last two years we have trained 1512 Children and Young People to Bikeability Level 2 standard.
We were heartened to read that School Sport Partnerships are not being closed down but being entrusted to schools. The schools which we work with are unanimous in wanting ot continue to use the Partnership to impact on the attainment of their pupils. They will not be able to maintain the current levels of provision for PE and Sport or encourage more competitive sport without funding.
If the economic situation dictates that the government cannot fund this work will we have to ask parents and carers to pay an Olympic School Sport levy? The Plymstock SSP currently works with 29 Primary Schools, 5 Special Schools and 9 Secondary Schools reaching around 18,000 Children and Young People. If we ask parents/carers to pay £15 per year to fund our work we will generate the same amount
of funding as is paid by the Department for Education to support this work.
Our promise to school leaders is that we are, and will be, the best value for money investment that any school can make. You can find more information about what we do on our website : plymstockssp.com
We would like you to consider continuing to allocate DfE funding for this work so that we can make key government policies happen for the students in the schools we support. We would also like to invite you to visit us whenever you are able to so that you can see how much we are achieving.
Yours sincerely
Mr R Wright
Partnership Development Manager
Copies to : Mr Gary Streeter MP
Mr David Cameron Prime Minister
Mr David Farmer, Headteacher
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