Sport is credited with instilling self-discipline, fitness, teamwork and a pure sense of enjoyment of an activity.
Sports provision for all young people is now set to be defined more formally under the recommendations stemming from the Youth Matters green paper, which will provide statutory guidance for local authorities on new standards for activities that young people "would benefit from accessing in their free time", including two hours of sporting activity a week.
This support for sporting opportunities will include a "network of local youth sports development managers", who will work with partners and existing models of good practice such as Positive Futures to "engage young people in sport", including those not in school, work or training (see p14).
This week's main feature demonstrates that sport and youth work can coexist.
Jesse Peters, founder of the Haringey Warriors Youth Organisation in north London, makes no apology for using high standards of sports coaching to attract young people, but he is quick to emphasise that much deeper personal development work is going on at the same time (see p15). Staff act as coaches, but also as youth mentors, and are trained to build up young people's life skills as well as their sporting skills.
Indeed, you could say that the best coaches in the elite sporting world, such as Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United Football Club, have used youth mentoring skills to protect and develop talented teenagers such as Ryan Giggs and Wayne Rooney, and stop them going down the same path as their 1960s equivalents George Best and Jimmy Greaves - who lacked similar support.
In short, the answer to the question, "Is sport youth work?" is: "It can be." But as The National Youth Agency's Tom Wylie cautions elsewhere in this issue, we must shy away from the simplistic leisure-based "bats and balls" approach (see p9).
The Department for Education and Skills has yet to produce a job description for the role of sports development manager. It is to be hoped that in its further work to develop the proposal it looks at models such as that on offer in Haringey, so young people are given the chance to achieve their wider potential at the same time as getting involved in sport.
