Where and how has COVID-19 impacted children’s access to recreational sports across Scotland?
Understanding sports activity in Scotland through data: Mapping what the system looks like for young people, and how Covid-19 impacts access to sport.
The issue
COVID-19 has impacted many aspects of children’s lives across Scotland and had detrimental effects on their health and well-being. Recreational sport has long been understood as a crucial mechanism for improved health and well-being and positively impacting social cohesion, education, and the economy. Holistically, however, little is understood of recreational sport accessibility, uptake, and impact on children and young people across Scotland. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic and its unprecedented impact on society have further complicated our understanding of this field and increased the requirement for action.
Why does it matter?
Sustainable Development Goal 3 focuses on ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being. COVID-19 presented a unique set of challenges to achieving this goal and exaggerated the pre-existing obstacles. It stopped many children and young people from participating in sports and disrupted the process of understanding how recreational sports contribute to their well-being, how to best support participation in recreational sports, who and why they are missing out, and how that affects them. COVID-19 also presented a new set of challenges for the facilities, systems and opportunities to support young people through sports in their communities.
To promote and enable children and young people to participate in sports and access opportunities, policymakers and local and national organisations need to understand the impact of COVID-19 on children's sports activities. They not only need to know it from the institutional perspective but, most importantly, from the perspectives of children and young people, as experienced by them during and after the pandemic. They also need to be able to identify existing networks of organisations, authorities and trusts that provide recreational activities for young people across Scotland and what challenges they have been experiencing. Understanding both the landscape of recreational sports in Scotland and lived experiences of young people in Scotland helps create a more cohesive set of actions promoting the health and well-being of children and young people through participation in sports.
Our Project
The Observatory for Sport in Scotland (OSS), who’s vision is ‘A healthier Scotland where every person can access sport and its wider benefits for life’, underwent a thorough process with the Data for Children Collaborative to break down the challenge question, and its intended outcomes and impacts. We then ran our Impact Collaborations process with OSS to build a multi-disciplinary team focused on addressing the challenge of understanding how and where COVID-19 has impacted children’s access to recreational sports across Scotland and who has been impacted. The team will develop innovative survey techniques for a range of youth groups. The process will ensure that real-life experiences are captured and considered in the analysis.
Combined with engagement and data collection across sports institutes, trusts and organisations, the addition of experiential data will enrich the analysis and ability to tell meaningful data stories and inform policy.
Through this unique collaboration, bringing together private sector and academic expertise, this project will take a bottom-up and top-down approach, mapping the complexity that exists, the data available, and the real-life experiences of young people and the sports organisations that have supported them.
The main objectives of the project are:
Mapping the sports organisations, authorities and trusts that provide a recreational activity for young people across Scotland. Visualising the linkages and accountabilities and building an understanding of the data they currently collect and what is available to be explored.
Building a data pipeline that enables clear and simple transfer of data to a central repository.
Designing and completing quantitative data collection and analysis across young person sub-group and organisations providing recreational activity.
Combining Quantitative and Qualitative analysis to explore the understanding of the landscape.
Giving insight into the current landscape within Scotland through data stories and providing advice on solutions.
Using data-driven approaches, the team will gain a detailed understanding of the barriers to accessing recreational sports across Scotland and how this has changed through COVID-19.
The outcomes will provide insight into the practical solutions to promote and increase participation, which the OSS can use to inform, influence and support policy makers to make a difference to children’s lives in Scotland.
The outcomes will also highlight the data gaps that exist and practical solutions to bridging these gaps.
Who is Involved
Observatory for Sports Scotland
Information Answers