Keeping fit for business

SkillsActive - 26/03/2008

What started as an Easter Holiday kids camp, founded in 1991 by Dean Horridge, then the head of PE at a London school, has seen Fit for Sport develop into the UK’s leading children’s healthy lifestyle provider.

The independently funded organisation who recently launched the Fit For Sport Foundation (Charity no: 1118546), has partnerships with big names such as Tesco and David Lloyd and has gone from strength to strength in the last 17 years.

The company now runs 38 kids camps across the UK, works with 40 London schools to teach curriculum PE and After School Clubs, runs term time activity courses and educates children on the benefits of leading a healthy lifestyle.

As well as this, the company has teamed up with ex-Arsenal and England legend Ian Wright, along with a national group of health clubs, to run the ‘Fitter Schools UK Challenge.’ The 2007 campaign was a huge success, engaging nearly 3,000 primary and secondary schools across the UK, over 1 million school children and improving children’s fitness on average by 14.5%.  A total of 3,500 schools have already registered for the 2008 Challenge.

As well as running the  Fitter Schools UK Challenge 2008, Fit for Sport is about to launch a ‘Fitter Families’ campaign along with a book called ‘A Fitter Family Handbook’ which will be available in September.

Inside the hive of activity are 40 full and over 350 part time and seasonal staff who directly support over 32,000 children each year.  It is this hard working team, along with the company’s recognition for effective training and development and clearly defined career paths, which is proving to be one of the secrets of Fit for Sport’s success.

Operations director, Craig Jones, explains: “We recruit people from all sorts of backgrounds: university graduates, coaches and qualified teachers. Some have sports science qualifications and want to get into coaching.  What they all have in common, however, is an appreciation of our corporate values and a great attitude.

“Whatever their previous experience we are happy to train all of our employees from scratch. We encourage them to work towards a minimum of a Level 2 National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) in Health and Fitness.  We also support career progression for those people who want to develop higher level skills.  Some of these are promoted to become trainers so that they can teach adults how to teach children.”   

With such a high emphasis on training it is little wonder that Fit for Sport is now centrally approved to run nationally accredited training courses for its own employees, as well as others, throughout the UK.

To help them to do this the company sought help from SkillsActive, the Sector Skills Council for Active Leisure and Learning. “SkillsActive have been instrumental in supporting professional training so that our employees have the right skills and qualifications to be able to assess NVQs,” explains Craig.

In addition SkillsActive have worked in partnership with Fit for Sport to perform presentations to college and university staff to promote initiatives such as the Duke of Edinburgh Awards within the further and higher education sectors.

Stephen Studd, chief executive of SkillsActive, commented: “A highly skilled and competent workforce is central to all successful businesses which want to grow and fulfil their potential.  The active learning and leisure sector should not be an exception.  In fact the active learning and leisure sector contributed £8.6 billion in output to the whole UK economy in 2004.  And with major events such as the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic games in our midst, making sure that there is the right training and education, the right people and the right skills in place is of extreme importance.”