ACTIVE OXFORDSHIRE PARTNERSHIP: IN FOCUS

We are proud to announce a threeyear strategic partnership with Active Oxfordshire, designed to help hundreds of young people facing disadvantage to become more active. Pete Bennett, Head of Sport Partnerships, tells us more about this exciting and important work.

Active Oxfordshire and Radley College have been working together since 2018, helping local children and young people learn to swim, ride a bike, and develop new skills such as rowing. This became even more critical because of the COVID-19 pandemic when children across the county missed out on swimming lessons as leisure centres and schools were closed. Radley College partnered with The Oxford Academy to provide catch up swimming lessons, and from there a new Oxford Academy Rowing Partnership was formed. This innovative collaboration introduced local children to rowing, with their headteacher reporting: “In every metric — attendance, achievement points, negative points, and academic progress — all pupils on the rowing programme have improved.” Participants also reported a greater feeling of self-belief and happiness.

Many parents will have generously donated to our bike collection days for Ready Set Go, a campaign led by the Oxford Hub and part-funded by Active Oxfordshire. This work enables Active Oxfordshire and their partners to provide bikes to those in the greatest need, mainly focused in the Blackbird Leys area of Oxford. These bikes have enabled children and their families to become more active and mobile. Recipients have included families residing in areas of high deprivation, refugees, and asylum seekers, with many of those supported sharing their stories with our boys.

This new three-year partnership will build on the fantastic work that has already taken place and comes at a critically important time. In Oxfordshire’s most affluent areas 80% of children can swim by the time they finish primary school, but this falls to less than 10% in our county’s most deprived areas. This partnership will challenge these major health inequalities so that more children can live an active life. We are incredibly proud to be involved and our boys will be making a meaningful contribution to a key issue of our time. I am confident that they will get just as much out of it as they put in; allowing them to better empathise with those who have very different lives to their own.

We’re delighted to be entering into this three-year partnership with our friends at Radley College. Thanks to their support, hundreds more children and young people in Oxfordshire can now swim, ride a bike and enjoy rowing. We know that only half of children in our county are doing enough activity to protect their health and wellbeing, and with the cost-of-living crisis causing so much concern, this situation could get significantly worse. Our partnership will make sure that children can still enjoy being active and we’re looking forward to reaching many more children and young people over the next three years.

~ Josh Lenthall Chief Executive of Active Oxfordshire