Active Schools Fife win Silver Equality Award

Representatives from Fife Active Schools received the silver equality award at a presentation held recently

Following Equality Pathfinder training with Fife Centre for Equalities, Active Schools Fife decided to focus on the challenge of making their young leadership programmes accessible to all young people in all Fife schools and that the opportunities and recruitment practices promoted equality and diversity for all.

Active Schools Fife offers young people a range of opportunities to gain experience and skills in leadership through roles as ambassadors, coaches/deliverers, technical officials, event/competition organisers and decision makers.The roles offered give participants great opportunities to become directly engaged in promoting sport and motivating other young people to get involved in sport within their local communities.

These are valuable experiences for young people to help their employment prospects and applications to further and higher education institutions. However, the programmes needed to update their Equal Opportunities monitoring in order to evidence and gauge how fairly the opportunities were allocated year in year out.For their Silver Equality Challenge, the Active Schools Fife team decided to update their recruitment practice to make sure there was a fair gender balance and also to make sure that literacy skills were not a barrier for applicants who had the potential to be effective young leaders.

The new recruitment practices put in place for the Silver Award assess pupils through an informal interview, how they deal practically with a task and how they work with other people and on their own. The team at Active School Fife described that they felt that this was a better process that gave all pupils a greater opportunity to compete for a place on the programme.Nina Munday, manager of Fife Centre for Equalities, which presented the award, said:

“I would like to congratulate and commend Active Schools Fife to be the first organisation to gain the Equality Pathfinder Silver Award.”

Andrew Baird, senior active schools co-ordinator, said:

“The challenge process along with the support and guidance from Fife Centre for Equalities enabled us to improve our recruitment processes and practices ensuring our leadership programmes are inclusive and accessible for our young people whilst promoting equality and diversity.”