The Young People Lead plays a key role in enabling the children and young people aims within the Making our Move plan. Working across Derbyshire, Derby, Nottinghamshire and Nottingham, the main areas of responsibility of the Young People Lead will be:

1.    Deliver the county School Games offer and other children and young people programmes, aligning them to support the aims in Making our Move.

The School Games aims to make a positive and meaningful difference to the lives of children and young people through sport and physical activity, providing young people with the opportunity to co-design, enjoy and learn through competition, to achieve their personal best. The School Games is a national model that is delivered to reflect local need Your School Games - What is the School Games? The County School Games offer for 23-24 can be seen here https://makingourmove.org.uk/wp-content/

uploads/2024/12/School-Games-event-infographic.pdf

 We know that significant inequalities remain in activity levels, with Black and Asian children and young people, and those from the least affluent families, still less likely to play sport or be physically active than the average across all ethnicities and affluence groups. Girls are also less likely to be active than boys. Our local insight suggests young people with a long term health condition and/or disability are less likely to meet the Chief Medical Officer recommendation of an average of 60 minute or more a day of moderate to high intensity physical activity. Through our work with partners, we aim to provide young people - who for a number of reasons find it more challenging to be active – access to positive physical activity experiences. These experiences support their physical literacy, wellbeing and development of life skills.

2.    Support the Active Lives Children and Young People survey, encouraging and assisting schools to complete the survey.

Designed by Sport England, the Department for Education (DfE), the Department for Health (DfH), and the Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport (DCMS), its purpose is to gain a detailed insight into the current physical activity habits of the nation's children and young people (5 to 16). Each term a random sample of around 90 schools from across our cities and counties (Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire) are selected to take part in the survey. The insight from the survey helps inform priorities and future investment Active Lives | Sport England

What you will do:

Grow our insight and understanding of young people across both counties

• Champion putting youth voice and co-design with young people at the heart of all planning and provision so young people are involved in developing and delivering opportunities that are right for them. Support partners and stakeholders to embed an insight-led approach so it becomes their way of working too.

•  Engage directly with young people, focusing on those facing the greatest inequalities, to understand more about their lives and what motivates them to be active and what barriers they face. Capture what you are seeing and hearing. Share this insight internally and externally to inform work with young people. 

• Manage the delivery of the Active Lives Children and Young People survey, proactively following up with schools to encourage them to take part, emphasising the value of the survey and offering support in the process. This might include visiting the school to help the children and young people with completion. 

•  Help capture the impact and value of our programmes, events, workshops and investments. Use this insight to inform our future planning for this work.

Support and enable young people to provide and benefit from positive experiences of being active

• Work with key partners, including the School Games Organisers, to develop and deliver a safe, inclusive and meaningful county School Games events offer with tackling inequalities at the forefront, informed by insight and youth voice. This will include tasks such as attending School Games Organiser meetings, booking venues, sourcing deliverers, managing communications with attending schools, carrying out risk assessments, production of event schedules, event feedback forms and certificates, undertaking the role of Event Manager on the day and overseeing the successful delivery of events.

• Ensure the local and county School Games offer provides opportunities for young people to take on leadership and volunteering roles.

• Encourage and enable people working with young people, and young people themselves, to be involved in designing workforce development opportunities that are right for them.

• Co-ordinate the delivery of a training and development programme that supports the workforce to enable children and young people to have positive experiences of being active.  

• Create opportunities for and empower young people to inform programmes and provisions that are right for them.    

• Champion the Chief Medical Officer’s active minutes guidelines, supporting schools to reflect this in their provision.

• Work with new and existing partners, who share the same values, motivations and desire to support young people to be active, to build on our current offer and develop new opportunities. This could include connecting community providers with education settings and working with uniformed groups, youth and children’s services/groups to support them to develop physical activity opportunities within them

• Place safeguarding, equity, diversity and inclusion at the forefront of our work with young people.

Target and align investment with effective monitoring and evaluation

• Support new and existing partners to proportionately focus their time and energy on young people experiencing the greatest inequalities.  

• Be responsible for managing and reporting on your allocated budget and progress within your action plan.

• Provide effective communications and reports to APT’s Board, county panels and programme funders, for example Sport England.

We are looking for someone to join us who:

 Essential

• Is passionate about enabling children and young people to have positive experiences of being active throughout their childhood

• Is committed to reducing inequalities in physical activity, appreciating that some young people need more support

• Believes in APT’s values and behaviours.

• Has experience of working together with others and developing positive relationships

• Has experience of working with young people, listening to and acting on their insight

• Is able and willing to challenge, in a positive way in order to create change

• Has experience of managing projects / programmes

• Is an excellent communicator – writing and speaking 

• Is a good listener and good at asking questions

• Is organised and can prioritise and lead their own workload 

• Is self-reflective and self-aware

• Understands the value of being humble  

• Understands the value of learning 

• Has access to a car to travel across both counties

• Has the IT skills to work competently 

Nice to have

• Has experience of delivering sport / activity events

• Has experience of developing positive relationships at senior level in schools

• Has knowledge of education strategies and how they may positively or negatively impact on our work

• Has experience of managing funded projects and or programmes

Please note that these are the skills we want you to tell us about in your application, as we’ll be assessing candidates against these.

If you’re passionate about addressing inequalities and physical activity, we welcome your application. We encourage people to join our organisation from all walks of life, you don’t need experience in the sport and physical activity sector to work for us. Disabled people and those from ethnically diverse communities are underrepresented in our workforce and are particularly encouraged to apply. 

If you want to find out more about the role to help you decide whether to apply, you are welcome to call Naomi Bennett-Jones on 07880 316006 for a brief chat.  

Please note, we are unable to support employees with Visa costs. Proof of Right to Work in the UK is essential and will be requested during the application process.