Over the summer school holiday period, in partnership with Blackpool Council, we delivered a very successful Blackpool Summer of Fun programme. The programme focused on engaging some of the most vulnerable children in our primary schools and supporting families of key workers by providing sports activities in a COVID-safe environment and also a free meal at each session.
From our involvement in provision 98% of the children we engaged said they enjoyed and ate all of their healthy lunch, 100% enjoyed working with the sports coaches, 98% made new friends and 53% would have been doing nothing at home and a further 25% would of spent the day on a games console or watching TV.
In addition, this past week has been the start of the academic year for our Blackpool FC Sports College and it’s been great to restart face-to-face delivery. We were very proud to introduce a record amount of 70 new BTEC Education students into the programme and 17 Degree students onto provision.
As part of their introduction week, on Thursday, they had a great afternoon with BFC Head Coach Neil Critchley. Neil spoke to the group about his coaching journey, career and then answered some very challenging questions.
The students also enjoyed an internal football competition at our home game fixture venue AFC Blackpool.
We also had the joy of restarting our Kickstart Traineeship programme with 16-24 year olds. 24 new students have started their journey with us, which will last twelve weeks, with the intention of seeing them develop their skills and qualifications to enter the employment world in the future.
We have developed our facilities to be COVID safe and risk assessments are in place for these programmes to be reintroduced. The team have worked unbelievably hard to make the programmes as safe as possible to be face-to-face full time and I’m very proud that they have shared my vision for the work to get back to normal as much as possible. Let’s hope now that we can all remain sensible and safe, to allow all provisions to continue without a further lock down.
