BG Blog: Our Learning and Development journey by Jay Roper

Hi, I’m Jay.

I joined British Gymnastics as Director of Learning and Development in March 2023. I thought it might be interesting and helpful to share some of the things we’ve been doing over the past 12 months and offer further clarity about what we’re working towards in the upcoming year at British Gymnastics, from a Learning and Development (L&D) perspective.

As I began my new job with BG my young daughter was also stepping into gymnastics via a local club for the first time. 12 months on we are both fascinated by the sport, the people involved and the opportunities it brings. Gymnastics is a hot topic around our dinner table!

I spent a lot of my first six months on-the-job speaking to people across our community about their experiences and unpacking the challenges faced in the real-world. Through visits to clubs, meeting groups of you at events, and building relationships 1:1, I’ve learned so much about the needs and wants of the gymnastics workforce. I’ve enjoyed sharing ideas about opportunities to work even better together to reduce barriers, increase capacity and drive quality across the gymnastics community, all whilst using L&D as the vehicle for these changes.

I’ve noticed how central coaches are to ensure the safety, learning and performance of gymnasts, and how incredibly complex and challenging the role of a coach is, in such a diverse and potentially dangerous sport. It quickly became clear that there are many brilliant people who are incredibly passionate, doing amazing things in pursuit of creating opportunities for others to have uplifting experiences through gymnastics.

“Through L&D, we explore possibilities, we challenge, support and share experiences”

Sport means different things to us all. For me, it is about fun and play through participation. It is about developing friendships that could last a lifetime. It is about searching for new opportunities to grow and get better, discovering things about us and what we are truly capable of through learning and performance. Through L&D, we explore possibilities, and we challenge, support and share experiences with one another in a social way, constructing and evolving our ways of thinking and doing. Learning is a journey not a destination. It happens over time, and it can continue in many different directions through choice, potential and opportunity. By encouraging each other, together we are strengthening our community and sport.

So, what have we been up to?

Our new Learning & Development Strategic Plan

Back in October 2023, following a critically important period of actively listening to the needs and wants of; people across the gymnastics community, colleagues and strategic partners, and in alignment with the findings of the Whyte Review and our commitments set out in Reform ’25, we published our L&D Strategic Plan. The Strategic Plan sets out our direction to re-imagine the way we approach learning and development in gymnastics through re-focusing on the things that are most important to best support and re-inspire everyone who makes gymnastics happen. The Strategic Plan has been created through lots of conversations with people across our community and with people outside of the sport. It gives us a lens to look through when making choices about where, when and what to pay most attention to so we can better support our people now and for the future. The Strategic Plan guides us through six interconnected principles that help us prioritise time, energy, and resource to best meet the evolving needs and wants of our community and sport. The Strategic Plan won’t solve everything, and we won’t get everything right by using it, nor will we be able to accommodate everyone’s needs and wants across our community. But, with the Plan in place we have something to unite behind, to inspire and move us towards our aspirational goal of offering world-leading L&D in gymnastics.

Structural changes to the L&D department

Alongside this, I have been working with our Board and Executives to re-organise the department to ensure the right people are in the right roles to deliver the Plan. The new structure, which will be in place from 1st April 2024 includes additional resource in the Coach Development Team, a newly formed Digital Learning Team and a streamlined Operations Team with the aim of improving efficiencies and effectiveness across our community, aligned to the principles set out in our Plan.

Establishing our Coach Reform Steering Group

We’ve also convened a group of independent coach learning and development experts who now make up our Coach Reform Steering Group. This group is made up of people from across the industry, mostly non-gymnastics specific, who bring a different perspective on how we can best support our workforce in gymnastics. It’s critical for everyone in the gymnastics workforce to feel valued, cared for and supported to be confident in their role, or roles within the sport and we firmly believe this Plan will help us to better support the people who make gymnastics happen as it represents the thoughts, feelings and opinions of many people from across our community and wider sector.

Setting our priorities for the next two years

Since launching the Strategic Plan, we’ve agreed our Operational Plan for the next 12-24 months. This sets out our priority projects and tangible activities to deliver during that period, which directly align to our purpose, our organisational strategic objectives and the Leap Without Limits vision. These priorities have been decided based on the multiple points of feedback gained through the conversations I and others have had in the past 12 months across the community and with wider industry partners. These priorities align to the things we believe will make the greatest impact on the ground with our community and for our sport. I’d like to take this opportunity to share some of these with you...

Relaunching a new & better BG Academy

Four months into the Strategic Plan and with the help of our community, we’ve recently launched our new and improved Learning Management System (LMS), known across the community as ‘BG Academy’. Thanks to all those that have offered feedback so far... please keep it coming in so we can continue to evolve the platform with you. The new BG Academy is more contemporary in its look and feel and will enable people to access better digital learning opportunities in a place and at a time that suits their needs and wants, through better functionality and an enhanced learner experience. For those like me who remember Teletext... imagine this compared to Amazon or Netflix and you’ll begin to realise the significance of the shift! The launch of the upgraded BG Academy was a critical moment in the evolution of our digital learning and development offer, better enabling us to collaborate and support one another across our community.

Positive feedback to high-performance coach education course shifts

The revised version of our ‘Level 5’ high-performance coach education course, known as Professional Practice in High-Performance Coaching (PPiHPC), launched last year too and the feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

“It’s great to see BG taking notice of the Whyte Review and doing things to help us as coaches in a different way. I really enjoyed it.”

The new structure of the course connects technical gymnastics knowledge and skills, with other important areas of High Performance Coaching including; understanding self, building and sustaining positive relationships and environments, coaching session design, coaching practice and coach behaviour.

A major shift in the PPiHPC structure is the assessment methods used, moving away from theoretical knowledge tests to a practice-based portfolio of evidence and professional discussion. The general principle of enabling the learners on the course to spend more time generating ideas and solutions to real-life problems together has been well received, and we plan to embed these sorts of learning and assessment methods into more of our L&D experiences in the future.

Introducing industry leading CPD opportunities

The first of many industry-leading continuous personal and professional development (CPD) opportunities went live last month. Our Eating Disorder Awareness CPD has had brilliant uptake and feedback since its launch. Coming soon, we have modules covering talent development and best practice in flexibility. We’ll be developing more CPD modules that align with upcoming policy changes, so that people on the ground are fully equipped to put critical updates to our sport into practice.

Profits generated from our CPD opportunities are reinvested into similar initiatives to enrich our CPD offer. We’re keen to ensure what we develop is needs-led and informed by insight from our community, and so we’re working out quicker and better ways for our community to let us know about CPD topics they’d like us to explore. Take a look at our Course Prospectus here.

Supporting coaches with their needs through Coach Developers

Many coaches have told us they feel unsupported and lost, without a voice or the confidence to make decisions. Coaches have asked for more support, more often but are unsure of their development needs. Michelle Vernon-Way , our Head of Community and Pathway Coach Development and Bobby Crutchley , our Head of Performance Coach Development are a small but mighty team who have strengthened the support opportunities available for our coach network – with exciting plans for the future too.

So far, our coach development initiatives have supported over 100 coaches to enrich their coaching knowledge and skill set. From 1:1 interactions and situated support to group interactions and workshops to formal development programmes, we have seen the positive impact these initiatives can have on our community already, and this is just the beginning! ?We’re continuing to collaborate with key partners like UK Sport, Sport England, CIMSPA and UK Coaching to offer multi-discipline and cross-sport L&D opportunities, so our coaches are gaining experience from a diverse range of people, sports, and cultures. A standout programme from the past year is the Ethical Explorations Project in collaboration with colleagues from UK Sport and Leeds Beckett University. This project brought together high-performance coaches from various sports to reframe their thinking on ethics within performance sport.

“I found the support interesting and thought provoking. Thinking about how past experiences have shaped my current values and beliefs allowed me to develop more of an understanding of why I behave the way I do in certain?situations...and how to proactively help with certain situations moving forwards.” – Ethical Explorations Attendee

The support of our Coach Development Team moving forwards will play a critical role in offering a more coherent offer of continuous learning and development support to help Coaches to be even more capable for our community and the gymnasts they support. We are working with our strategic partners to establish ways to grow the reach of this team to ensure more Coaches and clubs can benefit from the terrific initiatives we have in the pipeline.

What’s coming next?

Having spoken to many people, clubs, providers, and partners during my time at BG so far, I am very aware of the challenges we face together around capacity and capability to grow and develop gymnastics across the UK. We are committed to working with our community to provide an even better mechanism to attract, develop and retain people in our sport, particularly in collaboration with our Performance and Community Departments. This project begins April 2024 and will be led by Katie Richards, our Head of Learning Design and Research. As we head towards the start of a new summer Olympic and Paralympic cycle, we will naturally also turn our attention towards our judging and course provisions. We’ll be working with Technical Committees and our Events Department over the coming months to decide next steps to best support Judges across our community.

A review of entry point coach education courses

We will also be undertaking a major review of our foundation (Level 1 and 2) coaching qualifications along with the Gymnastics Activity Instructor course. We’ll keep you updated with our progress as our projects get underway over the next few months.

Priorities for the Learning & Development Operations Team

Rich Smith , our Head of L&D Operations, along with his team have begun the review of our Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and International Transfers processes. These are important ways to enable people to transfer into our community from other countries, other sports and across disciplines.

Alongside the review of our foundation coaching courses Rich and his team will review our Tutor, Assessor and Internal Quality Assurance workforce to ensure they are best prepared to offer consistently high-quality learning experiences across the country.

Capturing your feedback to inform future decision making

It’s important we find better ways of gaining open and honest feedback from our learners about their experiences to shape the future of L&D in gymnastics. That’s why, we’ve changed the way we capture feedback from learners going through our courses to help inform our decision making in the future. This has resulted in a 200% increase in learner feedback being gathered in the last three months. 88% of all Level 1, 2, 3 Coaching, Gymnastic Activity Instructor and Helper courses have now been planned and are in place for April 2023 – March 2024. We want to roll this out further to ensure our work continues to be even more informed by data and insight that represents the voice and needs of our community.

But is all this making a difference?

In summary, yes, I believe from what I can see, and what I have been told from people across the community, that we are making progress. One year, almost to the day, since I joined BG, we have made, and continue to make, big strides forward to creating a better future for gymnastics. We have prioritised aligning our people, policies, processes and practices so that we can best deliver our Strategic and Operational Plans and see the greatest impact across our community.

I feel privileged to have a fantastic team around me, who are true industry leaders in what they do. We have great people with the tenacity, appetite and skills to make a real difference, and I feel energised by the progress we have made in the short time we have had together so far.

I’ve also been overwhelmed by the warm welcome I’ve had into gymnastics by everyone I’ve interacted with so far. Thank you to everyone who has reached out, spent time with me and provided feedback to help. I know that there are on-going frustrations and I feel the urgency from people on the ground to see positive, tangible change at the earliest opportunity. Whilst it’s important to keep in mind that change takes time, and we are committed to taking the time we need to build our world-learning L&D offer, I take on the feedback that sometimes speed is more important than shine and I am committed to delivering impactful change for the community as soon as possible. And so, I ask for people’s continued patience and support as we use L&D as the means to build a better future for gymnastics.

If you would like to contact the Learning and Development team, we welcome your thoughts and ideas - find our contact details on Page 4 of the Strategic Plan.

Jay

Jay Roper, Director of Learning & Development - British Gymnastics