1. Hope or despair - into a new decade.

Ok I can’t resist any longer. Everyone is writing their blogs about a new decade so here is my look back on the last decade and a look forward to the next.

Although for the culture and sport sector the decade may have started full of hope undoubtedly the main focus has been on 10 years of austerity. Public sector funding for culture and sport has been reduced significantly particularly through councils who have traditionally provided most of the local community based infrastructure. Many councils have seen their funding cut by 50% or more and culture and sport has certainly carried its share of these reductions. However through the gloom we have seen real resilience to not just protect services but to reshape them by new investment. Over the decade I have probably facilitated leadership events for nearly 300 councillors. On every occasion I leave impressed by their passion for these services and their communities and their willingness to find creative solutions to the challenges they face. Yes some councils have taken easier decisions and simply cut budgets and closed facilities but many have shown real leadership to protect and reshape their services. Looking forward despite the claim that austerity is over I am not optimistic in terms of funding coming back to councils and even if it does I doubt very much the priority will be replacing our subsidy levels. At best we can hope that good practice of the last decade gets shared across other councils. 

Running in parallel however we have seen a major shift in understanding about the wider economic and social value of the sector. Sport has completed its major shift from promoting sport for sport sake, to promoting the value of physical activity as part of the health improvement and prevention agenda. Although the scale of resources allocated to support this shift from the NHS and public health has been limited by austerity the understanding and willingness I think has finally been established. If the government is serious about health investment there is every chance this policy shift could bear some financial rewards but only if the sector changes its own attitudes and behaviour to which I will return later. 

It is perhaps more interesting how the same changes have occurred in the cultural sector. When I left the IDeA the Arts Council had just been given and reluctantly accepted responsibility for Libraries and Museums. The prevailing culture in all these services was still about the intrinsic value not their value to wider policy objectives. This created some challenging tensions in both national bodies and local government. Ten years on it seems that culture is much more comfortable with at least positioning itself in this instrumental agenda if only to protect their more limited funding. With a new Arts Council strategy pending it will be interesting to see how far this direction of travel has gone and will go over the next five years. 

It is clear that austerity has driven greater efficiency across the whole sector mainly as a result of removing subsidy but also by better management, better marketing, replacement of inefficient buildings and to a lesser degree innovation and new ways of working. Councils running their own services is now more uncommon as externalisation continues at a pace. Unfortunately this process has also seen a removal of strong client functions meaning councils find themselves less able to control and even influence lengthy contracts causing political and community frustration. As a result I believe it has reduced the sectors effectiveness in terms of addressing equality and access to opportunity, key objectives of our public services for forty years. Both the culture and sport parts of the sector have always had as core aspirations the addressing of under representation particularly among those defined as difficult to reach. Sport and culture for all have long been our ambition but never really achieved certainly in the forty tears I have worked in the sector. There is little doubt in my view that austerity has made things much worse. At a very simple level the reduction in subsidy has increased price the biggest barrier to large sections of our communities. The price of a swim or a theatre ticket are now significant barriers to many if not most of our communities, but that’s not all. Increased use of membership schemes particularly in leisure facilities and the commercialisation of many traditional services including in parks and country parks have limited the opportunities for the less well off. Development programmes that use to provide a counter balance to normal pay and play access have very much disappeared. Targeted programmes for those excluded have dwindled away and even local clubs and societies are finding it harder to survive even where volunteering remains a strong component. Where facilities have been rationalised it has often increased travel times and costs for non car owners and it is the smaller local community level facilities that have been lost in favour of shiny new temples to leisure.

Towards the end of 2018 I wrote an article for the Leisure Review in which I asked if the sector had an “empathy gap” as the only reason I could identify to explain why we had failed to properly equalise participation rates in sport and physical activity over the last forty years, a criticism I could also level at the cultural sector. Whenever I discuss this at leadership events I get a range of reasons or excuses which usually end with the view that as a sector we just reflect the rest of society. But is that good enough? I keep reminding people that for the sector to be taken seriously as part of the health and well-being and preventive agenda and justify taking funding from a diminishing pot it has to realise it must respond to priority needs and not just market demand. I am not sure we can be both a social service and commercial provider, or can we?https://www.theleisurereview.co.uk/articles18/allison_empathy.html

The decade started with my continued frustration about the quality of management standards across the sector. In my time working at the IDeA I had tried to drive continuous improvement across both the culture and sport services with some limited success. National performance measures, self-assessment tools, peer review, and the sharing of good practice had raised our overall performance but a hunger for further improvement could be readily found in just a third of the sector with a further third open to persuasion. The remaining third I’m afraid were pretty much a lost cause.  

At that time I had invested some of my energy helping to create CIMSPA a chartered professional institute for sport and leisure industry but until recently it has staggered on the edge of collapse. I’m proud to see that it is now finally growing in membership, impact and influence but still being dependent on external funding from Sport England I remain to be convinced that it yet has a long term future when individuals are required to sustain it and grow it out of their own pockets. Although it has done a great deal to start to set, strengthen and enforce competencies and standards at an operational level I fear management ability still remains limited and leadership generally remains poor. More importantly I fear that the slow move to professionalisation means it is now happening just at the time when the very concepts of leadership and professionalisation are changing and moving in a different direction. The irony is that if we had been able to create CIMSPA twenty years ago when it was first suggested that separate institutes needed to merge we would have professionalised the sport and leisure sector at the start of the last decade and would now be ready to move on to post professional models of collaborative leadership critical to engaging in whole system change taking place across public services particularly health and well-being. 

Over the last decade the process of government has been held back firstly by austerity, then the lack of a clear majority and vision and latterly Brexit. Yet despite this sport and physical activity were given a huge boost by one of the most radical national strategies I have seen with this then embedded in a challenging Sport England strategy. Never have I seen such clarity in terms of positioning sport and physical activity as a force of social and economic benefit alongside a clear focus to address inequality of participation and opportunity. Although only limited progress has yet been made there was a clear feel that the next Sport England strategy will be an evolution on the same path rather than a massive switch in direction. However, that was the message before the December election created a massive majority for a government with a clear ambition to do things differently. There are already rumours that the DCMS will be broken up and the constituent parts cast among other government departments. Will the current structure of NDPBs survive at all, will they all remain based in London or used to demonstrate a “northern looking administration”. Will the long suggested cull of the numerous organisations operating in the sector now finally be on the cards. Will the challenges and opportunities on the ground be lost in yet more structural and organisational change. I suspect all will be revealed by February as part of the post Brexit carnival, and yes I know it won’t be done. Whatever this government has in store for us if the Brexit trade negotiations go badly wrong then the sector will certainly feel the cold winds of austerity return. 

Those who know me will know I regularly joke about not being able to retire because of the work I do. I have to say retirement would have happened last year had I not been given the chance by Sport England to engage with their work on the place pilots, leadership development for officers, the development of the Quest modules for Active Partnerships and latterly the future of Quest and NBS. What I have found exciting and challenging about all these projects along with a smaller project with UKSport is that it has enabled me to develop new thinking and new ideas round system change and more importantly collaborative leadership. It has truly given me a new impetus. 

As I said earlier my article on empathy forced me to acknowledge my and I believe the sectors failure to address properly inequality. This I think is not just a practical failure but a moral failure particularly when we advocate the value of what we do in terms of changing lives. To exclude those that would benefit most is fundamentally wrong and indefensible.  When Tracey Crouch launched her sport strategy designed to address this I was not only surprised but inspired. Whilst there was lots in the new Sport England strategy that followed to underpin this policy direction by far the most interesting for me was the “local delivery pilots”. This initiative felt somewhat different to what Sport England had done before. It started from the premise of place and therefore community. This had been tried before but often short term and quite limited. It also started with people and specifically those currently inactive but started by asking some really difficult ”why” questions. Above all it was designed to challenge fundamentally the concept of always doing the same thing and encouraged those involved to do it differently but not to be frightened to fail but to learn and above all to do it collaboratively and not in competition. I’m not sure this is totally new, many of the concepts are similar to what I was doing in the early 1980’s in Action Sport in Coventry but this time I really hope we are brave enough to stick with the pilots long enough and build on the learning. Action Sport failed because the system found it too challenging and gradually adapted it to suit the system. What the place pilots aim to do from the beginning is to actually change the system and that’s why this time it might just work. It is still early days to talk about the impact of these initiatives but the learning emerging is at least interesting.

What also emerged quickly from this work was an opportunity to work with Andy Reed to support the future development of the County Sport Partnerships now Active Partnerships. We developed a methodology based on Quest to help the partnerships and Sport England prepare themselves for their new role. What this project provided for me was a chance to define more clearly what we mean by collaborative leadership. This involved some extensive relearning on my part and an opportunity to completely rethink what I understand by leadership as opposed to management. This work has been developed further through the development of a major leadership programme aimed at officers but again run jointly with the LGA. We have now run nine of these programmes plus three “deep dives” in more detail round three topics. This work has been the most rewarding of the year. The demise of Leading Learning the leadership programme I ran for ten years with Sue Isherwood for both the culture and sport sector was extremely disappointing, but to have a new opportunity to work with a new cohort of leaders in an excitingly different way is a pleasure. 

Just to close another circle with reference to my comments above about CIMSPA. In the work on system change and collaborative leadership I have with the help of Debbie Sorkin of the Leadership Centre been exposed to the view that as professionals we probably don’t know all the answers or know what’s best for those that we seek to help. Collaborative leaders don’t hide behind professional management concepts that “ we know best” but are happy to defer and devolve to others in the system including the users of service themselves. Collaborative leaders create the right culture and environment in which change can happen, then encourage co production of solutions and accept failure as well as leaned success. Hence my comments earlier about the need for CIMSPA to perhaps reconsider traditional management thinking and focus on developing effective leaders of places instead.

So my decade ends frustrated by failure and excited by new opportunities ahead. Can anyone even start to predict what may happen over the next twelve months let alone the next decade. What is clear is that we will be living with uncertainty for a long time to come. As a sector above all we will need to continue and be resilient. Resources from the public purse will remain scarce but to win them I suspect we will need to continue to position the sector in terms of its wider social and economic value and increasingly we will need to demonstrate this value and our impact. Although structural change is likely to come at a national level I think we need to ensure this process of change does not deflect us from where we can make the most difference, at the local level in places and communities. To do this we will increasingly need to find the right balance between being efficient and effective, between being focused on need and responding to demand. Above all we must learn quickly to become trusted partners in wider local system change and to do this we must focus on becoming better collaborative leaders rather than just good managers.

So I end more with a message of hope than despair but the reality depends on each of us and how we respond. 

Happy New Year.