Blog: 'We are highly committed to delivering inclusive activities'
The English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS) website features a blog post every Friday through the year.
October's theme is older disabled people, with the first of the month being the United Nation's International Day of Older Persons.
This week, National Trust sport development officer Rachael Hanlon, who works at Speke Hall in Merseyside, discusses the unique experiences on offer in her area.
Rachael’s blog:
The National Trust has unique places to get involved in sport and physical activity – we offer the ultimate gym with a view.
With over 700 miles of coastline and 600,000 acres of countryside in our care, we have perfect locations for people to get active in the outdoors.
We inspire people to try something new, explore special places and engage with nature and the outdoors.
We provide over four million members and 90 million annual visitors with a safe, family-friendly environment where we can introduce people to sport.
National Trust and Sport England’s sports partnership aims to increase the number of people enjoying activity at National Trust locations, and we cater for everyone, from beginners to enthusiasts.
The sports partnership has had an exciting year, being able to engage people locally and nationally with sports at National Trust spots across the country.
Nationally, we have focused on increasing our numbers of events and opportunities. We have balanced this with ensuring that people are enjoying quality experiences.
To this end, we have work very closely with National Governing Bodies (NGBs), County Sports Partnerships (CSPs) and other organisations, to ensure that all our activities are to a very high standard.
This year has been really very exciting, as we have reached our highest number of participating people to date – we have successfully engaged 223,000 people with sport and physical activity through organised taster sessions, self-led activities and organised specific events.
We have invested to appoint 13 sport development officers who lead and deliver specific activities across dedicated properties.
I am the officer at Speke Hall, which is situated in south Liverpool.
The sports programme at Speke has been devised to ensure that everyone can access sport and that we host activities that everyone can enjoy.
Our Sporty Speke project was launched in 2014. In my past roles involving sport and physical activity I have developed my disability awareness skillset and have a greater understanding of disability sport. This allowed me to help devise accessible orienteering courses, running routes and cycling trails.
Sporty Speke has been really successful - we have reached out and attracted 10,851 people to take part.
In 2015 we also added Sporty Speke For All, which focused on golf and orienteering sessions specifically for disabled young people and adults.
At Speke Hall we also ran a successful inclusive sports event called Game On, which took place in August. Game On specially catered for disabled people of all ages and abilities, and we received lovely feedback.
A number of people told us that he had never before taken part in sport, and it was fantastic to see orienteering trails that have been designed to be wheelchair friendly and accessible being used by so many enthusiastic participants.
We are highly committed to delivering inclusive activities in 2016, and we are currently planning a sports programme which will be even more exciting than this year’s.
Our mission is to carry on inspiring people to try something new and allow people to create lasting experiences and memories, combining sport and physical activity and the unique opportunities offered by the National Trust.
