Minutes:
The Chair welcomed Mr Carl Daniels, the Senior Sports and Leisure Manager who was introduced by Head of Leisure, Ian Jones. The Senior Sports and Leisure Manager was invited to provide a presentation on the Young Ambassadors Programme.
The Head of Leisure provided members of Council a brief background in relation to work of the Sports and Leisure Services Section: The County boasts 8 leisure centres which attracts over 1.5m usages. In response to the financial pressures, work to increase income levels had enabled more services to be retained, increasing income in Aquatics by some £250k in the last 4-5 years to exceed £1m income and Health & Fitness by some £300k being set to exceed £1m this year. In addition to the work done within Leisure Centres significant amount of work was done out in the community and within schools. The Young Ambassadors Programme was an example of the work that had been carried out and was only part of wider community development work with an investment cost to the Authority of circa £26k a year.
The Senior Sports and Leisure Manager was accompanied by Richard Dando from Sport Wales, Rowan Smith and Dyfrig Davis, a pupil and teacher from Laugharne School and Jess Thomas from Ysgol Bro Myrddin, who gave their own personal experiences of being part of the programme.
Working together with Sport Wales, the Young Ambassadors Programme, a sector leading programme in Carmarthenshire was developed to deliver a number of Young Ambassador Outcomes which included:-
· Increase participation in Sport and promote healthy lifestyles
· Role model promoting positive values of sport in the school and local community
· To be the young people’s voice on PE and school sport in their school in the community
· Bringing the excitement and inspiration of major events to their schools
· To get every child hooked on sport for life.
The programme included a pathway for Young Ambassadors across Wales starting from Bronze (years 5 and 6), Bronze+ (years 7, 8 and 9), Silver (age 14+), Gold (year 10 and above) through to Platinum at a National level. This pathway aimed to train and develop a future generation of leaders by providing young people with skills and experience to make them employable resilient young people through sport and physical recreation.
With Carmarthenshire being the first local Authority’s in Wales to roll out Bronze Young Ambassadors programme, the County now boasts a network of over 300 Young Ambassadors providing valuable coaching support to staff. Appreciation was provided to Active Young People Officer’s within the Leisure division for their commitment in driving the programme throughout the schools.
The presentation was followed by a question and answer session.
In response to question, ‘What could Councillors do to help with the continued success of the programme?’ the Senior Sports and Leisure Manager stated that Members could encourage their local schools to embrace the scheme if they had not done so already. Furthermore, if local schools were involved in the programme, Members were encouraged to seek more information from the school by asking the school to demonstrate their involvement in order to raise the profile of work being done.
The Chair thanked the Senior Sports and Leisure Manager and the Young Ambassador representatives for attending the meeting to appraise elected members of the programme and its success.