Opening School Facilities – Community Engagement at Kepier School, Sunderland

Rise Active Partnership has shared this case study showcasing the great community work at one of their local schools.

Kepier, located in Houghton-le-Spring, is one of the schools that Rise has worked with as part of the Opening School Facilities fund. Andrew Dixon, from the PE department at Kepier, described to Rise how the OSF funding offered the school an exciting
opportunity to try to do something impactful:

“We looked at [OSF] and thought that there’s a lot of money there and there’s that opportunity to go and do something meaningful”

Kepier’s funding has enabled the school to:

• Refurbish their fitness room
• Offer activities and sports that had previously not been available
• Increase usage of existing facilities

When speaking to Mr Dixon, we were told that the fitness room at Kepier was an area that was quickly identified as one that could be improved with funding.

“we kind of had to sit down and sort of identify the fact that our fitness room was falling apart… we kind of looked at it and went, “This is something we can change in the department and make a big impact with” and went from that starting point”

With this improvement to the fitness room, the school was able open the room to students every evening, with staff leading sessions three days out of the week. While there was already an interest from some students around training in the fitness room, Mr Dixon had an interested in trying to offer activities that students wouldn’t typically be involved in:

“from my point of view it was about how can we put something else on that the kids wouldn’t normally do… it was trying to use the money to do something different to try and engage those kids that maybe wouldn’t normally be involved.”

This included a range of activities such as futsal, weightlifting, archery, and karate. For the archery and weightlifting, the clubs were also delivered by teachers at the school that had existing interests in the sports. This was an added benefit of the funding as Mr Dixon believed this wouldn’t have happened otherwise:

“we’re getting staff that are leading these clubs that wouldn’t have been involved without the fund, and then the sessions wouldn’t have happened, and the kids wouldn’t have been doing anything”

Beyond the after-school activities that have been delivered by the school, there has also been extensive work undertaken to increase the community usage of the facilities at Kepier. In addition to the fitness room, the school has an 11-a-side astro turf, five marked grass pitches (four for football, one for rugby), a sports hall, a gymnasium, a dance studio, and seven outdoor courts. Whilst the football pitches were generally well used, the other spaces, in particular the outdoor courts, were underutilised. To address this, the Community Manager at Kepier suggested the use of flood lights, to open up the usage of outdoor facilities year-round, and started to advertise the school’s facilities more through social media, with both strategies being successful for the school:

“[the Community Manager] was kind of making a big push to try and sell the facilities and get them booked out and part of what she was finding was she was getting netball clubs kind of going “We could do something there but it’s dark for most of the year”, so then we’ve got the extra flood lights in and we’ve been able to open up the courts down the bottom… So I think that’s been sort of getting word of mouth out and sort of advertising the facilities and sort of being able to actually use them all year round. That’s been the big thing”

Looking to the future, Mr Dixon explained that, due to the OSF investment and the work that has already been carried out, it is likely that everything that is currently been offered at the school will be able to continue post-funding:

“It’s basically run as a business after school so we’ll just keep carrying on running it… everything should in theory be stuff that can carry on and there shouldn’t be any real problems with it. It’s just if we can keep staffing some of them from there. But yeah, this should all be sustainable and stuff that can carry on, fingers crossed.

Image courtesy of Sport England Image Library