We stand for everybody, from every background, in every place, having an equal chance to be active and benefit from it.
Our aim is for a sporting system that’s truly inclusive and properly reflective of UK society.
These are our four broad ambitions:
With these broad ambitions in mind, we’re focusing work in four areas:
In July 2020, along with UK Sport, we announced the Code for Sports Governance was to undergo a formal review to look at areas where it would benefit from further development, including around equality, diversity and inclusion.
This review process has involved a wide and inclusive consultation to ensure the experiences of both current partners and other organisations involved in improving governance, diversity and inclusion contributed to the shaping of the revised code.
In July 2021, we and UK Sport announced changes to strengthen the Code, including ensuring bodies in receipt of substantial public funding from either organisation have a detailed and ambitious diversity and inclusion action plan to increase diversity on their boards and senior leadership teams, as well as across their wider organisations.
Find out more about the Code
We’ve carried out a detailed, independent review in collaboration with the other home country Sports Councils and UK Sport.
There were two major pieces of work – the first involved bringing together existing data on race and ethnicity in sport to identify gaps and make recommendations, while the second involved creating an opportunity to hear lived experiences of racial inequalities and racism in sport by offering people a safe space to tell their stories
Full reports for both the #TellYourStory campaign and existing data audit were published in June 2021, identifying where there are gaps as well as common themes, with recommendations on how to make meaningful progress.
The Councils have agreed initial overarching commitments that all five will work on together. Each Council will also work at pace to develop their own specific action plans to further deliver on these commitments.
Read the reports and common themes
We’re looking at how diverse and inclusive we are internally, in terms of our staff, our policies and procedures, and the specific work we undertake – ensuring each have a strong focus on equality, diversity and inclusion from the start.
As part of this, in January 2021 we announced the appointment of our first director of equality, diversity and inclusion, are updating our Diversity Action Plan for 2021-24 and have formed a terminology task group, to examine how our use of language can help us to be more inclusive.
Our commitment to diversity
In order to take these three areas of focus further, in Uniting the Movement we’ve used the principles that emerged from the consultation period to take a holistic view of the sector and how it works and interlinks with others, to understand more about the complex causes of structural inequality.
We’re now taking ownership of delivering a range of responses that create sustained systematic change, and the first of these steps were outlined in our Year 1 implementation plan – part of which includes a further £20 million commitment for our Tackling Inequalities Fund.
Read more about Uniting the Movement
Read more about our equality and diversity work as an employer, including our accreditations.
More on our equality and diversity work
In 2020, the murder of George Floyd was a catalyst for the five Sports Councils responsible for investing in and growing sport across the UK, to come together to explore racial inequalities in sport and to look at how reflective our sporting system is of UK society.
Led by the five chief executives of each organisation, this group has met regularly over the past year, and quickly established the Tackling Racism and Racial Inequality in Sport Review (TRARIIS). This was to help better understand if the Councils were doing enough to understand the context and tackle the issues involved.
The review involved an extensive analysis, carried out by the Sport Industry Research Centre (SIRC) at Sheffield Hallam University, of all publicly available data on race and ethnicity in sport.
It also involved an additional piece of work led by AKD Solutions, a Black-led learning and development consultancy, to carry out a lived experience research project in which over 300 people across the UK, ranging from grassroots participants to elite athletes and coaches, shared insights into their involvement in sport.
The findings make clear that racism and racial inequalities still exist within sport in the UK and that there are longstanding issues, which have resulted in ethnically diverse communities being consistently disadvantaged.
The review also highlighted the detrimental impact this has had on individuals, leading to mistrust and exclusion, and makes clear areas where we must see change.
The review has produced two reports, published in June 2021, identifying where there are gaps as well as common themes. They set out recommendations on how to make meaningful progress.
UK Sport, Sport England, sportscotland, Sport Wales, and Sport Northern Ireland welcome the depth of the findings and fully accept that the recommendations should now be used to develop and deliver tangible actions to tackle the issues raised.
The Councils also want to put on record their huge appreciation to all of those who shared their personal stories, a process which we know for many, will have been deeply upsetting.
Sport across the UK is delivered by a broad range of organisations. We call on them to work with us, as well as diverse communities in the UK, as we drive racial equality across all nations and in all sports.
While recognising that this process will take time, collectively, the Councils are determined to learn from the review and bring transformational change across sport, harnessing its huge power to drive equality and ensuring all parts of the system are fair, welcoming, inclusive, and diverse and that people have positive experiences at every level.
The Councils have agreed some initial overarching commitments that all five organisations will work on together ensuring they’re aligned to their individual strategies. These relate to people; representation; investment, systems and insights and further details are set out below.
Each Council will also now work at pace to develop their own specific action plans to further deliver on these commitments, considering their own local contexts and remits, addressing the recommendations from the review.
This will involve working closely with relevant groups or communities in the coming months, to co-create solutions for real, lasting change and to earn trust. The resultant plans will be shared publicly to support the wider sports sector to understand and recognise the issues, and collectively bring about change.
All five organisations are committed to transparency and accountability and will continue to report publicly on progress. This work will continue to be led at chief executive-level.
This was a statement from Tim Hollingsworth, CEO Sport England; Sally Munday, CEO UK Sport; Stewart Harris, CEO sportscotland; Sarah Powell, CEO Sport Wales; and Antoinette McKeown, CEO Sport Northern Ireland.
Commissioned by the five UK Sports Councils, below is a summary of the findings from two pieces of research into racism and racial inequality in sport:
To provide a framework to respond to the findings of the research, the UK Sports Councils have identified five themes for action.
What the research tells us:
People from ethnically diverse backgrounds in England are more likely to live in areas with higher levels of deprivation. Deprivation is negatively associated with participation in sport and physical activity.
This finding suggests the inequalities found in sport and physical activity are engrained in wider societal inequalities.
Participants observed a system that was often unresponsive to complaints of racism. This was referred to as a “colour blind” approach and participants discussed how this encourages the continuation of inequality and division.
Representatives of alternative sports leagues and associations took part in the research. These alternative networks and structures were set up in response to marginalisation from mainstream sport activity where ethnically diverse people didn’t feel welcomed or understood.
Many had first joined existing majority-white clubs and left in search of better representation after struggling to have their voices and opinions heard.
What the research tells us:
In its 2019 Benchmarking Survey, Haysmacintyre found that amongst 24 national governing bodies from across the UK, the proportion of board members from ethnically diverse backgrounds was 4% – less than one third of their incidence in the wider population.
In 2020, Perrett Laver surveyed 125 sports organisations funded by Sport England and/or UK Sport to establish the diversity of their boards. Results revealed that 7.9% of respondents identified as ‘BME’.
While the Perret Laver survey suggests an improving situation, ethnically diverse people remain under-represented on the boards of sports organisations in England and by implication throughout the UK.
Across the coaching workforce in professional football, research has found that people from ethnically diverse groups were 4.6% of the coaching workforce, despite being 25% of the playing base and 14% of the wider working population.
Participants explained that poor or non-existent representation is damaging on many levels, impacting progression and maintaining existing unequal relationships.
A lack of visible role models also reinforces negative stereotypes and the perception that ethnically diverse participants have limited skills and abilities.
Participants across all Home Nations shared examples of unrepresentative leadership and observed that the absence of representation leads to decision-making that’s unlikely to be in the interests of Black and Asian communities and sports participants.
What the research tells us:
Across the portfolio of jobs in sport measured by standard occupational classification codes, people from ethnically diverse backgrounds account for 7% of the workforce, which is half their incidence in the working population (14%).
Representation is notably low for the influential roles of sport coaches, instructors and officials (5%) and leisure and sport managers (6%).
Participants reported anxiety and mental health issues as a direct result of negative coaching behaviours and practices based on their race.
Young participants reported that the attitude and behaviours of coaches affected their confidence and motivation in early years. For elite athletes and those on performance pathways, negative coaching attitudes had caused participants to leave clubs or their sport altogether.
Exclusion also exists for culturally diverse coaches who told stories of unwelcoming environments, disbelief of the validity of skills and expertise and limited opportunities for career progression and access to top coaching roles.
What the research tells us:
Further analysis is required in the following areas:
The granularity of data between and within different ethnic groups needs to be improved.
Further research into the lived experiences of ethnically diverse groups, undertaken by research professionals that have credibility with, and an authentic understanding of, those communities, is required to inform and improve what sport currently offers.
What the research tells us:
When considering investments to encourage people from ethnically diverse backgrounds to be more physically active, success depends on much more than the nature of an intervention.
Other fundamental ingredients include who delivers the intervention and how it’s delivered.
There’s evidence within participants’ stories that funding mechanisms don’t reach the communities most in need. This was reported by participants representing grassroots organisations, elite athletes, and teams.
Black and Asian communities, groups and clubs are poorly represented in grant-making structures. The research found these communities are also less likely to be aware of support structures that can help in accessing grants and funds.
Organisations adopt “colour blind” approaches that favour organisations who can best navigate the application process.
The chief executives of each of the councils have issued statements and update reports, six and 12 months on from the publication of the two initial documents.
We’ll look at our overall grant, investment and supply-chain arrangements to ensure fairness, creativity and representation are at the heart of the way funding and contracts are awarded.
Through our respective frameworks and strategies, we’ll look at how we can ensure we and our funded organisations have, or are putting in place, policies and procedures that support inclusion in areas such as:
Under-representation of diverse ethnic communities within sporting structures is a recurrent theme within the research.
We want to see increased representation at all levels of sport, whether that’s in participation, administration, volunteering or recruitment.
We’ll therefore place greater emphasis on understanding the negative impact of racial inequalities in sport and how better representation can help create an inclusive and more diverse environment, reflective of UK society. We’ll work to embed the connection between improved representation and better strategic and operational decision-making.
We’ll work with partner organisations to share good practice, paying particular attention to actions aligned to longer-term equality, diversity and inclusion planning and implementation. We’ll be clear where we want our partners to do more, and work with allies to create an environment that offers positive experiences, tackles discrimination and empowers individuals to reach their full potential.
The research has identified issues which contribute to racial inequalities in the paid and voluntary workforce. It’s also pointed to the need to improve practices such as the gathering and analysis of workforce data to inform action plans and determine measurable outcomes.
We’ll therefore work to improve how and where data is collected across our workforce so that we can have a much clearer picture of the inequalities that have been identified through this review.
We’ll take a proactive approach to identifying the existing systems and structures currently acting as barriers for people from ethnically diverse communities and it’ll be our priority to make improvements to processes in workforce recruitment, development and retention.
This will include embedding the approaches which mean we can begin to address this area from the perspective of individuals, groups, leadership and broader society.
The research has given us rich insight that should challenge us to rethink how we approach the delivery of sport. It’s also highlighted that we need more and better information about diverse ethnic communities in sport if we’re to be truly effective in understanding and tackling racial inequalities.
This includes further analysis of high-quality data sources that are yet to be fully investigated; exploring means of achieving greater granularity of data between and within different ethnic groups; developing further insights about the interplay of race, socio-economic status and deprivation; and furthering our understanding of the lived experiences of ethnically diverse groups.
As a group of Sports Councils, we’ll look to be more systematic in the way we collate data, in the research we commission around inequality and inclusion, and in measuring and tracking the progress we’re able to make.
We’ll proactively engage and share reports with key partners, supporting them with digesting, understanding and reflecting on the findings with a view to challenging what this means for their own ways of operating.
What we invest in and how we invest are key factors in how we reach communities and drive change in engaging positively with sport and physical activity.
We acknowledge that more should and will be done to get investment to where it’s needed by working with new and existing partners as part of our wider priorities to tackle inequalities, of which racial inequality is part.
We’ll work with communities to understand their needs and target investments to help address these needs. Where relevant, we’ll continue to invest in targeted programmes that reach ethnically diverse communities and continually measure the impact of our investments to ensure that it brings about the necessary change we want to see.
The UK’s sports councils published new guidance in September 2021 for transgender inclusion in domestic sport.
In 2020 the Sports Councils’ Equality Group (SCEG), made up of representatives from each of the UK’s sports councils (UK Sport, Sport England, Sport Wales, sportscotland and Sport Northern Ireland), commissioned a review of its existing guidance (2013/15) for the inclusion of transgender people in sport, recognising that sport at every level required more practical advice and support.
This review investigated the views, knowledge, and experience of hundreds of people with a lived experience in sport, including transgender people, and also explored the background to current policies domestically and internationally and considered the latest scientific findings affecting the inclusion of transgender people in domestic sport.
Guidance is published on the SCEG website, alongside a number of other supporting documents.
The nine documents are:
Read the guidance in full
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