Teach Secondary Issue 14.8

different to those between teachers and pupils, and more akin to youth workers and mentors. How can schools get involved? A club will typically approach the schools in their local area with the PLI offer, followed by discussions with those interested on whether said offer meets their needs, and whether the club will be able to service that in the long term. We presently fund 54 professional club charities to deliver PLI, having increased that by nine this season. We intend to increase it again in 2026/27. We try to ensure that PLI partnerships aren’t just isolated, three-week programmes of ‘fun stuff’ but packages of long-term support for said they’d seen improvements in pupils’ behaviour, and 96% reporting increases in pupils’ enjoyment during lessons, The finding that I think is perhaps the most important, though, is the programme’s interesting for us to observe, and obviously great for those schools wanting to ensure that parents are properly engaged in their young people’s education. Have there been any efforts at extending the appeal of PLI beyond young people with a pre-existing interest in football? When we first started PLI, we didn’t want it to be solely a programme for young people with potential behaviour issues who happened to be sporty. While we like to think that the programme definitely helps those groups, we wanted to also ensure that there was another ‘hook’ that could get young people engaged. What we’ve found is that even for young people who aren’t especially sporty, there’s something appreciably different that happens when a professional football club starts to have an active presence in their school. Just seeing and recognising the brand of that club can be enough to get them interested. When setting the programme’s KPIs, we were clear that all clubs had to deliver specific girls-only provision too, so it’s never just been about engaging young boys; it’s about trying to help as many young people as possible. Through doing that, we’ve heard from a number of young people how they didn’t enjoy football before, but now do and are considering going to games. That’s not necessarily what the programme is about, but still great to see as a by-product. For more information about Premier League Inspires, visit tinyurl.com/ts148-PLI those young people who need it. Even outside of PLI, there’s a whole host of other activities that club charities are already engaged in. Many run ‘hub school’ programmes, whereby club staff may be based at local schools multiple times per week. Other clubs have formed effective relationships with combined authorities and other local organisations to create similar sorts of programmes for schools themselves. So whilst PLI is our national programme, and one we’re proud of, club charities have long been doing some incredible work. I’d encourage all schools to to reach out to their nearest professional football club charity, because there are bound to be some great ways in which they can they can work together. What kind of impact has the programme had thus far? PLI was recently evaluated by Sheffield Hallam University, which found that 92% of participating schools impact on school attendance. The evaluation found that 80% of schools said it had improved pupils’ attendance, most notably amongst those deemed as ‘persistently absent’. We know that there’s a segment of young people who are very interested in football, so it would seem that simply having a football club be present within your school on a certain day will encourage them to be there. If we can get young people into school, and use the programme to positively impact upon their experiences of what school can be, that opens up an ‘in’ for the brilliant teaching taking place across other lessons and activities – and will hopefully set those young people up on a great path towards future success. Were you surprised by any of the findings in the Sheffield Hallam evaluation? One surprise was discovering that over a third of schools had said the programme helped themwith parental engagement. That wasn’t something we’d set out to do, but was perhaps a product of parents just being interested and curious about a professional football club having a presence in their children’s school. It was 45 teachwire.net/secondary P H Y S I C A L E D U C AT I O N