Blog: Working in Place Partnerships

As Sport England announces work in 53 new places to address regional inequalities in activity levels across England, we look at what this means for the work we do.

Join Director for South Yorkshire Gayle Elvidge and Director for West Yorkshire James Brown as they look back on the work across our area and how the focus on Place Partnerships has taken shape over the years.     

Gayle: How we're structured as an organisation has aligned really well with Sport England's thinking on place.  

The decision was made in 2016 to move to a district-based structure, with members of our team working alongside districts, understanding the needs of the place and responding to those needs.  Alongside that was an evaluation approach that supported that way of working, looking at the conditions needed for change.  

So ahead of Sport England formally moving to a whole systems, place-based approach, we were already thinking about that, and our set up has helped us to kind of transition into place partnership working.  

James: The philosophy in our way of working has been focussed at a district and neighbourhood level.  

We had been putting resource collectively into helping to support what we called ‘district activity partnerships’. The purpose was to develop the collaborations, partnerships, and cross sector relationships as we all know it's not one organisation who's going to help both increase activity and decrease inactivity 

So from that point of view, we always wanted to use some of our resource to be the oil that helps the cogs turn.

We wanted to help bring multi-agency groups, now known as place partnerships, together in our nine districts, because that's often the missing bit - someone needs to actually coordinate people and do some of the collaborative backbone support work.  

We needed to understand how best to do that and what does it lead to?  So strategically, we put some of our resource into people on the ground and building the relationships, understanding the connections between the different organisations and the different sectors locally.  
 
National policy was going in that direction with the Sport England strategy at the time. Expressions of interest were being invited in 2017 to become one of the 12 Local Delivery Pilots (LDP) with the idea of testing out different ways of working in a local systems approach. 

Most of our nine places felt they were already at a position to bid as there were strong relationships locally with partners understanding of ways of working. In the end, Bradford, Calderdale and Doncaster were successful. 

The learning has brought us a lot, both in ways of working, relationships and collaborations across all the nine, and how each has supported each other. 

We're really pleased to be able to say Phase One of the Place Partnership expansion includes Barnsley, Kirklees and Rotherham as well as the three LDP areas getting investment from Sport England. Announcements about Leeds, Sheffield and Wakefield are expected in phase two, so all nine areas will be covered by some kind of place partnership investment. 

Our thinking was that we knew we didn’t want to add to bureaucracy on a county level. Even before district activity partnerships we had a long history of community support networks. We knew the way of working with groups like national governing bodies and different groups of people in a more active geographical area is better when connected. 

That's the philosophy and the background of all our way of working across not only the districts, but also in neighbourhoods and our two counties. There are differences clearly between the two, with historically different ways of working and relationships, but at the heart of it is the understanding that the district, or the city, or however we define place, is where there's the most opportunity to pull that together. 

Gayle: I think there's a couple of good examples to look at, Doncaster being a local delivery pilot has led the way with some of this thinking and the deepening work showing how you make place based systemic work sustainable. 

What they've achieved really well is to embed roles within existing structures, showing what the investment model can look like and really investing time in some of the relationship building that enables that. 
 
They are looking at their Systems Academy, which is all about systems leadership and trying to really share that learning right across the whole of the Doncaster system and beyond. 
 
In Barnsley, who are much earlier on in their work, what I'm finding really interesting is the way that they address it as “the Big Idea for Barnsley, this is where we're headed and the things that we want to achieve’. Sport England investment plays a part, but it contributes to an overall ambition and plan for Active in Barnsley.  

Barnsley are really clear in telling that story of where they're headed, enabled in part by the Sport England investment. I think that's a really interesting approach as a risk with this work is that it can be still viewed in isolation, particularly earlier on in the journey.   

James: The approach in Calderdale is a very similar approach to Doncaster in terms of considering the whole place. It allows a real deep dive into some of those communities that need it the most and understanding how to make an impact there.  

Bradford's slightly different because it was focused specifically on children and young people, and not the whole of Bradford, with research from Born in Bradford to help support that and what that looks like nationally for children and young people (CYP). 

I think Gayle's hit the nail on the head in terms of there were always going to be those who were going to be successful with the applications to be local delivery pilots. As soon as we knew we had three, we probably slightly changed without realising how we were going do things, based on the fact that we were in a privileged position to support all three. We had to consider how we were operating shoulder to shoulder with that work, supporting where we can, but also using the insights and learning in our other areas? 

That allowed us to still use that methodology and approach in other areas, even if there wasn't the immediate investment. 

We've tried to support areas on that shift into not an entirely new way of working, but just being aware of some of the ingredients of success and the conditions for change from those different ways of working.  

Now they've got access to some investment to start having those wider conversations about how they want to achieve their local ambition.  

So I think that would be a success story from my perspective. We can't attribute cause and effect or we can't attribute that to just our work, but we are one part of a wider system with wider investment from Sport England, it's all the same money, trying to do the same thing.  

We are in a unique position to be able to use our expertise and resource to support the areas now as place partnerships. What's interesting is going to be the next phase. Where's our focus and do we have to slightly manoeuvre some of our strategic thinking around our role in our positioning or is more of the same required? 

Even when there is investment there, we know there still is a role for coordinating and convening people. Having that extra bit of resource to be able to do that and keep sharing the learning is more important than ever. What are we asking our local Development Managers and Development Officers to do within that? What does our continued coordination and support look like via the Mayoral Strategic Authorities and sub-regionally with the Integrated Care Partnerships?  

So that'll be an interesting next step for us both strategically and operationally when there's a bit more capacity locally.

Gayle: I think something that is important in the way that we work with districts and our places is we've had the maturity of the relationship already in place when investment has come through, because we've been working in that way for quite some time. 

This has helped lay the foundations and create an environment where that could be used to really good effect.  

The maturity of the relationships has meant that we've been able to work with each place individually to understand exactly where our support and resource is needed. 

That looks really different across places, right through from having development officer, development manager and director support at different levels. Support is there that really responds to the need of the place, rather than an agenda that we're driving. 
 
The point is that we're doing different things with different people and places. James: Its almost a worst case scenario if the money is coming into all nine and everyone does exactly the same thing. That wouldn't be a true reflection of place based working. You need to be responsive to the needs of the local area, how the local authority is set up, how the voluntary community sector is set up, the support agencies that are in place, the assets that are already there and the existing investment into  services.  

All the things we know to be important are going to be completely different in each area. So it's how to get the best out of the investment as a contributing factor to the wider strategic priorities and outcomes. 
 
Gayle: While we are celebrating this investment it's still not a position we would want to be in. All nine districts have all been identified for investment because the level of deprivation and inequality are still prevalent. 

James: There's a few different variants identified on the ‘place needs’ classification. So on the one hand we are happy because we're getting more investment, on the other it's because people are having an extremely hard time.  

Gayle: But great that that's been recognised by Sport England and we're getting the investment to try and do more to address that and the potential good that brings. 

James: In the scheme of things, it's a drop in the ocean. On the one hand I want to celebrate there's extra investment coming in but in reality there's still so much more that needs to be done. 

This isn't the end point. It's essentially the starting point and that's why we have to really focus in on the opportunity in the way that Barnsley and other areas are articulating. ‘This is what needs to happen because this is the challenge we are in. This is our ambition, and there's a range of different things that need to contribute towards reaching this ambition.’ One of which is the place partnership investment. 

Sport England has a real collective sense of bringing something positive. Physical activity and being active in sport is a real positive addition for communities.  It connects and brings cohesion. It's not a negative message like ‘you must stop smoking, you must stop drinking alcohol.’ This is a positive, ‘do more, get out, do things, connect with people.’  
It’s so important to frame that in the ambition of a local area in a really positive way. And there is a lot of that happening. 

Gayle: What is also positive about this investment is it recognises that knowledge and experience about what works best for communities is within those communities. The answers and next steps are always there.  

But individuals and groups of people can only influence their own environment so far. This recognises that there's a systemic change that sometimes needs to happen to enable people to take that further so people can act within their area of influence within their communities. 

Often decisions that affect people and places are made by policy makers and investors.  

What this work does, is it tries to connect those two; people and place, and the system. If you see them in isolation, you're only ever going to get so far. You're going to miss the magic point in the middle where communities can describe their experience and opportunities, and their barriers, and the system that can support that, can take some action to do something about it. 

When Wakefield were starting off with the navigating local systems work with very small-scale investment, we had support from Together an Active Future the Pennine Lancashire LDP. It’s important to learn from others outside of our area too. 
 
James: Luton and Liverpool were two other areas where we knew other people and other networks, like our previous community development approach such as in Burngreave and Active Dearne. They were all precursors to this way of working, because that was specifically the neighbourhood place-based work and then we were doing other bits with the whole of systems work. 

Absolutely going back to Gayle's point, we're in a unique position now where the combination of the two is the really important bit, and how they interconnect.  

We might not have known that, or didn't maybe approach it in that same way before. So we're approaching it knowingly with those two things, within a specific boundary of a place.  
And it's that that's leading us as our guiding light now in terms of the place partnerships and how  to do both, because both rely on each other. They are depending on each other for change. Which is why we often use the phrase ‘community led; system enabled’ as they say in Kirklees. 
 
Gayle: The best result is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a way of thinking about approaching the work with low ego, leaving your badge at the door. I think  that's what YSF are particularly good at is leaning into work when we need to, and knowing when to step right back and keep out with the way. Knowing when to do both is so important. 

For me, the utopia is when we're not needed anymore. The purist in me is likes the idea of reaching a point where we have the least number of organisations needed, but the most active, healthy and happy people, that's when we know we've got there.