School Focus: Develop a health and well-being offer aligned to the new school curriculum.
Expression of Interest Overview
Within Ysgol Y Grango (a secondary school based in Wrexham and serves the communities of Rhos, Johnstown, Penycase, Ruabon and Rhostyllen), 27.1% of pupils are entitled to free school meals. The facilities of Ysgol Y Grango have historically been used by sports teams within and outside of the neighbouring communities of the catchment of the school. Following receipt of separate funding, the school installed a new 3G football pitch and were keen to maximise its use by enabling the community increased access outside of the school day. In collaboration with the school/hub partnership and Active Wrexham, they sought to create a new term-time and holiday time programme. The intention was for the funding to be spent on four overarching areas to support the creation of a community hub:
- Equipment
- Infrastructure (e.g. new lockers, re-decoration, online booking system)
- Security access and systems
- Community development days
Programme Implementation
The school received funding from December 2021 to July 2022. Monthly learning logs listed activities the school had been offering, such as breakfast club, netball festival, ‘boot room’ of spare boots for use on forthcoming 3G pitch. They also sought to improve changing rooms to make them accessible for the community outside of the school. Through the monthly completion of learning logs, the following key reflective points were highlighted, and the school’s implementation of the programme was documented in the timeline shown in Figure 17:
What Worked Well:
- Monthly school meetings and the first Sport Wales [school forum] meeting – accessed new ideas and a chance to see whether the ideas of other schools could be transferrable to their own context
- Leadership courses which fed well into the new curriculum and could benefit local clubs
Learning Points/Areas to Improve:
- Narrow down the school’s focus for the programme and identify key focus areas
- Consider costs of adding additional breakfast club days
Next Steps:
- Create links with cluster schools and communicate with clubs and primaries regularly
