Friday 6th March 2015

...and business partners, James Jennison and Andy Mellors won’t mind us saying that!

James and Andy scooped Franchisee of the Year at #NTE15 and following the event, not dwelling on recent success, reflected on their LEARNINGS and ultimately decided they are running a business without PROCESSES and sufficient STRUCTURE. As a result, James and Andy have projected they could double their current growth by implementing simple processes, REDUCING WASTE and improving structure which they hope will result in a LEANER business.

Danny Melling & Yvonne Gandy spent nine hours this week creating a strategy to approach teaching schools to work collaboratively with YOU in a school led model. We are currently carrying out a pilot with one teaching school, where we have already invested over 60 hours and thousands of pounds in an attempt to create a perfect model for YOU in the future.

At this year’s NTE, Yvonne Gandy presented the results of a national impact review. The data compiled in this report provided us with outstanding information that has already enabled us to develop the service and training we supply to you and your Activity Professionals. The schools that completed the survey provided us with some important feedback and trends. There was an overwhelming response by franchisees at the NTE who recognised the importance of knowing these statistics within their own businesses to review your own, local practice.

This month, Marketing will invest £8k in two businesses through a Duncan Goodhew visit and subsequent PR support, resulting in exposure for their business on a localised level as well as enhancing relationships with their current schools.

Ofsted have released a two part video highlighting ‘good practice in competitive school sport’. Part 1 should get you all thinking innovatively about how to SUPPORT and STRUCTURE your curricular time delivery rather than JUST offering PPA cover.

The video shows how Eastbury Comprehensive School has excelled at competitive school sport and is introduced by Ofsted’s National Lead for physical education, John Mitcheson HMI. The short video includes detail about futsal, table tennis, rounders and football.

This week, Skills & Compliance, Operations and Marketing have collectively invested significant time working on creating a ‘Quality Impact Review’ survey plus supporting materials. We will ask you to circulate this to your schools soon. The results will allow our team and Yvonne Gandy to highlight areas of quality improvement across the network.

Since the NTE, Franchisee Danny Melling has invested in Glenn Hoy’s time from TIME associates to work together and create a STRUCTURED sales strategy for his business.

Using the five step sales dashboard, they have created an action plan for the next 3 months. The new plan will target 81 schools via referrals, with a view to convert 40 schools into sales with a year 1 average value of £5,000 (£215k). On top of this, they have targeted an average upsell value of £1000 for current schools, equalling £44k in total.

This week, Skills & Compliance met with a new national traineeship and apprenticeship provider on your behalf, which we hope to unveil to you soon.

This week Golden Mile licensee, Danny Boswell has been invited by TWO head teachers to present at TWO different cluster meetings following the outstanding work of his Health & Physical Activity Coordinator, Ross Catchpole.

Danny commented; “We have invested in Ross to schedule and deliver as many BLM’s within our existing schools as possible. Off the back of the analysis and solutions we have provided, two head teachers this week approached me and asked if we could come and present this service to all the other schools in the two clusters. As well as this, they have endorsed Premier Sport to the numerous schools within the two clusters as the preferred provider.”

This week, Karl Fox has been working on the BLM data sheet and increasing its analysis capabilities. The data sheet will now measure even more impact when comparing short/medium/long-term BLM’s, helping you to leverage your sales opportunities. Enhancements include:
1) Distance progression now by school, gender & key stage,
2) Average school % completing BLM by school, gender & key stage

Andrew Thomson, a Multi-Skills External Verifier for 1st4sport, recently visited Head Office to observe our ability to deliver the 3 in 1 combined qualification, including PESS L2, Principles of Coaching L2 and Multi-Skills L2.

Before Andrew’s visit, he questioned how we can blend this valuable learning into a one week course.

We’re delighted to announce the external verification got a  big thumbs up from Andrew who commented:

This week, Frankie Worthington spent seven hours analysing February’s PPA holiday course performances across the network. Great news, you delivered 54% more courses compared to February 2014, which demonstrates a promising growth rate across the UK.

Newmarket schools’ Premier Showdown is set to take place at Newmarket Academy on Wednesday 25th March at 6:30pm. With a 200 capacity audience, panel of judges and grand stage, the competition is set to be quite a spectacle.

There will be 10 schools involved from Gareth Simpson’s territory performing on the night, varying in ages from year 1 to year 6. The secondary school students from the academy will also perform on the night which is set to inspire the younger children to dance the night away.

Sports coach UK, with the support of National Partners including COMPASS, has revamped the Coaching in Primary Schools Portal following recommendations from schools across England. The Portal is a free to access resource for schools identifying a need for coaching through the Primary PE and Sport Premium. With just a couple of clicks, Head Teachers and PE Leads can find all the information they require to effectively and sustainably recruit and deploy a coach in their school.

Olympic gold medallist Duncan Goodhew MBE will be on hand to give some gold medal winning advice to London’s primary school children on Monday 9th March 2015. Duncan will be visiting St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School in Highgate in the morning before a group of lucky competition winners from St Joseph’s will take to the pool at Archway Leisure Centre receiving once-in-a-lifetime advice from the gold medal winning swimmer.

The law on workplace pensions has changed. Every employer with at least one member of staff now has new duties, including putting those who meet certain criteria into a workplace pension scheme and contributing towards it.

This is called automatic enrolment. It’s called this because it’s automatic for your staff – they don’t have to do anything to be enrolled into your pension scheme. But it’s not automatic for you. You need to take steps to make sure they’re enrolled. Please find attached the ‘how to guide’ from The Pensions Regulator.

In January we told you about the new, state of the art telephone system we had installed at HQ. As part of this upgrade the telephone numbers for HQ staff and departments changed.

To ensure you reach the correct person/department, please check these new set of telephone numbers.

We thought you would find it useful to create a Weekly News Update archive housing previous newsletters from this academic year.

‘Read more’ to catch up on any news you may have missed.