During his time at the 2015 Conservative Party Conference, Chris Heaton-Harris MP took time to hear about the work that the Football League Trust is doing in local communities and the positive effect of the 72 Football League Club Trusts are having in the communities.
Using the power of football to improve people’s lives, every year The Football League Trust engages over 1.5million through sport to improve health, inspire education, reduce crime, increase participation and tackle many complex social issues like drug abuse and homelessness.
The Football League Trusts deliever a range of health, education, inclusion and social impact programs through their local club, making a real difference to people's wellbeing. All 72 Football League clubs are involved in delivering sport in schools, supporting primary schools in particular to deliver their objectives against the PE curriculum. In addition, The FLT is playing a strong role in the development of the female game, with 30,000 women and girls aged 14-25 enjoying FTL football development programmes over the past two seasons. For perspective, this number was less than 1,000 as recently as 2009. The 72 football club trusts are a vital part of the delivery network that will help the Premier League achieve its goal of providing a sports offer to every primary school in England and Wales.
The Football League Trust is currently playing a very active role on a number of key government agendas, using sport to bring our communities closer together and outlined this recently in their submission to the Government's Sport Strategy consultation.
The Football League Trust is also proud to have been involved in NCS since its inception in 2011, and in 2015/16 will deliver almost 10,000 places through 40 football community trusts and other partners. That is likely to be over 10% of the entire national programme, and our feedback from the NCS Trust tells us that we are a very strong provider in terms of recruitment, retention and quality.