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About the Article
The following opinion piece explores the wider systems and structures in which coaches exist in the UK. It is written for anyone with interest or involvement in sports policy, coach development, coach education and coaching. Specifically, it addresses the question:
ARE COACHING SYSTEMS AND STRUCTURES IN THE UK EFFECTIVE IN SUPPORTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPETENT COACHES?
I answer this question through six interwoven sections which include:
- Introduction
- Coaching is Not a Strategic Priority
- The Wider Coaching Ecosystem in the UK
- The Challenge of Being an NGB in the System
- The Emperor Has No Clothes
- Conclusions and Recommendations
The conclusion I reach is that the system is mostly incoherent, ineffective, and not fit for purpose. Reasons for my beliefs are nuance and complex and that is recognised in how the piece is written. Each section is discrete but by linking them together, I hope to encourage you to think about the complex reasons why coaching systems in the UK are not working well.
Acknowledgments & Trustworthiness
Whilst many of my opinions are included in the piece, I followed a rigorous journalistic approach in writing it. I draw on experiences, conversations and meetings with others, and the wider academic literature too. Prior to sharing the article, I asked ‘critical friends’ to review it. This was because I wanted to ensure that it was balanced and as accurate as possible. These people are ‘close to the coalface’ and include NGB board members, Quango administrators, coach developers and coaches.
Introduction
The goal below from Bergeron and colleagues in their IOC Consensus Statement is an admirable and aspirational one which everyone working in sport should be contributing to:
“THE GOAL IS CLEAR: DEVELOP HEALTHY, CAPABLE AND RESILIENT ATHLETES, WHILE ATTAINING WIDESPREAD, INCLUSIVE, SUSTAINABLE AND ENJOYABLE PARTICIPATION AND SUCCESS FOR ALL LEVELS OF INDIVIDUAL ATHLETIC ACHIEVEMENT”.
This article is about coaching and the wider systems and structures in which coaches exist in the UK, in which I explore how effective we are in doing so. My ‘dream’ is that everyone from sport policy makers, CEO’s, Board Members to grass roots coaches read it. That’s because I want you to think about how effective the system is and be constructively challenging about it to anyone who will listen. Specifically, I address the question:
Are coaching systems and structures in the UK effective in supporting the development of competent coaches?
This question is important because answers give clues about the effectiveness of policy in giving people positive opportunities in and through sport, whether at an Olympic Podium level or a children’s group. In discussing coaching, it is important to provide a definition of what coaching is.
My favourite one comes from Doug Cooper & my colleague Justine Allen:
“Coaching is a social activity benefiting from interpersonal skills. It is complex and dynamic, and yet also goal-oriented, focusing on bringing about change, usually an improvement in the athlete’s performance. Furthermore, it involves a range of activities and skills employed to bring about the desired changes”.
Being a coach is a very responsible and challenging job. Doing it well can transform lives and doing it badly can damage lifelong health, wellbeing and affect how people engage in sport afterwards. Every coach likes to believe they are responsible for good things happening and most attribute bad stuff to the actions of others. When things ‘go wrong’, coaches are often the ones who are held accountable. Recommendations typically relate to the need for better educated or regulated coaches in the area of failing: i.e. mental health, nutrition, equality and safeguarding. These recommendations assume that the suggested intervention will work, without due consideration of how they will be implemented or how they will reach the appropriate target audience.
People who educate coaches usually do so for the right reasons, believing they are ‘giving back’ or making a positive difference. This is true in many instances, and I believe that most people have good intentions. However, the reality is that many of the methods used to educate coaches were ‘made up’ guided by flawed assumptions, in which culturally normal ‘ways of doing’ are simply reinforced. Thus, an ‘illusion of learning’ is presented, in which these norms are often detrimental to the fun, participation, learning and performance of athletes. In other words, good intentions are not enough and ‘giving back’ can sometimes result in things that are counter to the simple goal proposed by Bergeron and colleagues.
I believe that the systems which exists to support participation and performance in sport, specifically relating to coaching, are mostly incoherent, ineffective, and not fit for purpose. These failings are often detrimental to sport, to coaches and to athlete well-being. That is not to say that all coach education is rubbish because it’s not. But in making such a strong public statement, I am relatively confident that it is true. I have listened to the lived experiences of people at every level of the sporting system in the UK and beyond. I have listened to what history has told me and I have reflected on my personal experiences too. I am evidence-informed, guided by my research (coach learning; behaviour change science; mental health) and by the research of others. Whilst often guilty of being an esoteric academic, I am an active coach, I have been on multiple coaching courses, having written and delivered a few of them too. I speak with coaches at every level of sport on almost a daily basis. I am motivated to write this piece because I want the best for others in sport, knowing that many are being ‘short-changed’. Most people in sport are good people. They genuinely want to help others in and through sport.
Reasons for me arguing that the system is failing are complex. Most are broadly related to ‘too many cooks’ focusing on achieving Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to maintain or increase funding levels, whilst forgetting their job is to ‘cook the broth’.
Critical friends and those with the sufficient expertise to help to make the system better are ignored. A cultural myopia exists in which poor leadership, vested interests, capability deficits and complex power dynamics limit the potential impact of the work that people do. I understand these things because I am guilty as charged too. I have sometimes acted in ways to maintain a roof over my head. I have passionately delivered coaching courses when I was too ignorant to recognise that content was based on flawed assumptions and could potentially harm others. I have chosen not to fight battles when I was not equipped to win them or been fearful of the consequences of speaking out. When I have spoken out, the consequences have normally been horrible.
Dealing with ‘elephants in the room’ usually makes people happier and more effective, especially when it is recognised that previous behaviours were based on flawed assumptions and poor evidence. Please ‘reach out’ to me if you disagree with what I write. That is because I would be over-the-moon if I was wrong. I also recognise that the system is so complex that I can’t possibly understand it fully. I may not have heard about the wonderful initiative you are part of or what you are about to do in the future. But I just want to help to make things better.
Coaching is Not a Strategic Priority
Quality coaching is fundamental to the experiences of participants in sport. A well-trained coaching workforce can support growth in participation, health & wellbeing and inclusivity agendas. These factors are central to most of the funding drivers for sport in the UK.
However, coaches tend to be under-valued, under-trained and under-paid. They are often scapegoated when things go wrong too. In the International Olympic Committee Consensus Statements on Youth Athletic Development and Mental Health in Elite Athletes, it is recognised that knowledgeable and expert coaching workforces are fundamental to performance and athlete welfare, from the playground to the podium.
Through high-quality coaching, we can tackle many culturally embedded practices that act as barriers to participation and hinder positive athlete development. Stories about poor athlete mental health, eating disorders and poor retention rates at youth development level usually relate to poor coaching practices. But these coaching practices are often the result of complex culturally interwoven things that allow poor behaviour and poor practice to exist. Lack of strategic priority surrounding coach development is part of the reason. Much as it is convenient to say coaches are autonomous creatures who are wholly responsible for their own behaviour and learning, the reality is very different.
In my day job as a lecturer, I deliver on an MSc. in Performance Coaching. We currently have around 100 experienced coaches with us. The focus of our teaching is to expose coaches to different ways of thinking through reflection and by encouraging them to understand their own practices at a deeper level. They are often exposed to ways of thinking that do not reflect cultural norms in their sport or how they have been previously educated. I am very proud at what we do. When I am effective in my teaching, it usually means shifting coaches along the Dunning-Kruger curve, which I write about here. The journey along this wiggle can be very tough, in which highly experienced coaches start to recognise what they don’t know and sometimes see that the ways they have coached in the past have been flawed.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is related to the ‘magic’ t-shirt effect (authority bias) in sport. This phenomenon immediately infers competence and expertise through the wearing of a t-shirt. This t-shirt is often associated with an NGB, a podium programme or club. This is prevalent at grass roots too when the club t-shirt has 'coach' on it. It is common for coaches who have just been on a Level 1 weekend course to deliver coaching points with such certainty and all athletes simply complied without question. We are all guilty of ‘just been on a course’ syndrome.
Particularly in the higher echelons of sport, coaches are often appointed based on who they are rather than on the coaching skills they have. The prevalence of cronyism and a bias towards past performances influences appointments to more senior coaching roles. This is independent of demonstrable competence. People suddenly appear after mysterious recruitment procedures and others who may have also fancied the coaching role wonder how they missed the advertisement. This is not only unfair on athletes, but also on ambitious young coaches who believe that being appointed on merit is unlikely. Furthermore, an appointed coach who is underequipped to comprehend or manage the complexity of their role, particularly when they are ego orientated, will often display overtly dominating behaviours to ‘paper over the cracks’. Doing so has consequences. Of course, some may decry initiatives such as the Elite Coaching Apprenticeship Programme from UK Sport exist to help make coaches better. To you, I say, “you’ve shown me your cherry, but what about the cake?”. Figure 2 adapted from Rynne & Mallett shows a list of ingredients for a high-performance environment coaching cake.
I argue that those with strategic leadership positions should at least know what these ingredients are and how complex the role of a coach is. Doing so would allow them to appreciate what the demonstrable competences for the role are and deploy coaches appropriately. Victories of athletes under their charge is one metric but it is only meaningful when expressed relative to the broken eggs around the cake bowl. Success as an athlete is another component, particularly when their past experiences can be drawn on to help others. Buy-in from athletes can be more rapid too. But the personal attributes that many victorious athletes possess can often be dichotomous with the attributes needed to be a good coach.
Employers have a duty of care to coaches. That means employing coaches with the right capabilities for the job. Without these capabilities, both the coach and their athletes can suffer. Coaches who wear the NGB t-shirt are role models to other coaches. Their behaviours and practices pervade throughout the system to the grass roots. What an academy, regional pathway or indeed university coach does matters and has consequences. Therefore, quality coaching must be treated as a strategic priority. Doing so is fundamental to achieving participation and performance KPI’s. This means having both bottom-up and top-down pathways. To work, these pathways should meet in the middle.
The reality, however, is that NGB’s do not have complete autonomy to decide what their strategic priorities are. Whilst there is substantial variation, most get <20% of their income from their membership. The other 80% is usually ring-fenced in ways that are demanded by their funders and other actors in the wider sporting ecosystem. This means that NGB’s do not necessarily invest in or give coaching the priority it deserves.
The Wider Coaching Ecosystem in the UK
From around 1996 onwards, there was considerable investment in developing professional sporting systems in the UK. Whilst there have been times of adequate resource, this resource has not always been used wisely. As a result, coaching has not developed as a profession as well as it could have.
Other areas of sport have been more successful, such as the sport and exercise sciences, in which most active practitioners have at least a postgraduate qualification in their domain of expertise. Arguably however, coaches need a greater range of skills and competences to enable them to orchestrate complex processes involving human adaptation. Get it wrong and maladaptations occur. But coaches only need to go on a few weekend courses to learn content that is typically not evidence informed and may be reflective of poor practice. This is like expecting medical consultants to learn their specialism without doing their general medical training first and GP’s learning their job through watching Casualty. What could possibly go wrong?
Lucy Moore did an excellent job in explaining ‘the system’, in which coaches exist, in her paper on professional practice and policy making in UK high-performance sport. This paper, in the bibliography, was insightful because she explored the complex social context in which many coaching systems and practices are situated. I’ll do my best to describe this system as simply as I can, pinching a few of her words and ideas whilst I’m at it.
Central and devolved government dictates policy and allocates funding. Decisions are typically based on political rhetoric and occasionally on evidence-informed things that may benefit society. Quangos (quasi autonomous non-government bodies) sporting bodies (UK Sport, Sport England, Sport Scotland, Sport Wales & Sport NI), are charged with implementing these policies through the distribution of ‘strings attached’ funds to others.
These organisations, including UK Coaching, CIMPSPA & lots of NGB’s, are staffed by individuals with different levels of knowledge, values and beliefs, which in turn influences their competence and priorities. These individuals interact to interpret, ‘design’ and implement what they think they are expected to do. Within this constantly evolving ecosystem, power plays and tensions exist between groups and individuals. Ultimately, these social factors influence how strategy is operationalised and what work is done. I suggest that efficiencies and effectiveness within this system could be much better.
For example, I’m not exactly sure what UK Coaching does. What relevance do they have to the wider coaching market, and indeed would anyone notice if they weren’t there? My perception is that they seem to just output idealistic ‘stuff’ to make already nice people feel better about themselves.
CIMSPA is a relatively new player to the market, with funding and a remit associated around vocationally, market orientated forces and coaching regulation. CIMSPA are pushing for chartered status for coaches and the adoption of specific standards for coaching. This is not necessarily a bad thing. However, it is unclear what lessons have been learnt from the past in how the standards are implemented. Standards usually dictate what goes into isolated competency matrices, from which learning curriculums and assessments are constructed. Dave Collins and colleagues suggest these types of matrices are too simplistic to reflect the complexity of expert coaching practice. I have mapped qualifications against similar standards, assessed and been assessed against them. My perception is that in operationalising such standards, they usually become ‘tick box’ processes that constrain learning, maintain cultural status-quo’s, and lose sight of what was set out to be achieved in the first place. Furthermore, I believe that the remit of CIMSPA is such that they must be very careful not cross into the NGB coach education market. Does this render them ineffective? David Aldous and David Brown wrote an interesting critique on CIMSPA which is shown in the bibliography. There are many who remain sceptical, particularly because there are concerns surrounding an implicit ‘control & regulate’ rather than ‘enable and empower’ philosophy of the organisation.
I am Scottish, so I must mention Scotland. Sport Scotland has a level of strategic oversight on Scottish governing bodies (SGB) and allocates funding on this basis. There are often dependencies and co-dependencies between SGB’s and the NGB’s which will influence how coaching qualifications are delivered. How well these relationships work is dependent on the quality of relationship, the level of respect at institutional and individual level; it doesn’t help relationship building when Scotland is often referred to as a ‘region’ at UK level. NGB’s primarily get their funding from Sport England, who insists that money cannot be used for things that happen north of the border. UK Coaching, CIMSPA and a few other bodies want to exert their influence in Scotland too. This is further complicated by the fact that Scotland & England have different regulatory authorities with oversight of nationally recognised qualifications (1st4sport is the awarding body in England, in which competencies are aligned to QCF and SCQF frameworks).
If I have got anything wrong in this explanation, then I apologise. I understand complex systems better than most, but this system is continually evolving in such a way as to encourage Stephen Hawking to say “WTF”. Fortunately, my belief is that Sportscotland is doing positive things towards being more autonomous from UK wide systems, make things simpler and attempting to do things that work. The Scottish Coaching Certificate is CIMSPA endorsed and no longer linked to the UKCC. I am less convinced about England and don’t know much about Wales or Ireland.
In writing the previous paragraphs, I recalled an example where two senior managers with strategic oversight within their NGB silo of responsibility did not like each other. There was a degree of one upmanship, with competition for money from the same pot and in defending their little fiefdoms. They had KPI’s associated with slightly different sporting populations and agendas within the Whole Sport Plan (a plan which determines how funding is allocated and in measuring KPI achievement). Decision-making was often stifled by an inability to plan beyond discrete funding cycle boundaries i.e., “we don’t know if there will be a metric associated with that in the next plan, so let’s just wait”. The results were varied but inaction, inefficient use of resources, work replication and a very selective use of evidence to suggest people were achieving ‘stuff’ associated with KPI’s was evident. There were very few tangible outcomes that could be directly attributed to the allocation of resources and deeper frustrations further down the chain.
The Challenge of Being an NGB in the System
Make no mistake, I am often a fiercely critical friend of NGB’s, including my former employer British Cycling. However, there is no denying that they exist between a ‘rock and a hard place’. The rumblings of change and fears surrounding austerity have existed for many years but are only now becoming apparent. I am slightly more optimistic living in Scotland, in which a modicum of common sense and evidence-guided policy making prevails. Particularly in England, there is a current political drive towards a market-orientated discourse in which sustainability and income generation underpins strategy. The complex inter-relationship between funding and policy is now having a direct impact on coach development, and things do not look great.
Most market-orientated economic models are based on the flawed assumption that the potential for growth is infinite. Profit is driven through greater efficiencies and increased demand. When demand slows, all you need to do is offer new products. The reality, however, is that sport in the UK is a saturated market. Growth for one NGB is typically contingent on the failure of another, usually a smaller one. Additionally, NGB’s are set KPI’s around the assumption that those from more-socioeconomically deprived areas, women and girls, non-whites and people of disability constitute a latent market. In other words, by offering products to suit these markets, then more people will be attracted to sport. Some people at a policy level need to learn about how to set achievable goals. Or perhaps they have and intentionally set unachievable ones for political ends.
Of course, I would love more diversity in sport, and I want people from similar backgrounds to my own to have opportunities to love sport like I do. But barriers for entry into the market for less wealthy people is not because of a lack of the right products or different opportunities. It is because of social inequality, and inequality is growing. There are some wonderful programmes in sport where people do great jobs to tackle inequality. But local conditions and a few very committed volunteers need to work very hard to make them work. Traditionally, Youth Services have acted as one gateway for young people into to sport. However, they have experienced funding cuts of 70% in the last decade in England. NGB’s are not necessarily best placed or have the right workforce to achieve KPI’s associated with equality and diversity.
In the next Whole Sport Plan cycle in England, funding is likely to be front-loaded. This means budget deficits will progressively increase and NGB’s have ‘imposed’ targets for income generation and commercial revenue to meet shortfalls. It is not unreasonable to suggest that to achieve these targets means growing the market and/or reducing costs. The barriers into sport and coaching are considerable for poorer people. Many cannot afford to play sport or pay to become a coach and thus cannot contribute to income generation metrics. Even for participants in higher socioeconomic categories, participation growth is dependent on the availability of facilities, coaches and volunteers. Facilities are often provided by local authorities, many of whom cannot cover their statutory obligations to old, vulnerable and disabled members of the community, let alone sport. This is because of draconian funding cuts from central government.
The drive towards income generation and reduced funding pots for NGB’s mean that coaches and other volunteers often need to fund themselves. Funding agencies may suggest that this means it is important to make it cheaper to become a coach. Online learning is perceived to be one way to do so. However, my experience of developing and delivering online products is that costs are simply different. Delivering online learning is not about ‘cutting and pasting’ resources, previously delivered face-to-face courses or in a book onto an online learning platform. To deliver quality interactive products that support learning requires considerable upfront investment and the involvement of costly humans too.
Reducing costs usually means reducing quality. But NGB’s typically have fewer resources and few KPI associated incentives relating to quality. There are fewer incentives to encourage them to evaluate products especially when the results of most evaluations are likely to be negative.
There is an ethical dimension to the fact that NGB’s are expected to generate income. The actions of many in strategic leadership positions suggests that they view coaching and volunteering as an income stream. I argue that this means selling coaching qualifications, many of which are not fit for purpose. Unfortunately, funding and other resources are typically allocated “using rigid methodologies and target driven measures” based on specific key performance indicator metrics. NGB’s will typically deliver and measure to achieve these metrics, often losing sight of the goal presented by Bergeron and colleagues.
Additionally, KPI’s are usually abstract from the needs & wants of NGB members and their affiliated clubs. This is because membership fees typically account for less than 20% of NGB income. This income barely covers insurance expenditure. Therefore, members tend to have very little power or voice. Quite rightly, some feel their interests are not necessarily being served by their NGB.
Furthermore, NGB’s need sponsorship and commercial partners. These commercial partners will want something in return, usually an opportunity to market their products to the membership or demonstrate corporate responsibility through association with a ‘healthy’ brand. Such things are often ‘dressed up’ as membership benefits.
As I previously said, NGB’s are stuck between a ‘rock and a hard place’. Unfortunately, rocks were not used in the foundations of coaching qualifications in the UK. In fact, the foundations were not laid correctly in the first place.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
For those with sufficient expertise and autonomy to speak publicly, there is consensus that the UK Coaching Certificate Framework (UKCC) framework, from which most coaching qualifications are supported, is not fit for purpose. Admittedly, I am not fully up to date on how this framework is evolving but I believe it will not exist in the not-too-distant future. I suspect only those with some strategic responsibility in Quango’s have any clue as to what is happening.
The foundations from which the UKCC system was built were well intentioned and had some merit. However, the reality of implementation was that we ended up with a jigsaw puzzle, in which the most important pieces were missing. No one knows where the original box is and only people of a certain vintage have vague recollections on what the final picture was meant to look like. Arbitrary boundaries between each level of qualification were agreed upon, through opaque processes. Minor differences in the framework exist between NGB’s, in which some individuals managed to argue that the original ones did not meet the operational needs of their sport. NGB’s had a degree of autonomy to decide on what physical, technical and tactical stuff coaches needed to learn about. Typically, important psychosocial elements were lost in the learning hierarchy, presumably because coach educators cannot develop or deliver stuff they have limited understanding of. I think Prof. Chris Cushion captured how the system evolved better than me when he said it was “just made up and became normal”.
Notwithstanding, some NGB’s have done a much better job than others. I work with coaches associated with British Canoeing. This NGB made a brave strategic decision to support coaches and coach educators by rejecting a linear model of numerical progression and created a system based around coaching roles. They also engaged with academia to bring current research into their coach education system. I am continually humbled by the quality of their coaching workforce, which is at odds with others. Furthermore, I am very impressed with British Triathlon’s industry leading Level 3 qualification which is built around sound evidence-informed pedagogical principles and ‘market’ needs. Developing such a qualification meant engaging people who have expertise in coaching, not just sport specific stuff.
Positive things happen when strategic decision-makers see the value in quality coaching. There are many wonderful people doing wonderful things to develop coaches. Sadly, I believe that the best coach educators are often those who have learnt to ‘circumnavigate the system’, who deviate from expected curriculums and have invested a considerable amount of their own time and money to learn their trade. The return on investment to these people is usually only a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.
Many others have become slaves to the system, believing they are doing a great job to benefit the sport they love. I in no way devalue their intentions or contributions. However, many in the coach education workforce lack of expertise to understand the error of their ways and this myopia can be damaging. Overly rigid delivery of outdated and flawed curriculums are deployed by well-meaning coach educators with a sense of duty to ensure coaches assimilate with specific institutionalised ‘ways of doing’. These ways are often enforced through ‘tick box’ assessment. Those who dare to be different, and dare I say it follow better practice, are often ‘referred’ and will only pass when they assimilate. The ‘system’ is partly responsible, magically believing that to become a skilled coach educator happens on its own with the absolute minimum of investment. It doesn’t.
These slaves include my old employer British Cycling. To the best of my knowledge, they have not had a coherent coaching plan for many years. Despite attempts to implement a wider educational philosophy and to update qualifications, ‘waiting to see’ approaches, poor strategic leadership and lack of priority given to coaching means that nothing of great note has happened in over 6 years. By reading the job description of the Head of Education at British Cycling demonstrates what these strategic priorities of the senior management team are. I am sure that they can present nice statistics such as 95% of coaches had a positive experience on a course. I suspect a similar statistic applies to children who go to McDonalds for dinner. Having a nice time whilst consuming a collection of stuff packaged up to make it palatable to undiscerning tastebuds does not mean that a nutritious meal has been eaten. Fundamental issues relating to their Level 2 and Level 3 qualifications that have been known about for years and are addressed through the application of the odd sticky plaster. These and other systemic issues indirectly impact on clubs’ abilities to maintain sustainable coaching workforces to serve the needs of sport. Yet it seems that it is a strategic aim to make more money out of these volunteers, whilst not investing in fit-for-purpose products. If you sense a hint of anger and frustration in my ‘voice’ you are right.
Great coaching changes lives but poor coaching damages them.
I am a critical friend who cares deeply about sport. British Cycling is not an abstract entity to me but part of my extended family. It is an organisation that employs people who are my friends. As a member, I am as much part of British Cycling as the CEO. I have no doubt the CEO and I want the same things, including a sustainable business model which gives customers what they need and want.
I am picturing myself in Dragon’s Den making a pitch as a coach education manager to the savvy millionaires. Can you imagine Peter Jones saying: “So you present no evidence that your product works, you’ve got no patent on it and you’ve not invested much of your own money for how long? What do you take me for? A fool?”.
Poor coach education is not a victimless crime. It is just easy for people not to be held accountable for their actions or inactions. For example, think about a head swimming coach who orchestrates training and sets the culture for a club with 100 children in it. What if his model of training prescription was built on flawed physiological assumptions, which have become normalised partly because of what was taught on a coaching course? Attributing conclusive evidence of cause and effect is difficult when things go wrong. But it is convenient for some.
Being a smart-arse is a particular skill I possess, and I have asked this question of a few swimming coaches: “What have you learnt about the adaptation of the pre-frontal cortex of the brain?”. Unsurprisingly, I am usually met with blank looks. Yet adaptations in the pre-frontal cortex are related to hormone regulation. This area of the brain is structurally and functionally vulnerable to environmental stressors and sleep disruption during adolescence. It is also responsible for executive function including emotion regulation, working memory and self-control. If stress levels are too high and sleep patterns are regularly disrupted, then the long-term implications on mental health can be serious. In conversations with clinical psychiatrists working in sport, they tell me that referrals for mental health disorders from swimming are high. Well-meaning and conscientious coaches are doing what they think is right. However, misunderstandings around physiological load management and adaptation and long-term athlete development have become culturally normalised through practice and reinforced through education pathways. The link between poor youth retention rates on programmes and what happens on a clinical psychiatrist’s couch is clear to me too.
I am not arguing that coaches need to be educated in neurological adaptation but rather in balanced curriculums that allow coaches to challenge cultural norms and biases. The paper from John Stokowski and colleagues is very helpful in this regard as it focuses on avoiding the bullshit. There’s a lot of that about in coach education. Whilst the past cannot be changed, ultimately CEO’s and their Boards are responsible for what happens under their watch. I am not picking on swimming here. Similar arguments could be made against many other sports.
Pop along to the British Gymnastics coaching page to see what they have on offer. This NGB has had their fair share of bad press. This poor publicity has generally related to normalised poor coaching practices including overtraining, bullying and an eating disorder prevalence of >30%. What equally distresses me is that they have a picture of pre-pubescent little girl beside the Level 1 in Women’s Artistic Gymnastics tab. A deeper look at curriculums for coaching qualifications across NGB’s, including British Gymnastics, illustrated broadly technical based ones, with limited meaningful psychosocial material and superficial appreciation of the coaching process (what coaches do and why). As a business model and with their available market, I suggest that British Gymnastics may be one of the most successful ones in generating income. But their curriculum is light in areas of coaching that are in part responsible for their poor reputation. That reputation cannot be mended without addressing coaching curriculums.
Health and safety guidelines, risk assessment and ensuring coaches operate within remit dominate focus on many coaching courses. Delivering safe and fun coaching sessions through good evidence-informed coaching practice should be the priority. Many sports are inherently risky, and coaching should prepare athletes to manage these risks. Eliminating risk in sterile coaching environments may cover bottoms from litigation, but it does not make participants safer, provide more enjoyable experiences or result in better performance.
Discussions on courses and within coaching forums are dominated by questions surrounding what coaches can or cannot do under their remit, not how to be a better coach. This is what happens when courses are constructed using atheoretical competency profiles and arbitrarily set boundaries between qualification levels. These qualifications have typically been constructed using naive and didactic teaching pedagogies on what and how to coach. There is often little appreciation of the ‘why’ or consideration of alternative and potentially better approaches. To reiterate, psychosocial elements that relate to athlete health and wellbeing are typically absent. We should be empowering coaches, not making them into docile compliers of boring practice.
Coaches learn best through experience and reflection not through short, episodic courses. But the ‘system’ tends not to account for learning through experience. It is my understanding that sports must recognise accreditation of prior learning (APL) but few have working mechanisms to do so. I once had a rather interesting conversation with a captain in the Royal Marines who had been ‘referred’ for poor session planning despite having planned and led combat missions in Afghanistan (true story). Rather, the system leads to coaches delivering overly structured sessions that restrict skill development of participants. Most NGB’s share the same generic session and seasonal planning templates. Teaching of how to fill them in is based on naive coaching methods.
Level 1 coaches may only be allowed to deliver pre-planned sessions provided by the NGB or a higher-level coach. The reality is that every session will evolve as the result of complex interactions between the athletes in the session, the tasks being delivered and environmental constraints. In other words, no session ever goes to plan, coaches of children face more challenges that those of Olympic athletes, with them having to continually differentiate and adapt the session as they go. Some NGB’s insist that a Level 1 coaches can only operate under the supervision of a coach with a higher level of qualification. The implication of these factors is that the operational needs of clubs to maintain and grow participation are often not met. Clubs have a hard enough job of retaining volunteers as it is. Furthermore, the least experienced coaches often coach participants at the most complex age-and-stage of long-term athlete development too. Admittedly, there are no easy solutions to this dichotomy, but there are better ones.
On the balance of probabilities, most coaching qualification pathways hinder participation and performance levels rather than fostering them. ‘The market’ isn’t daft. Whilst most coaches have a nice time on courses, when you ask them a few years down the line how courses helped them, far fewer remain complimentary. This is not to say that all courses and all content is rubbish or that no learning occurs. To reiterate, there are many committed tutors delivering worthwhile content, meaningful experiences, and valuable learning. Arguably, this is usually down to the tutor’s own capability rather than what they are asked to deliver.
But the reality is that NGB’s currently have a coach certification monopoly. Unless you have a qualification from them, then it is almost impossible to obtain coaching insurance or operate in many clubs. What would happen to their market if there was an alternative route to certification? What would happen if a participant sued a coach for negligence and the lawyer of the coach successfully argued that they were not fully liable because their qualification was deemed not fit-for-purpose? I’ll end this section by asking if KPI’s relate to sustainability, does the current structure reflect a sustainable model or one at risk?
Conclusions and Recommendations
How do we improve coaching systems in the UK? Let me be very clear. Tinkering around the edges, in the belief that things will improve is quite frankly delusional. Changing the name or remit of a Quango will not work.
I also believe that it lacks integrity to have income generation targets for products where there is limited evidence to suggest they work. There is better evidence to suggest that some can reinforce culturally normalised poor practice. The delivery of non-evidence based ‘widgets and wodgits’ to tick a box around mental health, inclusivity and diversity probably just makes already well-intentioned people feel better about themselves and does not deal with underlying causes.
We know that people often rate learning experiences more highly when they confirm pre-existing beliefs. But experiences that challenge, contradict, and push coaches to think in new ways about their practices results in more effective learning. Therefore, whilst not a complete panacea, high-quality coaching must be treated as a strategic priority and resources allocated appropriately. That does not necessarily mean allocating more resources, it means allocating resources towards evidenced-informed approaches that are likely to work. Success should not be measured on ‘having a nice time’ metrics.
Prof Chris Cushion suggested we should:
“Burn the whole system to the ground and start again”.
I agree to an extent but ‘burning the system to the ground’ does not mean starting again. Personally, I could convene a working-group from my network, to build a new evidence-informed framework using existing evidence to do so relatively quickly. Many of the principles advocated in Practical Sports Coaching edited by Christine Nash and the Professional Judgement & Decision-Making model (PDJM) advocated by Dave Collins and others would provide the overarching philosophy. I use the BIG5 questions from Collins and Collins in most coach development activities I deliver. Leaders in sport would do well to have these questions sitting on their desk and use the answers to inform on strategy.
To answer question 1, most strategic aims point to most participants having a nice time, wanting to continue to take part in sport and for a small minority, to be successful on the international stage. To do so with limited resources means delivering things efficiently, through asking the next four questions. NGB’s must ask themselves if their coaching pathways and educational content supports or hinders participation retention rates and performance. This often means challenging and changing some culturally imbedded practices by fundamentally changing how some sports are coached. I have been highly critical of cycling, swimming and gymnastics in this regard. But not because I am picking on them or through vested interests towards damaging their reputations. It’s because I believe they could do so much better, and I want them to listen.
I am a realist, not an idealist and know how difficult cultural change is. Improving the quality of coaching and coach education is a Wicked Problem which requires strong leadership and vision to tackle. It is usually the easy option to ignore wicked problems. But surely organisations that present messages to suggest they lead the world in performance terms can ‘grasp the nettle’. There are management tools designed to deal with complex problems because every organisation faces them. Is it ok not to do so when the health and wellbeing of people is at stake, when systems do not work, when products are not fit for purpose and when we are asking for committed volunteers to pay for the privilege?
I have been involved in too many cases where organisations have resisted doing the ‘right thing’. Problems just seem too difficult, and it is easier to ignore them. Arguments about ‘protecting the business are internally discussed. But protecting a ‘business’, set up to serve the interests of the sport, its members and wider society means operating on the principles of integrity, openness and transparency. There are multiple policy actors in the system, who through lack of capability and/or vested interests, do not stop to ask the BIG5 questions. These people include leaders in these organisations. Lucy Moore suggests that effective leaders are those who “consciously attend to the tension balance between autonomy and interdependence” within the system. This means humbly asking policy makers “why this way and not another?”. It also means being brave enough not to take the Queen’s Shilling when the strings attached are unlikely to achieve desired outcomes. Sometimes, it’s as simple as taking a step back and asking, “what was the original purpose of the policy or the KPI and are we being true to that?”. Solutions usually quickly emerge.
To quote Lucy Moore yet again: “Policy makers on the top tier game will need to embrace a fear of the unknown, whilst the players on the lower tiers will need to feel safe and informed enough to problem solve”.
This is usually not the case. NGB’s are often so fearful of losing funding that they often continue to do ‘stuff’ that doesn’t work in the hope that nobody notices. But the funders do notice and will often just add new strings to the next round of funding without addressing ‘the elephant’. This is because aesthetically challenged elephants like to avoid mirrors.
When bad things happen in sport, reputation management strategies kick in to ‘protect the business’. Few people are fooled, resource is wasted, and trust is often broken. Many coaches can become so fearful of doing the wrong thing that they cannot do the right thing. What they often believe to be right doesn’t’ work but they continue to do it because it was taught to them on a coach education course. When presented with evidence to suggest a better way of doing things, coaches often lose faith in the system and trust is broken.
Because of such complexity between all stakeholders, what happens at the ‘coalface’ with clubs, coaches and athletes rarely reflects the intentions of anyone in the system. Good people trying to do good things end up fighting other people trying to do good things and more bad things happen as a result. This usually results in gross inefficiency, in which all are responsible, but few are accountable. Anyone who leads an NGB would do well to read the paper from Niels Feddersen on how a destructive culture evolved in one organisation. You may recognise some of the stories he tells.
We need a system where people comply with ‘stuff’ through informed judgement. That means listening with an open mind to the needs and wants of each other, whilst staying focused on desired outcomes. Not all opinions are equal. There is also a substantial proportion of society who believe that because they are not given what they want, they have not been listened to. Parents of the next world-famous sporting legend who has not been selected for an Under-14’s regional talent squad is an easy example to provide. But do you know what? Well-trained coaches can often manage these situations without there being repercussions and resource requirements throughout the wider system.
I am proud of myself because I have had small wins in doing ‘stuff’ behind the scenes which have resulted in change. Engaging, being listened to and respected by people throughout the system reinforces that most people have good intentions. Those who are perceived as ‘the enemy’ are usually nice people who suffer when things go wrong too. That includes people working in Quangos, CEO’s, members of boards and those on the front line. I am also positive about the future direction of sport in Scotland, particularly to address some issues in the past. Solutions take time, usually years to see benefits of change. Humans are not very good with dealing with such timescales.
I have not written this piece for the good of my health. Good coaching enhances lives and poor coaching damages them. Therefore, having coaching as a strategic priority of a sport is an imperative. Of course, NGB’s must be sustainable, and I don’t mind if they generate income to reinvest in coaching offers. However, coach education & development products must be fit-for-purpose and serve the needs of coaches as athletes alike. The logic model I present in Figure 7 is a simple tool which could be used when designing future evidence informed coach education interventions. Unfortunately, there are those who cannot see beyond coaches as an income stream, in which their actions, rather than their words, suggest that quality is not a priority. Failure to act is failure to demonstrate integrity.
About the Author
My name is Dr Andy Kirkland, a Lecturer in Sports Coaching at the University of Stirling. I am an active coach, who has worked for British Cycling as a coach developer. I am a BASES accredited Sport and Exercise Scientist and Chartered Scientist with experience of working in high performance sport.
I have broad expertise ranging from behaviour change science, performance systems in sport, coach learning, health and wellbeing. This generalist approach means that I’m skilled at understanding how to solve complex problems in sport. My ‘superpower’ is that I am good at understanding people and the complexities of the world we live in.
References
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If you wish to read any of the papers in this list, please feel free to drop me an email. I cannot provide access to the books though.