Ben Bradshaw to announce £6m funding for after-school sports clubs

The culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, will tomorrow announce £6m funding for 3,000 after-school sports clubs intended to be open across the UK by spring next year. The aim of the clubs, which will be funded by Bradshaw's Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Department of Health and Sport England, will be to involve all school-age children in sports regardless of their innate athletic ability. With £3.38m of the funding coming from the DCMS, the initiative is being linked to the 2012 Olympics, paying for equipment and coaching in the Olympic sports of badminton, fencing, handball, table tennis and volleyball, and wheelchair sports basketball and boccia (similar to bowls) played at the Paralympics. The DoH is contributing £1.5m of the overall funding package and the clubs will be run under the "Change 4 Life" banner, the DoH's educational campaign to encourage children and adults to eat more healthily and be more physically active. The programme's other £1m has been allocated by Sport England, whose lottery funding is now targeted to sports governing bodies rather than to encouraging general participation in physical activity. The patchy provision of after-school clubs, particularly for young people not naturally among the most gifted, has long been seen as a missing link in the sporting landscape by DCMS policy experts. The government lays claim to having overseen a major overhaul of sport in schools, with a commitment to spending around £2.4bn on new sports facilities and coaching programmes, including £680m of lottery funding, between 2002 and 2011. The DCMS points at evidence of tangible improvement to 90% of children now doing two hours of PE and sport a week, increased from the proportion of 25% which Labour inherited in 1997. More than half of five- to 16-year-olds now take part in three hours sport a week and the after-school clubs are intended to help fulfil the ambition of the DCMS to offer children opportunities to do five hours' good-quality sporting activity every week, both in and out of school, by 2013. The UK, however, still has one of Europe's highest sporting drop-out rates once teenagers leave school and the government has set a target for all 16- to 19-year-olds to be offered three hours' high-quality sport a week by 2012-13. The intention ultimately is for the clubs, which will be run by qualified coaches from the seven sports' governing bodies, to become available to adults at the facilities on school sites, which are currently mostly unused in the evenings. The DCMS said today that the first clubs will open in the autumn term, with all 3,000, at locations around the country, fully staffed and equipped by the spring 2011.