‘UK sport should focus solely on elite sport. If we get enough athletes winning we will also get...

Third Year Summative Assignment One - Student – Z0906870

‘UK sport should focus solely on elite sport. If we getenough athletes winning we will also get people playing’(Collins, 2010). Critically discuss this statementstating why you agree or disagree.

United Kingdom (UK) was a relatively ‘late adopter’

(Green & Houlihan, 2005: 63) to the trend of nations viewing

elite sporting success as a ‘resource valuable for its

malleability and its capacity to help achieve a wide range of

non – sporting objectives’ (Green & Houlihan, 2005: 1). From

the 1990s successive UK governments shifted from historically

fragmented sports policies (Roche, 1993) to funded, systematic

and centralised systems (Bloyce & Smith, 2010). At the helm,

elite sport and in its wake grassroots community sport has

encouraged mass participation for sporting and non-sporting

objectives.

This essay will critically explore the premise that UK

Sport should focus solely on achieving elite sporting success

in the belief this has a ‘trickle down’ or ‘demonstration

effect’ on community grassroots and mass participation sport

(Green, 2007: 943). There will be discussions of historical

and contemporary rationales of key sport policies and in doing

so, map the origins of tensions between elite and grassroots

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funding particularly following past restructures to UK Sport

and the forthcoming 2012 Olympics.

Interwoven throughout the essay will be insights from

theoretical policy frameworks such as advocacy coalition

framework (ACF), multiple streams framework (MSF) and path

dependency theory, in order to illustrate of how UK Sport has

emerged and learned from the experience of Eastern Block

nations and Australia. Throughout the essay there will be

examples of methodological difficulties and empirical evidence

behind the claims of sport per se and in particular elite

sport’s potential to influence wider social objectives. For

these issues are at the heart of the debate surrounding UK

Sports policy trajectory i.e. can the wider welfare policy

objectives of youth and community sports development coexist

successfully or even reach a point of ‘convergence’ with the

elite sports objectives of talent development and

international sporting success (Houilihan, 2011).

In order to understand why UK Sport looked

internationally for policy learning, it is useful to trace the

fragmented emergence of sport as a sector of public policy

interest. Using a timeline from 1960s there will be a critique

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of policy themes and rationales such as targeted recreational

welfare sport policies, desire for international sporting

success, contemporary concerns over physical inactivity and

finally the economic lure and political kudos of hosting a

mega Olympic event. For it is against a background of

pluralism, convoluted political rationales and discourse

coalitions (Green, 2006) that the UK has developed a sports

policy trajectory that is ‘path dependent’ (Kay, 2005, cited

in Houlihan and Green, 2008: 17) on elite sport investment

using state and private funding beyond the 2012 Olympics

(DCMS, 2010). From this assertion personal judgments will be

made over whether this policy trajectory can remain

electorally palatable if elite sport is perceived to be

‘disconnected from a vigorous commitment to mass

participation’ (Houlihan & Green, 2008: 19).

Wolfenden’s Sport in the Community report (1960, cited in

Henry, 2001) is recognised as the first government initiative

that moved from a minimal state interest in sport. Prior to

this there had been a reliance on ‘voluntarist’ sectors, with

sport viewed as a recreational pastime not requiring

intervention but only to foster ‘enlightened paternalism of

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voluntary bodies’ (Henry, 2001: 13). Wolfenden’s Report has

been highlighted as important for signalling the start of

longstanding tensions, which still resonate in sport policy

discourses today, i.e. sport’s ‘mythopoeic’ role as a

utilitarian social instrument (Coalter, 2007: 9). McIntosh &

Charlton (1985: 6) suggest ‘the underlying justification for

the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations was sport for

sport’s sake however extraneous benefits were not totally

ignored’ and that the ‘British love of sport should be

‘encouraged as a contribution to social wellbeing, perhaps

even for social control’.

Houlihan (1997: 93) suggested utilitarian benefits of

sport shaped government interest in three ways; firstly in

alleviating problems of adolescent urban control, secondly

electoral pressure for an expansion of sport facilities and

thirdly the realisation that state-funded sport could improve

international sporting achievements. The influence of

electoral opinion in the latter two have been important

exogenous themes in UK sport policy changes and is cited by

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both MSF and ACF as a crucial factor (Kingdon, 1995; Sabatier,

1998). During this period it is important to note that the

decline in UK’s international competitiveness was in contrast

to the sporting successes of the ‘systematic planning of East

Germany and Soviet Union (Houlihan, 1991: 27, cited in Green

and Houlihan, 2005: 52).

Therefore the establishment of an Advisory Sports Council

(1965) which was later restructured to become GB Sports

Council (1972) was the first shift towards recognising

systemic and coordinated approaches to sport were required.

However on closer examination the reality of what happened to

sport development in the next 20 years under the GB Sport

Council’s Sport For All (1972, cited in McIntosh & Charlton, 1985:

6) and Sport in the Community: The Next Ten Years (1982, cited in Green

& Houlihan, 2005) was more like ‘irregular evolution’ than

systematic development (Jackson, 2008: 25).

Critiques of Sport For All programmes have suggested they

were ‘never more than a slogan and that government

increasingly directed GB Sports Council to target its

resources towards specific groups in society’ rather than

towards mass participation (Green, 2004: 369). Policy language

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quickly shifted from Sport for All to the ‘formulation of policies

of recreational welfare’ (Coalter et al., 1988, cited in Coalter,

2007: 10) and sporting organisations found themselves

operating in a ‘broader political consensus surrounding the

maturation of the welfare state’ (Green, 2004: 369). The most

blatant example of sport being used for recreational welfare

purposes was Action Sport (Rigg, 1981, cited in Coalter, 2007:

11) which followed the 1981 urban riots where GB Sport Council

allocated £3 million to urban sports development in the hope

of avoiding further inner city tension. It is important to

note that an additional stated aim of GB Sport Council at the

time was to improve elite sport. Houlihan (1991: 98 – 99,

cited in Green & Houlihan, 2005: 52) suggests however ‘there

was no discernable tension between the interests of the elite

and of the mass, as there was a consensus, that an increase in

facilities was the first priority’.

The second significant policy from GB Sports Council was

Sport in the Comminity: The Next Ten Years (1982: cited in Green &

Houlihan, 2005). It was clear that Sport For All’s original premise

‘was not yet a reality’ (McIntosh & Charlton, 1985: 19) and

although there was continuing funding emphasis to target

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recreational welfare initiatives, Sport in the Community (1982)

largest funding commitment was towards elite level sport

(Coalter, 1988, cited in Green, 2007). However despite funding

focus, subsequent periods between 1980s and early 1990s did

not yield significant elite sporting success. Moreover it was

a period of organisational confusion from pluralisms of

sporting and non sporting objectives, characterised by Roche

(1993, cited in Green, 2004) as one of ‘continuing

fragmentation and disharmony between the various bodies

involved in lobbying for sports interests’.

Sources of disharmony within sporting organisations were

both external and internal but politically, inextricably

linked. Firstly from an external perspective the government

under Margaret Thatcher were largely ambivalent and disdainful

towards sport which resulted in what Henry (1993, cited in

Oakley and Green, 2001) describes as a period of disinvestment

in sport. GB Sports Council was reduced in size which affected

elite level sport and capping on local authority spending led

to reduced investment at grassroots community level (Collins,

2008). Secondly from an internal perspective, endemic tensions

existed following the restructure of GB Sport Council to the

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UK Sports Council which presided over the four home nation

sports councils. All five organisations were responsible for

financially aiding National Governing Bodies (NGB) to achieve

performance strategies, fund grassroots and specialist

facilities. Tensions arose from UK Sports Council adopting a

top down policy approach and the domestic sports councils

adopting a bottom up policy approach (Collins, 2008). Pickup

(1996) has argued that any middle ground reconciliation became

a process of political power games. This condemnation of the

organisational sporting landscape was supported by Roche

(1993: 91) who argued ‘structural disorganisation and internal

conflicts are at least long standing and probably endemic in

the British sports policy community’.

In summary as the UK approached the 1990s, sports policy

continued to face two major problems, the ‘absence of a voice

at cabinet level and secondly the fragmentation of

responsibility for the service across a number of departments’

(Houlihan, 1999: 96). All this was about to change in the next

decade as sport entered a period of sustained public

investment, governmental interest and debate about the role of

sport in society (Houlihan & White, 2002). Importantly however

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the advancement of elite sport development in the 1990s

overtook any ‘pretence of an integrated and multi-dimensional

approach to sports development as conceived in the late 1980s

by the GB Sports Council’ (Green, 2004: 371).

John Major’s 1995 ‘Sport: Raising the Game’ (DNH, 1995)

statement signalled an important watershed in terms of the

political salience of sport in the UK and underscored

contemporary rationales for the policy trajectory of massively

funding elite sport. Elite sport during this period became an

important element of a political discourse over its potential

as an inspirational panacea alongside competitive PE and

School Sport (PESS) for increasing mass participation.

National Lottery funding and the subsequent ‘emergence of an

organisational, administrative and funding framework’ for

elite sport (Green, 2004: 369) helped contribute to the

growing state involvement in sport policy development.

This policy direction however was not based on any

longitudinal domestic or international empirical evidence of

elite sport’s ability to inspire mass participation. For as

Australia discovered ‘trickle down’ or ‘demonstration effects’

of elite sporting success remain unproven (Stewart et al., 2004,

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cited in Green, 2007: 943). Instead proponents of ACF and MSF

would point to the political influence of John Major whose

position as a high profile ‘policy broker’ for promoting

competitive elite sport both in PESS and on the international

stage was a significant factor in introducing lottery funding

(Green & Houlihan, 2005: 16). Major’s construction of sport

policy was based on his ‘traditional views of conservatism’,

nationalism and cultural restoration (Coalter, 2007: 14) and

that international sporting failures such as UK’s 1996 Olympic

medal total were pervasive indicators of a nation’s decline in

competitiveness. Major’s political influence, 1996 Olympic

failure and lottery funding, constitute three acts in what

Kingdom (1995) calls ‘focussing events’ that alter operating

conditions and allow policy change to happen.

Policy attraction for elite sporting success ignored any

concerns regarding the lack of empirical evidence of sport per

se or elite sport’s efficacy on influencing wider social goals

such as mass sports participation (Coalter, 2007). Indeed

Green (2007: 937) has argued that Sport: Raising the Game (DNH,

1995) effectively ‘indicated the withdrawal of government from

the provision of opportunities for mass participation’. PESS

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and elite sport were very much seen to form the centre piece

of the prevailing sport policies of Major’s government with

the needs of community grassroots sport pushed to the margins

(Bloyce & Smith, 2010). The UK had now begun a process of

policy learning and policy transfer from successful Olympic

nations such as Australia who had started their elite sporting

programmes decades earlier, and who themselves had drawn

inspiration from the systematic approach of former Eastern

Block countries. Bloyce & Smith (2010: 143) suggest ‘the

success achieved by Australian athletes, made a significant

contribution to the sea change in British government policy’.

Houlihan (2011) suggests policy transfer is an example of

‘mimetic isomorphism’ or replicating a model not because its

complete efficacy is proven or that it can be applied

successfully to another country but simply because other

nations follow this policy route.

Entering the millennium Tony Blair was persuaded to

continue the re-invigoration of sport by ‘policy

entrepreneurs’ Sue Campbell Chair of the Youth Sport Trust, UK

Sport and Patrick Carter of Sport England (Houlihan & Green,

2006: 87). However it was recognised infrastructures of sport

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lacked organisational ownership to deliver New Labour’s own

sports strategy. Specifically in terms of its social policy

aspirations for developing generations of socially included

‘active citizens’ in health, education and employment

(Houlihan & Green, 2006). Although this will be illustrated

later in detail it is worth reinforcing, the empirical

evidence behind sports credentials to ever deliver broader

social objectives was questioned then and is still critiqued

today by academics. Notably, Coalter (2007: 31) who was

employed by Sport England to review the evidence base

concluded ‘the cumulative evidence base for the wider role for

sport is weak and littered with, ill defined interventions

with hard-to-follow outcomes’, sport per se therefore as a

social panacea is ‘not proven’.

Despite this, however, astute policy brokering and

lobbying of health and education minsters by Sue Campbell

brought about what Green (2006: 223) has described as the

‘emergence of ‘institutionalised discourse coalitions’. This

discourse shaped and politically legitimised a renewed

commitment for the principles of Sport For All using sport as a

part of a cost effective ‘Third Way’ agenda for solving wider

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social exclusion problems in health, employment and education

(Coalter, 2007). The linkage between sport and social policy

objectives were laid down in the policy statement: A Sporting

Future for All (DCMS, 2000: 7) and endorsed in the Game Plan policy

when Tony Blair stated ‘sport is a powerful and often under-

used tool that can help government to achieve a number of

ambitious goals (DCMS, 2002: 5).

Significantly, however even though a central focus within

Game Plan was towards health and community outcomes there was a

considerable strengthening of political support for elite

sport development and a political unity in this respect with

the previous conservative government. New Labour’s creation of

UK Sports Institute (UKSI) based on the Australian

decentralised sporting network, its support for the successful

bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, and the extra £200 million

of public money in the 2006 budget on top of annual £100

million lottery funding was further testament to the

increasing importance placed on elite sport success (Green,

2007).

For the first time sport was considered a discrete domain

for government intervention (Green & Houlihan, 2005) however

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important caveats to this political support applied. The most

significant of which was that those working within sports

development e.g. Sport England and Regional Sports Development

Officers were increasingly expected to provide detailed data

regarding the monitoring and evaluation of sporting projects

to demonstrate their impact and achievement of desired social

outcomes. The evaluation process came in the form of Public

Service Agreements (PSA) and Comprehensive Performance

Assessments (CPA) which were part of the broader Best Value

policy and which resulted in sport having statutory targets

(Bloyce et al., 2008).

What has been starkly revealed however during this decade

of Best Value scrutiny and evidence based policy making is

that the presumptions that sport can help address the

multifaceted aspects of social exclusion have not been proven,

‘sport seems to lack systematic evidence for many of its

claimed externalities’ (Coalter, 2007). Sport researchers

commissioned by sports bodies have encountered many new

problems for rigorously evidencing the social impact of sport

(Kay, 2009) and the political rhetoric over sports credentials

continues to be largely based on anecdotal evidence. One of

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the first expositions of sport research’s fragility was

Collins et al., (1999: 3) who in a meta - analysis of 180 studies

found only 11 studies that ‘had anything approaching rigorous

evaluations, and some of these did not give specific data for

excluded groups or communities’. The same researchers

concluded that there were a growing number of studies that

describe short term outputs in anecdotal narrative but

observed that few looked at longer term outcomes and many had

conceptual difficulties in defining measures for outcomes and

attributing causality. It is this last point that is still

highlighted as a critical difficulty and weakness in the

research that has attempted to interpret and determine the

social impact of sport.

In terms of measuring its broader outcome of

participation, physical inactivity and the ‘moral panic’

(Cohen, 2002) over obesity levels, Sport England has used

quantitative methodology to measure frequency of sport

participation. The Active People Survey (www.sportengland.org)

shows some progress in overall participation rates since the

survey commenced, e.g. in the rolling 12 months between

January 2009 and 2010, 16.6% of adults over 16 participated in

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http://www.sportengland.org/


moderate physical activity for 30 minutes compared 15.5% in

2005/6 period. However in terms of socioeconomic groups the

results are not helpful in supporting sport’s credentials as a

relevant tool for social cohesion which was a central theme of

Game Plan. There has been no statistical change in participation

rates between the lower and higher socioeconomic groups since

the 2007/8 survey, (www.sportengland.org). Kay (2009: 1178)

concludes ‘researchers are not only uncertain about the

potential social impacts of sport but also about the capacity

of research to uncover these’.

Elite sport has not escaped New Labour’s philosophy of

scrutiny, targets and value for money either, for the pressure

to succeed at the 2012 Olympics is palpable in UK Sport

language. UK Sport stipulated four areas to NGBs as part of

their funding regime: ‘medal potential; evidence of a

performance system to produce talented athletes; track record

and significance of the sport in public eyes’ (UK Sport, 2001:

6, cited in Bloyce & Smith, 2010: 143). A minimum 4th place on

medal rostrum has resulted in UK Sport adopting a ‘No

Compromise’ strategy (UK Sport, 2011). This approach to medal

success has resulted in the majority of resources being

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http://www.sportengland.org/


targeted to those athletes and sports capable of winning

medals, which has generated tensions amongst the less well

known fringe sports (Green, 2007).

It is clear however that desire for Olympic medal success

although difficult to politically resist in the lead up to

2012 is not universal. There remains a degree of scepticism

with regard to the amounts of money currently accounted to an

elite minority when compared to other levels of community

grass roots and mass participation sport. Girginov & Hills

(2008) report £65 million which represented 8% of Sport

England’s development of community grassroots sport has

already been diverted to sustain NGBs for elite sporting

development for 2012. The Chairman of the House of Commons

Committee of Public Accounts in 2006 asked of Liz Nichol the

Director of Performance at UK Sport ‘why are we not spending

more of this money on sport generally’; her response in

respect to Olympic funding was ‘it really does have a huge

impact on people in this country in motivating them to

participate in sport and compete in sport. That is why we do

it!’ (Green, 2007: 941).

It is here again however that the evidence base for such

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a claim is flawed, for a publication by the Institute for

Public Policy and Research and Demos reveals ‘all the evidence

shows that past Olympics failed to bring with them a sustained

increase in participation’ (Vigor et al., 2004: xiii). Coalter

(2004) in the same document considered the impact of Olympic

Games on sports participation levels and his findings suggest

that the impact was limited and in some cases participation

declined. Furthermore the UK’s sports policy inspiration,

Australia, has static participation levels and is only a few

percent above the UK following the Sydney Games in 2000

(Collins, 2008). Cashman’s (2006, cited in Bloyce and Smith,

2010) research into the Sydney Games suggested that if there

was any impact at all it was extremely short lived and

fleeting. From a methodological perspective it is difficult to

draw any conclusions for the future legacy impact of the 2012

Olympics because of the complexity in establishing a simple

cause and effect impact of hosting a mega event, as was found

by Coalter (2004) following the Manchester Commonwealth Games.

In conclusion the international evidence base therefore

suggests that for UK Sport to focus solely on elite sport in a

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bid to raise participation levels is ultimately a flawed

supposition! Furthermore the evidence that sport per se can

deliver non–sporting objectives such as social inclusion and

active citizenship is yet to be confirmed if the evidence is

there at all. It could be argued that the policy trajectory

that the UK has been following for the last 20 yrs has been

less around mass participation but more around the political

kudos of using elite sport to promote the UK’s relevance to

the global economy (Green & Houlihan, 2008). The pinnacle of

this has been the political and economic desire to host the

2012 Olympics despite the continuing rhetoric that the 2012

legacy will be one of increasing mass sports participation. As

Vigor et al., (2004: 8) argues ‘sustainable legacy is a slippery

term subject to different interpretations and diverse

perspectives as to what type of legacy is desirable or

achievable’.

The UK has not been on its own in the continuing pursuit

of elite sporting success for global stature, ‘elite sporting

systems of leading nations have become increasingly

homogenous’ (De Bosscher et al., 2008: 13). Houlihan & Green

(2008: 9) have suggested that the extent and similarity

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between leading nations indicates an inevitable path

dependency, for ‘the pressures towards convergence in elite

sporting systems are globalisation, commercialisation and

governmentalisation’ and these influences are unlikely to

disappear. Furthermore within all these countries there has

been an experience of an ‘apparent incompatibility between the

needs of the elite athlete, the needs of the club

infrastructure and the grassroots participant’ (Green &

Houlihan, 2005: 169). The UK has been no different in trying

to appease all stakeholders in sports development however a

new political coalition discourse for continuing the

development of grassroots community sport for sporting and non

– sporting objectives, suggests hope and a small

distinctiveness from most of the UK’s international peers

(Houlihan, 2011). That said the tension between providing

sporting opportunities for all, whilst recognising that in

some parts of the UK, socio-economic and physical environments

are ‘toxic to physical activity’ (Riddoch & Mckenna, 2005:

193) and that secondly not everyone in the community will want

to become involved in physical activity will remain a constant

practical challenge for sports development and health

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agencies.

Therefore it would be extremely premature to suggest that

massive investment in all levels of sport over the last 20 yrs

is producing a cultural formula to increase mass sports

participation and physical activity to the levels achieved by

countries such as Finland. Collins (2009) suggests that

Finnish policies unlike other western countries have remained

consistent to the principles of a nationalistic Sport For All

programme. By way of contrast Green (2006) has argued that to

continue the UK policy of a two – tiered focus on PESS and

elite sporting success leaves no space for the mass

participation principles of Sport For All to converge with

them into a holistic sports policy. However in the world of

‘realpolitik’ and remaining electorally palatable it will be

politically difficult to resist remaining on a path dependency

of elite sport investment if athletes excel in 2012. This will

be in part due to the British love of watching sport, future

policy challenges remain however to transfer this love into

playing sport, which will be made more difficult in a period

of financial austerity.

(Word Count 3852)

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