Advantages of Outsourcing your PE and School Sport

We are delighted to have Craig Brennan from Little Sports Group writing for us today. He looks at the intrinsic and extrinsic benefits to schools for outsourcing your PE provision to a specialist company such as ourselves.

There are many reasons to outsource your PE and School Sport to an external provider, these can include cost, the range of services available, quality and the level of qualifications and experience. We take a look at some of these in more detail below.

Cost efficiencies: Employing your own member of staff will come with added costs such as national insurance and pension contributions, paid leave and paid sickness. Outsourcing your PE and School Sport to a specialist organisation like us saves you on average 13% compared to employing a member of staff direct.

Flexibility: Employing someone on a full-time basis means that there could be times when a PE teacher’s time is not being used effectively. An outsourced provider can help you operate more efficiently with a coach that can be used only when they are needed. This could be covering PPA time, leading regular PE sessions or extra-curricular clubs.

Covering Absences: Any good provider will be able to cover their own staff absences with another member of staff, meaning you are not left short. You should be notified in advance and have full details of the member of staff covering including DBS details along with photo ID to be presented upon arrival.

A range of services: A single provider may be able to deliver dance, gymnastics, sports, yoga and more, so it's obviously much easier to manage from a logistical and financial perspective.

A well established and organised provider will have a variety of skill sets and specialists within their team. Unlike being tied to a single employee, or using teachers to cover PE, these experts are trained and passionate about PE and School Sport. Many will be specialists in a particular area and schools should be able to request a coach with the most appropriate skills where available.

Knowledge and Skills: Training and support for our team is at the heart of everything we do and we are always looking to improve the level of service we provide. All of our carefully recruited and professionally trained teachers and coaches are experts in their respective subject. Our bespoke schemes of work have been carefully crafted by senior subject specialists and follow the National Curriculum guidelines, within the OFSTED framework. We deploy a dedicated quality assurance team who are on the road on a daily basis upskilling and supporting our practitioners.

A good fit for your school: When a school employs a teacher or member of staff directly they will of course follow a rigorous recruitment process, however, it isn't until the candidate actually starts that you really find out if they are a good ‘fit’ for the role or your School. Finding good people is fantastic but also hard and if it turns out that the candidate isn't right for your School, it could months or often years to fix. Using an external provider should mean a quick phone call will get your coach the support they need or a replacement if required.

Much of the feedback we receive from our partner schools describes how our member of staff feels like part of their team, which we love! So our Schools get the benefit of having a highly engaged, qualified and experienced PE specialist without the pains of having to employ or manage them directly.

Working with over 150 schools across the UK we must be doing something right, even if I do say so myself.....that said we are still working extremely hard on our mission to get more children to play more sport and become more active.