Hansard

I want to acknowledge the great and many successes that we have seen at the highest level in women’s sport this year, including the success of the Scottish national women’s football team in getting to the world cup 2019 finals, the success of athletes including Laura Muir and Eilish McColgan at the European championships, and the many fantastic performances by female athletes at the Gold Coast Commonwealth games. Those are all defining moments for women and girls in sport across the country. I thank all those fantastic role models.

I am absolutely clear about the benefits of sport and physical activity. My ministerial portfolio—public health, sport and wellbeing—signifies a deliberate, clear and connected approach that exploits the benefits of physical activity and sport to improve the health of the people of Scotland. I am more convinced than ever of that, as I have seen at first hand the powerful force that sport and physical activity can be in transforming people and communities. We want to create a culture in which healthy behaviours are the norm throughout people’s lives. Only by doing that can we achieve the Scottish Government’s vision of a Scotland in which more people are more active, more often.

Sport has an important role to play. As members are well aware, we in Scotland have developed a world-class sporting system at all levels that connects sport in schools and education, club and community sport, and performance sport. Through our investment in facilities, we are providing participation opportunities for people and communities across Scotland. Since 2007, sportscotland has invested £168 million in supporting local clubs, local authorities, sports’ governing bodies and other organisations to deliver a wide range of new and upgraded sports facilities.

This is all about behaviour change. To ensure that children from all backgrounds benefit from access to sport and physical activity, the Government has invested £11.6 million in supporting schools to meet our commitment to providing two hours or two periods of physical education a week. The number of schools achieving that went up from 10 per cent in 2004-05 to 98 per cent in 2016, which is a success.

That activity is backed by investment of up to £50 million in active schools between 2015 and 2019. Figures on uptake under that programme that were published in September showed that 7.3 million participant sessions were delivered in 2017-18, which is an increase of 6 per cent on the previous year. Of the female school roll, 44 per cent participated in active schools in 2017-18, which is a 2 per cent increase on the previous year. Those 147,655 females made up 48 per cent of the distinct participants in active schools in 2017-18, which represents an increase of 7,604 on the previous year.

Although that 48 per cent is not the 52 per cent that it probably should be—more young men than young women take part in active schools—the trend reverses in leadership opportunities. More young women than young men take part in sportscotland supported leadership opportunities, as we see in the applications for and membership of sportscotland’s young people’s sport panel. Such leadership opportunities help to build strong role models and inspire other girls and young women.

In our 192 community sport hubs across the country, there are nearly 56,000 female playing members, and 27 per cent of coaches are female—which relates to a point that Alison Johnstone raised in her amendment, which was not selected for debate. Progress is being made, but we have a distance to go. In the hubs, which are embedded in our communities, more than 55,000 women and girls are members. The community sport hub programme is made possible only by an army of more than 19,000 volunteers who deliver sport and physical activity opportunities in their communities.

The Government accepts that we have work to do, and we are committed to doing more to encourage women and girls to participate in sport. The number of women and girls who take part in a wide variety of sports and physical activities has increased in recent years. That includes significant progress in participation in recreational walking, netball, hockey, cycling, basketball, rugby and shinty. Physical activity levels among teenage girls are also increasing, although we acknowledge that there is still much to do to increase participation, to raise awareness across the sector and to remove the barriers that some still face to getting involved in sport and physical activity.

In recognising the challenge, the Scottish Government established the women and girls in sport advisory board to help us to understand what more we could do to increase opportunities for every woman and girl, and to raise awareness across the media and business sectors. The board’s work has included helping to develop women and girls in sport week 2018, of which this debate is part. The week provides the opportunity to promote and celebrate women and girls in sport. My ministerial colleagues and I are undertaking a range of activities across the country to raise the week’s profile and to encourage more women and girls to take part in sport, to try new sports and to build more regular physical activity into their everyday lives.

There is a huge range of activities. Already this week, I have been able to join women from Edinburgh in playing tennis; on Friday, I will be joining some women to play football; and on Friday night, I will be attending Dundee ice arena to see women and girls who are taking part in ice skating there. It is a really important part of the week. Maybe next year, we need to widen it out so that more members from across the chamber can take part.

As part of this week, I was pleased to be able to announce a £300,000 national fund to support projects to encourage female participation. Funding awards will range from £10,000 to £30,000. That will build on the 2017 sporting equality fund that was awarded to such projects as wheelchair basketball in Glasgow, netball across Scotland and bikepacking adventures in the Highlands. The continuation of funding for such projects will help to encourage inactive people to take up physical activity.

I think that everyone will agree that there is a lot of really good work going on across Scotland. As I have gone round the country in the nearly four months since I became sports minister, I have been pleased to see that the understanding of the importance of physical activity and sport to people’s physical and mental health is embedded right across our sporting community at every level.

One of the first sporting events that I was honoured to be able to attend as sports minister was the European championships. The great thing for me as the new sports minister was that I was able to engage with and meet lots of people, some at the highest level of European sport. Every single one of our fantastic governing bodies in Scotland understands the importance of getting people involved at the grass-roots level for the success of their sports in the future. On every occasion, they have understood the importance of getting women and girls involved in sport as part of that.

I have attended a large number of community sport hubs, where I have seen traditional male sports clubs that have grasped the thistle and accepted that they need to do more to encourage women into their sport and into their clubs—for example, by extending the range of sports on offer. I have seen football clubs go outwith their comfort zones to encompass, for example, women’s boxing, which in some areas has been really successful in encouraging women and girls who are otherwise disconnected from the normal sporting environment into sport. They have found it really exciting. They do not always take part in the competitive element, but I do not think that that matters. If women and girls join clubs to do the training, that is what is most important. Some of them may go on to be part of competitive sport, but that is not, in my view, the primary objective. If we can encourage more people at all levels, particularly women and girls over this week, to engage in sport, we will naturally find more people moving through into the higher levels of sport—from recreational sport to club sport, and so on.