School Games Organisers Payment Programme

Following Ecorys’s successful delivery of the PE and Sport Strategy for Young People Administration Contract (Department for Education, 2009 – 2011), we were awarded the School Games Organiser (SGO) grant management and administration contract (Sport England, 2011 – to date).

This programme funds 450 SGO posts in host schools across England, to work with their network of local schools on increasing numbers of young people involved in competitive sport. It supports the School Games programme, which is delivered by the Youth Sport Trust, as part of the Government’s plans for a lasting sporting legacy from hosting the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Ecorys’s role is to provide the financial administration for the SGO programme on behalf of Sport England. Our main responsibilities are: issue award letters and other formal communications; handle withdrawals and host entity changes; make payments to SGO hosts (£10.7 m each year); manage a helpline to provide support and guidance to SGO hosts; and audit SGO spend through academic year end reports, recovering funds as necessary.

The SGO funding is committed until the next Comprehensive Spending Review in 2020.Working closely with Sport England and The Youth Sport Trust, we have built and refined a sophisticated online reporting platform to allow the 450 School Games hosts to provide annual plan data and report termly against targets.

The portal allows the project team to interrogate and visualise the data and produce bespoke reports. We have also developed a streamlined administration tool for handling payment, remittance advice and award letters, reconciling payments and expenditure by financial year, and maintaining up-to-date details of hosts, funded staff, and hosting issues. Since 2011, we have securely and efficiently distributed over £81 million of grants to SGO hosts and audited just under 2200 financial year end reports (to academic year 2016-17).

We validate over 405,000 data points on a termly basis, totalling at least 1,620,000 data points extrapolated and fully tested into data reports each year.

The School Games Organisers (SGOs) are specifically tasked with making the School Games happen, and they have an important role in developing and promoting local opportunities for participation. More than 21,000 schools across England have signed up to the School Games website, and take part in School Games’ competitions.

During the last full academic year (2017/18), School Games provided 2.3 million participation opportunities for young people as part of School Games events organised by the SGOs. By 2020, the School Games will be continuing to make a clear and meaningful difference to the lives of even more children and young people.