Premier League Inspires – Using footie to re-engage pupils
Nick Perchard explains how a learning programme funded by the Premier League uses students’ love of football as a means to get them re-engaged with the routines and demands of school…
- by Nick Perchard
- Director of community at the Premier League
We speak to Nick Perchard, director of community at the Premier League, responsible for Premier League Inspires and accompanying strategies, policies and partnerships…
How did Premier League Inspires come about?
Premier League Inspires is one of the national programmes we fund via the Premier League charitable fund. It started in 2019, building off of two programmes we’d been running prior to that. These were:
- Premier League Enterprise (a programme aimed at developing entrepreneurship among secondary school students)
- Premier League Works (an employability programme for young people)
The feedback we’d received from doing those was that there were growing issues among certain groups of young people who were struggling to engage at secondary school.
This was partly with regards to their behaviour, but also in relation to mental health challenges they were experiencing.
We wanted to develop a new programme that was more targeted and focused on disengaged young people who, due to multiple risk factors, couldn’t reach their full potential.
In practice, that included individuals at risk of exclusion or suspension, those with attendance concerns and looked-after children.
Our aim was to effectively engage in youth work within schools, for students struggling to remain within a traditional classroom environment.
We wanted to use active learning to try and develop these students’ personal and social skills, wellbeing and ability to build relationships.
Of course, six months after we started, COVID hit and everything changed.
Have the aims of Premier League Inspires changed or evolved?
Coming out of COVID, we found that the cohorts attending the schools that wanted us to work with had changed considerably.
The scale of the mental health challenge amongst young people increased dramatically. Many now struggled to be present within school at all.
What does a typical Premier League Inspires session look like?
Premier League Inspires aims to add value to schools’ existing capacity by organising weekly activities for small groups (typically six to seven young people) or on a one-to-one basis.
Premier League club charities will reach out to schools, identify young people who might benefit from the programme, assess their needs and then build a package around that.
There’s a whole host of different activities that participants get involved in. This includes qualifications they can aim for in areas such as refereeing and sports leadership.
We also set a national challenge each season. This is where we task young people with working in small groups to help tackle a specific issue.
These challenges might involve addressing mental health needs within their local community, tackling discrimination or a whole host of other causes.
Ultimately, it’s about using the power of the Premier League, our football clubs and football in general to engage young people in education.
How can we use active learning to get young people working as a team, communicating more effectively and solving problems? Because as an employer, we know that those are the kind of skills and attributes we want to see from young people entering the workplace.
We’ll try to establish a framework with the schools we’re working with to make sure that we’re encouraging young people’s interests.
Premier League Inspires’ main strength, in my view, is how it enables our club staff to form relationships with young people that are different to those between teachers and pupils. It’s more akin to youth workers and mentors.
How can schools get involved with Premier League Inspires?
A club will typically approach the schools in their local area with the Premier League Inspires offer. This is followed by discussions about whether the offer meets their needs, and whether the club will be able to service that in the long term.
We presently fund 54 professional club charities to deliver Premier League Inspires, having increased that by nine this season. We intend to increase it again in 2026/27.
It’s important that Premier League Inspires partnerships aren’t just isolated, three-week programmes of ‘fun stuff’. Instead, they should be packages of long-term support for those young people who need it.
Even outside of Premier League Inspires, there’s a whole host of other activities that club charities already engage in.
Many run ‘hub school’ programmes, whereby club staff may be based at local schools multiple times per week. Other clubs have formed effective relationships with combined authorities and other local organisations to create similar sorts of programmes for schools themselves.
So whilst Premier League Inspires is our national programme, and one we’re proud of, club charities have long been doing some incredible work.
I’d encourage all schools to to reach out to their nearest professional football club charity. There are bound to be some great ways in which they can they can work together.
What kind of impact has the programme had?
Premier League Inspires was recently evaluated by Sheffield Hallam University. It found that 92% of participating schools said they’d seen improvements in pupils’ behaviour. 96% reported increases in pupils’ enjoyment during lessons.
The finding that I think is perhaps the most important, though, is the programme’s impact on school attendance.
The evaluation found that 80% of schools said it had improved pupils’ attendance. This was most notable amongst those deemed as ‘persistently absent’.
We know that there’s a segment of young people who are very interested in football. Therefore, it would seem that simply having a football club present within your school on a certain day will encourage them to be there.
If we can get young people into school, and use the programme to positively impact upon their experiences of what school can be, that opens up an ‘in’ for the brilliant teaching taking place across other lessons and activities. And it will hopefully set those young people up on a great path towards future success.
Did any of the Sheffield Hallam findings surprise you?
One surprise was discovering that over a third of schools had said the programme helped them with parental engagement.
That wasn’t something we’d set out to do. However, it was perhaps a product of parents just being interested and curious about a professional football club having a presence in their children’s school.
It was interesting for us to observe. It’s obviously great for those schools wanting to ensure that parents are properly engaged in their young people’s education.
What can you offer to pupils without an interest in football?
When we first started Premier League Inspires, we didn’t want it to be solely a programme for young people with potential behaviour issues who happened to be sporty.
While we like to think that the programme definitely helps those groups, we wanted to also ensure that there was another ‘hook’ that could get young people engaged.
What we’ve found is that even for young people who aren’t especially sporty, there’s something appreciably different that happens when a professional football club starts to have an active presence in their school.
Just seeing and recognising the brand of that club can be enough to get them interested.
When setting the programme’s KPIs, we were clear that all clubs had to deliver specific girls-only provision too. It’s never just been about engaging young boys. It’s about trying to help as many young people as possible.
Through doing that, we’ve heard from a number of young people who didn’t enjoy football before, but now do. They’re even considering going to games.
That’s not necessarily what the programme is about, but still great to see as a by-product.
Find out more about Premier League Inspires.
