Sport England’s Return to Play funding will remain open until the end of 2021.

Sport England have also added some slight changes to the scheme as follows….

Highest priority

  • Projects located in areas of high deprivation (decile 1-3 of the Indices of Deprivation), as Sport England know that organisations in the most deprived areas have been particularly badly hit by the pandemic.

Other funding priorities

  • Sport England particularly encourage applications from organisations working with communities who’ve suffered worse health outcomes and the most significantly reduced activity levels as a result of the pandemic. Their insight currently shows this to be girls and women, young people aged 16-24 and older people aged 70+.

Responding to the relaxing of restrictions

As restrictions relax and activity becomes available again, the types of projects Sport England can fund will change.

While most sports are now able to resume due to the current stage of the government’s roadmap, Sport England recognise that not everyone will want to return to what they were doing before and may be cautious about getting active again.

They will therefore now consider new or expanded projects that will safely deliver activities allowing people to become active – addressing challenges their audiences faced during lockdown.

An example of this could be adding different sports to the provision previously offered by your organisation to offer people an alternative, or simply increase capacity to be able to deliver to more people at one time.

In assessing these new projects they will be looking for innovative approaches to delivery that remove barriers and encourage all sorts of people to get active.

To find out more click here: https://www.sportengland.org/how-we-can-help/our-funds/return-play-small-grants