“British Fencing has enabled us to reach young people with creative attributes who previously hadn’t found a sport that suited them” – London Youth, Sports Development Officer

Through working in partnership with London Youth we are able to provide young people across London with the opportunity to try fencing.

Our partnership with London Youth allows British Fencing to provide youth workers with training to deliver fencing in a safe, fun and engaging way, whilst ensuring that the activity can be sustained and delivered in-house.

Post pandemic our focus has been to support youth clubs to re-train new and existing youth workers by delivering two Core Coach courses throughout the year, as well as supporting a focused group of clubs to deliver a longer term programme over 40 weeks.

“As an organisation we are extremely thankful for the opportunity to deliver the programme over this extended period, it has meant that our coaches can work weekly with young people and really begin to see progress and the building of skills. For us, this opportunity has been really valuable for our coaches to see how we can continually work with a group and to see progress from the beginning to end and how greta this can be to see.”

Youth Worker

Engaging over 1300 young people in fencing, the partnership is proud to have achieved the following:

• Average retention rate of 71% (calculated by young people attending at least 60% of the sessions on offer)
• 60% of participants are ethnically diverse
• 38% of participants are female

Youth Workers are provided with information on how to connect with the British Fencing Bronze Award, to give the young people a sense of achievement in the activities they do. A number of young people have also used fencing to support them in achieving their Duke of Edinburgh Award.

“These sessions have allowed us to offer something different that is not currently easily accessible within the local community. We feel that we have allowed some young people who maybe otherwise wouldn’t get the opportunity to be involved, and by being involved helped them to develop new skills.”

Youth Worker

Based on the insight and data gathered from London Youth, we are currently reviewing the areas for focus and development in 2024/2025.