Chairman's Page

Good news for ice figure, but overall level of financial support to NISA and Short Track is reduced

Following a submission to UK Sport by NISA's National Performance Manager Catherine Barker, Figure skating is to receive World Class funding (now called World Class Pathway) for the first time since 1999, and will receive £496,000 over the next four years leading up to the Vancouver Olympics in 2010 although there will a funding review after year two.

Cath commented "I am delighted that the work that went into writing and developing the World Class Pathway Plans was well received by the Government and that Figure Skating now has, an accepted framework for the development of talent in Figure Skating, 8 years on from the funding withdrawal suffered by Figure Skating under former NISA Performance Director Kevin Bursey" The good news came on Thursday 27th July as UK Sport announced a £6 million package to support Winter Olympic and Paralympic sport up to and beyond the Vancouver Games in 2010. The money will be distributed across seven Olympic and two Paralympic disciplines on the basis of UK Sport's 'No Compromise' investment strategy. This targets resource predominately at sports and athletes considered to be genuine medal prospects in four years time. Liz Nicholl, UK Sport's Director of Performance said: "We have allocated funding to those sports that have shown they can deliver and have the future potential to win medals on the world stage. We have to be realistic, Great Britain will never be a top winter sports nation but we can achieve success if we target our investment effectively at the right athletes."

John and Sinead Kerr, identified as having genuine medal potential in Vancouver, will now receive as a minimum, Athlete Personal Awards (APA) of £13k each for the next four years. This APA is intended to provide a salary to athletes to enable them to train on a full time basis towards the achievement of Olympic success. In addition to the funding from UK Sport, services will now be drawn down from the Scottish Institute for Sport and the English Institute for Sport to deliver sports science support to the couple. Sinead Kerr said on hearing the news regarding the funding submission to UK Sport: "Without the support of UK sport, the opportunity of enhanced training facilities and sports science support and new coaching input would have been impossible to take up, so we are extremely grateful for their faith in us".

Figure Skating funding at lower level to Podium, includes support to a further 6 athletes who will receive targeted funding support to programmes geared at development levels within the British Squad. There will also be further support for British Squad athletes at talent levels and we currently await the outcome of this bid. Catherine Barker said "These underpinning bids equate to over £300, 000 investment over the next four years although this again will be reviewed annually with a full review of whether these funding streams will continue after year two."

Keith Horton, NISA General Secretary added, "the award of World Class pathway funding to Figure Skating is a major step forward for our sport and has most certainly been achieved through the development of a new four year plan for our figure skaters and the introduction of a new talent Identification programme. The ISU New Judging System has enabled us to target our skaters much more closely and by taking a large amount of the subjectivity out of the sport it has enabled
Government and the UK Sport decision makers to better understand how we intend to move forward and set clear and transparent targets for your aspiring Olympians".

However, as inevitably happens with Government Funding, this has come at a cost to the Association. During the next four years the total funding available to NISA from UK sport will actually decrease by 20% when compared to the previous four-year cycle 2002-2006. The hardest hit will be our Exchequer funded programmes, which have been totally withdrawn. Exchequer funding has been used during the past four years to develop and modernize NISA and agenda promoted by Government and fully endorsed by the NISA Management and Board. In addition to the loss of exchequer funding, our Short Track programmes will also see a reduction of 30%.

Haig Oundjian, Chairman of NISA, commented "whilst we are delighted at this great news for Figure Skating, we must remain somewhat cautious about the overall impact which this new approach to sport funding will have. Of particular concern will be the impact on our Short Track World Class Performance Programme, and also our ability to deliver core functions to all NISA members".

That means when you are abroad, you can go on the internet and go through the history class you missed in the morning.

This is fantastic. The curriculum is to bed, said Oundjian, who as a schoolboy had to travel miles early every morning to train for ice skating before going to school.
When I was called up to my first Olympics, I was doing my A levels. The headmaster wrote a letter to the Olympic Association asking if they could postpone it a couple of weeks, so I could take my mocks, he related.

That was the thinking in those days. Sport was an amateur thing. It was something you did for pleasure and not something you did for a career.

The world has changed but we have not changed with the rest of the world. John Currie, Haig Oundjian, Torville and Dean are people of the past. They skated to success when there was just talent and that is all that counted but now there is professionalism. France has shown us. Schools in France have sport built into their day.

We have, at Watford, youngsters who have homework to do. There is nothing to cater for the development of his education and his football career. Why should your sporting talent become a negative for education Oundjian asked.

While the new £24m Harefield Academy will not be solely about sport and education, for there are considerable facilities to be developed for art, there are other far-reaching considerations behind the ethos of the Academy, which has been designed with girls and boys in mind.

The French maintain that over 70 per cent of school-leavers stay in sport whereas, in this country, we are down to about 25 per cent, said the Watford director, who pointed out the effect of social factors inherent in such comparative figures.

The John Penrose School, currently a very open and accessible site, is subject to regular excesses of vandalism.

So many of the unruly members of our society are not bad, but bored and unfulfilled, said Oundjian.

Youngsters are adults who do not have transport are essentially stuck in the village and you have the attendant social problems of kids hanging round street corners and smashing up bus shelters etc.

People should be able to play sport and every child at school should not be elitist but inclusive. You and I might not be good at football but we enjoy having a knock-about, and why shouldn't we be able to indulge in that?

The design for the new Academy provides sports facilities on one side and teaching and academic education on the other part of the plot. Significantly, the public entrance by the library is in the centre, making access easy for members of the community after school hours.

Deputy-head Gary Bashford reflects the delight of all staff at the intended development.

It is a breath of fresh air. The buildings are run down and dilapidated over a number of years. They are very heavily used very day, which shows a need in Harefield.

John Penrose is a school in challenging circumstances and only such schools have been adopted nationally as part of the scheme. Things have improved there but, because if the infrastructure, they can only take it so far so small winder “this Academy idea, with high quality state-of-the-art facilities is a boon to us, the students and to the community.

The new Harefield Academy will be run on continental lines, and the expectation is that the school will open at 7am.

We changed to a continental day a couple of years ago, starting at 8.15am until 2.10pm but we don't go home. We offer a voluntary third session and most of our sixth formers opt for that, taking GNVQs, said the deputy-head.

We will be able to integrate into the Academy concept of a continental day quite seamlessly. The expectations is the school will be open at 7am offering a breakfast sessions because some kids do not eat healthily – a packet of crisps and a coke on the way to school.

There will be an internet café to utilise before lessons and the facility will be open seven days a week, up to 15 hours per day.

As Hornets vice-chairman David Meller pointed out, the concept of Watford's involvement in such a scheme has been the brainchild of fellow director Oundjian.

He kept banging on about it and we thought his idea was a bit fanciful but after a few years, I thought let's look at this. The more I looked into it, the better I liked it, said Meller.

Oundjian explained: it has been my mission because of my personal sporting experience, to press for this concept. A lot of market research has been undertaken. I remember when I accompanied Trevor Brooking, when I suggested to the Government representative, let's change 25,000 schools. I wanted to get sport in schools and have streaming and opportunities as they do in North America, Holland and France. ‚I was told to forget such a view but I suggested that if we do one school along such lines, we could set up a blueprint.

I went to the board at Watford and gave them all my research. I had started in 1997 but we found in 1999 that there had been such a major sea-change, with the Government really wanting to improve the opportunities for children, and it is not just academics, but life opportunities.

We had this Academy programme and fellow directors David Meller and Mike Sherwood were particularly keen on working with me. So, in 2001, they get involved. The club endorsed it and a working party was set up with three of us.

Meller is self-admitted a pushy individual who hates committees and seek progress at all stages. He also has the political contacts.

It resulted in a trip to Number 10 Downing Street to meet the head of policy.

It was Meller who homed in on Harefield, for the villages gain is Hertfordshire Education Officer, only to discover he was against the programme and refused to make a Herts. school available to the Watford group which, for a Hertfordshire club was disappointing.

We were looking at a school in Watford that had a huge plot of land and was ideal because it was in a dreadful state but Hertfordshire were against the scheme, said Oundjian.

Meller, through contacts, then found the John Penrose School in Harefield.

But Hillingdon was already working on an Academy concept at Evlyns, which is now Stockly Academy, where the main thrust is on technology.

David contacted Philip O'Here, corporate director of education for Hillingdon, and they came up with John Penrose School, which is geographically close to Hertfordshire. We would be become a part of a family of schools doing out-reach and in-reach across boundaries.

We will have fantastic facilities. The school will grow from 600 to 1,000 pupils, Oundjian explained.

But for the financial problems what have beset the Hornets over the last few years, it could have been the Watford Academy at Harefield. The club was scheduled to be the main sponsor but has had to take a supportive role, while three of the directors and one of the major investors have become the main sponsors.

Even so, there will be benefit to Watford.

All our members of our Academy at Watford and all our first-year professionals will be able to come here for further education. It is what the FA Academy want us to do but do not actually stipulate. It would become part of the time-table, said Oundjian.

This would be an added string to Watford's bow when attempting to sell the club to the parents of potential Academy scholars. While it is always argued a young player will have more chance of breaking into the first team at Vicarage Road compared with the opportunities at Premiership clubs, being able to offer structured and compatible schooling would be something unique for a Football League club.

Children, when they are taken onto the books of a professional side, do lose sight of education. They think they are certain to make it and, when they don't as most of them don't, they have nothing to fall back on.

This is way they will be able to learn while training to become a footballer.

In a sense, the proposed Academy at Harefield is part of the ethos of Watford; a quantum leap in the concept of the Watford Learning Centre which Oundjian created with Watford's director of marketing Ed Coan, which has won the club two national awards.

The biggest failure in football is that kids do not have any balance to their education. If you did interviews with most of the kids and current young players you would find they have jeopardised their education. They have to do training at different times.

This is really exciting: Sport England, the British Olympic Association, UK Sport, Youth Sports Trust along with the FA and Football League have been consulted. This is football leading the way for all sports. Everyone supports this project and, as you would expect, the endorsement in the local consultation document from the village has been terrific. Football can drive, said Oundjian.

The FA Academy of Watford will be based her in the longer term. The range of facilities will be phenomenal. Football will drive it and the football club will want to be based here using the facilities and developing further areas.

We have been told this will become an Olympic Training Centre and that fact will go up with the Olympic rings on the new building.

It is not just about football but also about health. We need, through schools to address the 15 per cent of obesity in children. This school will be a template.

We will attract talented athletes within a catchments area, who are either with an Academy or a centre of excellence or on a performance squad or the world-class start programme and they will be invited to join the school.

Gymnastics in the area is quite big, with significant clubs near by, but the youngsters are attending full-time school and trying to do training in the evening or the early morning.

The idea that they can have mornings off and train here, and return for that we will have world-class performers who will bring coaching to the school.

UK athletics will have a base ten minutes down the road at Brunel University, which is expanding near here. There will be a direct link to a sports medical centre.

There will be coaching and academic catering as part of a full and balanced education. Although it will be a sports centre, we will have a performing arts centre as well, with a dance hall, a central auditorium and a great stage.

The mission is to provide education, sport, fitness and health. We want children to have the opportunities in life that they would never have got without it.

We also want kids here to start training for the 2012 Olympics.

While the sponsors of the school will be entitles to place ten per cent of the intake, local children will be guaranteed a place.

The sponsors are three Watford directors plus shareholder Jonathan Green. They will also become trustees of the school along with Harefield Hospital's top specialist Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub and Hillingdon Council's Philip O'Here.

They form the board trustees.

The Academy concept up and down the country will be run by the DFES. For that reason, they are not popular with some local education authorities (LEA), but the Harefield Academy, with the presence of Philip O'Here, are intending to work with the LEA.

The school and the sponsors await the Government green light in January, a year after they were given the Amber light and £250,000 to develop the concept with architects' drawings, studies etc.

We got into 20th position – the last of the application to be adopted. For Harefield, it is a terrific prospect. No Academy that has already been given the amber light has failed to receive the green light, said Meller.

It started off as a vision of Haig's, I got it to happen and now we have a working party. We are the main four backers and the club is involved.

I do most of the work in the government side and with architects. Haig is very involved on the sporting side. Michael and Jonathan work a great charity', table tennis for kids', taking them off the streets, and that will be incorporated.

We do not intend just to be cheque-writers but to have an active involvement in the school.

We are not going to be elitist. Everyone who lives in the village will be able to come, and we will have kids bussing in from other areas. We know we will be successful if we have kids on a waiting list. We will be taking kids of mixed ability.

We want the facilities used by special needs children, adults and kids form other schools. We get this great cheque but we have to make sure it works properly.

Watford are already involved with local schools at an Academy level.

Watford will continue to work with Cavendish School in Hemel Hempstead and try to get them a covered area, this again representing this family of schools, said Oundjian.

I mean, just one covered indoor area for a population of around 3m? You need 300. Everyone needs that – look at the climate we live in. France has illuminated indoor facilities in every community of 10,000 people, paid for by the government.

Harefield is just the start.