19 February 2020

During 2019, the Sport Workforce Advisory team engaged and consulted with the sector collating feedback on the desired and required support and leadership requirements in this area. The feedback highlighted the need to develop a broader workforce strategy to service and support the sector, organisations and individuals. The desired impact is to provide quality sporting and activity experiences for the broader Australian population.

A key focus area identified, is the need to develop a modernised coaching and officiating framework. This is to assist in providing a more holistic, participant/player focused approach to servicing individuals needs and learning and development requirements. The optimal output is to provide quality, safe environments for participant, players and athletes to thrive based on their desired engagement in sport and activity, and to better support our coaches and officials to do this.

The alarming decline in physical activity and physical literacy in sport has been prioritised and will be embedded into this strategy for the sector. The 35455_Physical_Literacy_Framework_At_a_glance-access.pdfwill underpin the Coaching and Officiating Framework and will be mapped with four levels of engagement:

1. Learn – Provides coaches and officials with the confidence and competence to support participants learn the basics required to successfully participate in the play stage;
2. Play – Provides coaches and officials with the basics to support social activity as well as modified formats;
3. Compete – Provides coaches and officials with the knowledge and skills to develop participants that are in a competition with the key objective of winning. This area would encompass initial talent identification; and
4. Perform – Provides coaches and or officials with the knowledge and skills to support players/athletes in the talent pathway and/or high performance competitions.  In order to move from a phase of requirement gathering to development and delivery, Sport Australia have disbanded the Coaching & Officiating Industry Advisory groups.

We will be now inviting pertinent experts to be involved, and sit in on two new groups to provide the operational details to deliver on this priority project including: - A Steering Committee which will comprise industry coaching and officiating stakeholders with broad and diverse experiences - this group will provide guidance and advise on the requirements to service the system across multiple facets; and - An Operational Team to assist in bringing the content to life, from development, to housing on an eLearning platform and backend system operations. The initial support will manifest through re-vamping the ‘General Principles’ online course. The course will move from a “one size fits all” to customisable courses comprising of compliance, environmental factors, appropriate basic coaching principles for the level of engagement, and nuanced modules to service the coaches, officials, club and associations requirements. This content will be housed on Sport Australia’s new Learning Management System (LMS) – a project that is concurrently occurring with this one. We will continue to update you on the progress of this project as it unfolds. Should you have any questions or would like to discuss further, please contact the Workforce Advisory team via email at Workforce_Advisory@ausport.gov.