Warrington SSP and William Beamont Community High School have been successful in their bid to become a ‘Project Ability’ school.

Project Ability aims to establish a national network of 50 of the most successful mainstream and special schools at providing opportunities for young disabled pupils to take part in sport. These schools will receive funding and resources to:

• Help other schools improve their offer to young disabled pupils
• Work with School Games Organisers to establish and lead new leagues and competitions for young disabled pupils
• Find innovative and practical ways to signpost and support young disabled pupils into wider sporting pathways.

Project Ability is a bespoke project within the School Games to help drive and increase opportunities for young disabled people to take part in competitive sport. Project Ability is focused on building capacity within the school workforce to ensure opportunities for young people are progressive, competitive and shared across groups of local schools.

Schools delivering Project Ability will use the School Games as a vehicle to increase the depth and breadth of PE and school sport opportunities for all young disabled people.

The Project Ability Schools will:

Increase the quality and quantity of competitions for young people with a disability by working with a minimum of 10 local schools to commit to, adopt and promote the School Games and its values:

• Support partner schools to develop inclusive or discrete Intra School (L1) competitive opportunities for their SEN pupils that feed inter school competitions (L2).
• Support the School Games L3 Local Organising Committee (LOC) chair to identify suitable disability experts to sit on the LOC.

Build capacity in the workforce to support this focus on inclusion:

• Deliver sessions across the year (one per half term) for local secondary and primary school specialists to improve knowledge, skills and understanding around the inclusion of young disabled people in sport.
• Work with local sport networks to ensure any coach education programmes address inclusion requirements needed to deliver schools games.

Share effective practice and collaboration at a local level to maximise opportunities:

• Deliver a local County / SGO conference on the development and delivery of disability sport.
• Host an annual leadership conference which is either disability specific or inclusion focused.

This is an exciting opportunity to build on some already great work being done in developing inclusive sport opportunities for young people, and we are excited to get started!