Charity projects

The Biggest Winners

The biggest winners is an inter school, inter borough and international fitness challenge. It involves young people undertaking a range of physical fitness tests during school PE sessions across the 2012 school year - inspired by the backdrop of the Olympics.

The Biggest Winners (TBW hereafter) is a not-for-profit programme which aims to increase young peoples participation in physical activity and sports using a competitive inter-school/inter-borough fitness challenge - inspired initially by the “festival effect”1 of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games and subsequently linked to other major sporting events. Classrooms of pupils at participating schools will undertake a series of activities designed to test the spectrum of athletic performance associated with Olympic events - strength, power, cardiovascular endurance, speed, agility and balance. The tests are validated measures used internationally for the purposes of athletic talent identification and for the assessment of health-related fitness and require minimal equipment. As part of the East of England Healthy Heart Study2,3,4 members of our team have already delivered these tests to over 8000 children within school PE classes meaning no disruption to the school curriculum. We received positive feedback from children and teachers. The delivery of TBW tests is based on this model and we are therefore confident of its success.

Strategic fit
TBW aligns to the mayor’s recommendations5 for partnership working. TBW has a number of confirmed and interested partners within local authorities, public health and sporting organisations with existing delivery in London. Several objectives of key stakeholders such as Sport England and Youth Sports Trust are also addressed by TBW such as:
• Contributing to the “Five Hour Offer” by offering 2 hours of extra after-school sport
• Targeting groups with lower sports participation/ age-groups with largest drop-off in sport (aligning with Sport England’s “Grow” and “Sustain”)

TBW also addresses legacy goals set out in A Sporting Future for London5 and related themes outlined in Go London! An active & healthy London for 2012 and beyond1 including:
Goal 1: Getting people more active by:
1) Tackling inactivity using innovative approaches designed to reduce barriers to participation in hard to reach groups and initially targeting the least active demographics. 2) Addressing inequality of access by delivering additional to-the-doorstep coaching sessions to schools and 3) using a competitive framework linked to 2012 and major sporting events to leverage increase sports participation and motivate young people to improve in at least one aspect of fitness.
Goal 3: Building skills and capacity
The TBW trainee programme aims to build capacity and skills for the monitoring and promotion of physical activity and fitness by providing young people with transferable skills in coaching, sports injury risk reduction, fitness/PA assessment and child protection.
Goal 4: Maximise benefits of sport to our society
TBW provides opportunities for success – for schoolchildren to see measurable personal improvement components of fitness and for TBW trainees, partly recruited from NEET young people in work reintegration schemes, to experience vocational development.


Building physical self-esteem and broadening the concept of fitness ... The selection of tests enables all young people regardless of size, perceived “fitness” and ability to gain positive feedback on at least 1 of the multiple dimensions of fitness – each linked to explicitly to Olympic events.

A competitive framework... Classes of schoolchildren then compete against other schools, boroughs and even countries as they track their progress across the 2012 school year on an interactive, fun and password controlled website.

Additional after-school sports and conditioning… Schools get the support of a Biggest Winner coach who will run 2 free fitness sessions for the students as part of their extra-curricular programme.

Ambassadors from the sports and entertainment world… Schools involved may receive a visit from Footballer Jermaine Jenas, Olympic Wrestler Chloe Spiteri or RnB singer Starboy Nathan during the fitness assessments or after-school coaching sessions.

A global health and sports programme… Partners in Ghana, Colombia and Brazil and are interested in running The Biggest Winners in parallel in 2012 and the long-term plan is to link these up and the schools involved in a global challenge.

To read more on the 'Biggest Winners' website click here....

Rachel and her buddies did ‘walk the walk’, uniting against Breast cancer since Rachel’s mum was diagnosed in Jan 2011.

Raising several hundreds of pounds between them (Rachel alone raised £270) for the 7hrs 12 minutes it took to complete the 26.2 mile walk around Edinburgh. “The scenery was amazing and walking the final miles along the coast with the sun coming up I was glad I had done all of my Biomechanics exercises in the run up to the event!!” Rachel said