How do we organise the practical session?

The idea of the practical session during the course is to provide young people with an insight into organising an event and to give them the opportunity to demonstrate their skills in leadership and organisation whilst carrying out a meaningful role.

Ideally we would like the young people to organise and run their own event and there are a number of opportunities of linking in this Award with other programmes to do so, such as Step into Sport, assisting to deliver Aquatic Festivals with Competition Managers and working with clubs to deliver PESSCL programmes or fun competitions at the end of training. 

In the long term we would like to see the course included in yearly programmes to coincide with events that are being run throughout the year.  A couple of examples of how this might be achieved are below:

• A club has some time trials planned in October so they organise a YAO course to run in September and delegate the organisation of a fun session at the end of the time trials to the young people attending the course.
  
• A School Sport Partnership plan to run an Aquatic Festival in July, so they organise a YAO course to run in May and delegate a session during the festival for the young people to plan and deliver.

If it is not possible for the young people to organise an independent event for the practical session, there are other options to consider:

• To link into an existing event and have specific roles delegated to the young people
• To deliver an event using the candidates as participants E.g. 15 candidates on the course split into three groups of 5, each group plans and organises a 20-minute event.  Each group runs their event using the remaining 10 candidates as participants.

Whichever way the practical session is delivered it is important to make sure that the young people have a meaningful role and are given the opportunity to demonstrate their skills in leadership and organisation.