The Levelling the playing Field “Leadership Development Through Action Learning” toolkit  

Prepared by Geof Cox (Project Consultant Cranfield Trust)

Alliance of Sport is immensely proud of its Levelling the Playing Field (LtPF) network of specialist partners in the community and secure estate who use sport and physical activity to positively impact ethnically diverse children.

On a daily basis, our specialist partners help young people overcome adversity and inequalities and build a positive future – and we want to promote this good practice at scale. Along with this, we wanted to celebrate, further support and advocate for the leadership within the network.

So once again, we’ve decided to celebrate and showcase that impact by putting together a LtPF Leadership ‘Leadership Development Through Action Learning’ toolkit. This is a collection of amazing leadership approaches, tips and tricks, that will support individuals and organisations interested in developing distributed leadership, within all levels of leaders. 

“When conducting the research for the LtPF project with leaders from the LtPF Specialist Delivery Organisations as well as Alliance of Sport leaders, we identified that there were pockets of excellence in leadership and delivery throughout the network… Hence, Action Learning became the obvious choice for the platform to provide for reflective practice, sharing and supportive learning in leadership. This toolkit provides all of the background and support materials to guide how to set up Action Learning Sets, how to run them, and further materials and models to provide a theoretical and practical back up to the probable themes and leadership / organisation development. It is also a guide to effective participation in an Action Learning Set.” Geof Cox.

Alliance of Sport are eternally grateful to Geof Cox and The Cranfield Trust for producing this amazing resource alongside the LtPF organisations and, the leaders from across them. We are also eternally grateful to Andrew Anastasiou for the support in making this possible. We are also indebted to the dedication and commitment to each and every person who has contributed, through this discovery process.

This toolkit is intended to support the leadership methodology and practice across the Alliance of Sport and LtPF networks. However, this is fit for all to utilise, share and practice. Please feel free to share it with your colleagues and across your networks, especially with all that are interested in developing their leadership learning, knowledge, skills, behaviours and habits.