Purpose: To develop a project plan that will guide you through the framework development process.

Actions:

• Understand the roles of relevant committees and key stakeholders
• Review key planning documents
• Review current training offerings
• Get everyone on board
• Develop a project plan
• Secure and allocate resources

The project plan will outline what has to be done, who does it, what resources are required to do it and when it will be completed. Some groundwork is required – collating and analysing existing systems and programs will inform the content.

Your sport may have a committee structure responsible for coaching and/or officiating. People on these committees will have specific expertise that you can draw on and they will have some corporate knowledge and contacts that will be useful. Consider that some individuals probably were key players in the development of existing programs.

Committee(s) will (or should) have Terms of Reference. Review these Terms; it may be that the development of a new framework is a role specified for the committee for example. An understanding of the committee and what it does will guide you in the way you engage it.

There may be similar committees in your state bodies. It is wise to understand their roles and how they relate to each other and the national committee so that they can be appropriately engaged.
Note that changes to frameworks and training programs will impact on the work of committees and might necessitate changes to individuals’ roles. This will need to be managed with sensitivity.

Your sport will have a strategic plan, an operational/business plan and possibly plans for participation and high performance.  All will (or should) have sections on coaching and officiating. Ideally, these documents will contain actions to review your frameworks, with timelines and allocation of responsibilities and resources. If this is not the case and the job needs to be done now, you will need to get support from management before starting this framework review.

Understanding what is currently on offer is important before any considerations are made on future plans. To do this you will need to review what is happening at national, state, regional and local levels:

• Consider not only the accredited training programs but also other training and learning offerings, such as mentoring, online learning, conferences and seminars etc.
• How the training is currently delivered is important to understand, along with the key people and their roles.
• How are your coaches / officials keeping up to date?  Do your coaches and officials feel part of a ‘community’ in your sport? Are you using technology or other means to build a community?
• Any international federation courses or accreditations.
• Use any evaluations you have, e.g. surveys, course evaluations, course enrolments and completions etc.

Your sport has many layers: clubs, regions and states, various committees, a Board, a CEO and other staff. New frameworks and training programs will impact everyone, so getting buy-in from as many stakeholders as possible is essential. This will ensure

• broad stakeholder agreement from start to finish
• smooth implementation to all levels of your sport
• the results of any analysis are clarified and followed up as required.

When planning for any change, organisations should ensure that there is broad consultation and communication with all stakeholders at all stages. The communication needs to be succinct, with options for more information. Stakeholders also need to have the chance to ask questions and have them answered. Here are some key points to consider when planning for change:

• The need for change should be clearly articulated and supported with research: why do we need to change? What’s the problem that the current situation isn’t addressing?
• When examining solutions and options to solve the problem, the more stakeholders are engaged and encouraged to contribute, the more ownership they will have in the process.
• Members will need time to process and adjust to any proposed changes.
• There should be feedback mechanisms in place for each stage of the change process and all stakeholders should be asked, encouraged and asked again to give feedback.
• Use the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) principle. Put yourself in the shoes of your stakeholders – try and see the product and its implementation through their eyes. Will it make their job easier or harder? Will it diminish or augment their revenue? Will they have to change? Will the change cause people to lose power or status?

Once you have everyone on board, a project plan needs to be developed.

• The big picture concepts should be easily described. A simple statement of where are now, where you want to go and why you need to change is critical.
• Consider your timelines, you may need to progress in phases, particularly if resources are a limiting factor or stakeholders need to managed sensitively.

If resources have not been allocated in your sport’s operational plan, or your initial analysis suggests more or different resources, you will need to secure them before you start. There is reputational risk for yourself and the organisation if a project is started and is delayed or abandoned due to lack of resources.
Some things to consider:

• Committees: Do you need a new project-specific working party that has broad representation and expertise? Or will existing committee(s) be able to handle the job? Do the terms of reference or make up of existing committees need to change?
• Your time: Do you have sufficient time to undertake the project, given your range of other duties? Note that if your analysis suggests significant changes to the current system, this will increase your stakeholder engagement and time commitments.
• Financial: Make sure you budget for meetings, travel, software licencing and resource production.
• IT: Consider what format the resulting resources will be in. Do you have the IT capability to put things online? If you are putting programs online, how do people register and how does this link with your other IT capabilities such as your membership database
• Workforce: What skills do you need for the job? What are the implications – immediate and long term – for the upskilling of your workforce? How will training be delivered, by whom and what upskilling will they require?
• External expertise: sport doesn’t always have the expertise or the capacity to undertake projects such as this themselves. In some instances, it is more cost effective for sports to engage an external consultant who can complete the project.

If your sport has an existing participation plan or a high performance plan, they will most likely include a participation map and you can move straight on to Step 3 Know your Workforce. However, you may need to revisit some parts of this step to determine current and targeted participant numbers, including breakdowns by state, gender or other factor.

If your sport does not have participation or high performance plans in place, or those plans don’t have a participation map, then you will need to work through the following actions.

Gather information from a number of sources to get a good idea of who your sport participants are, including numbers of participants, and their particulars (location, gender and age). At this stage, you should check for new programs and any targeted increases in numbers, gender or location. These potential changes will need to be considered in terms of coaching / officiating needs and capacity. For example, a modified sport program aiming to attract 5,000 new members, with an average of 8 members will need 625 community coaches who need to be recruited and trained.

The most common sources of information will be:

• internal membership databases
• internal documents or reports
• annual reports
• ASC’s overview of sport participation in Australia
• ASC’s AusPlay survey and previous sport participation research
• ASC’s Market Segmentation research
• ASC’s Athlete Development Pathways
• ASC’s FTEM (Foundation-Talent-Elite-Mastery) Framework

With participation numbers, there are some issues that should be considered:

• All sporting programs and competitions. Gather information about your NSO’s and SSO’s products, programs and competitions. Consider any other organisations (e.g.schools, social comps) that may be delivering products, programs and competitions for your sport.
• The characteristics of your participants, such as:
  • Target age range
  • Name of level, grade or program and competition where relevant
  • Focus of the program, e.g. social, high performance, talent development
  • Typical weekly time commitment or number of sessions
  • Different developmental stages, capabilities or behavioural factors
• All participants, including those in schools and social leagues should be included. Broadening the participation base is a key challenge
• for NSOs. Look beyond traditional sports participation, and understand the motivations of people of all ages participating in sport, as well as people who have dropped out or who are less inclined to participate.

Many sports identify their segments around:

• types of programs (social, high performance, talent identification): the participation map diagram that we have included shows these kind of programs.
• the ages of participants: note that age doesn’t allow for differences in ability between those of the same age group.
• developmental stages of participants
• the capabilities of their participants
• barriers and motivations: Sport Australia’s market segmentation research highlights what people like and dislike about sport participation. This has very important implications for training coaches and officials working with different participant segments.

The nature of participation in each sport varies considerably and so each sport’s participation map will look different. Use the information gathered in the previous task to identify, at a high level, the different ways people participate in your sport. These broad categories can be called participation segments. Identifying participation segments will help you to develop training for coaches and officials that is based on the needs of these participants. Further reading on participant development pathways might assist you in this process. Identifying your NSO’s key physical, technical and tactical development benchmarks for each segment will ensure that training for coaches and officials match participant needs.

Consider the implications for coaches and officials within each participation segment. What coaching / officiating support does the participation segment need? What are the differences and similarities? The participation map will help you develop training that is developmentally appropriate and matches the needs of your participants.

The primary objective is to ensure coaches / officials are trained to respond to the needs of the participants they are working with.

Understanding the capabilities and motivations of the participants in each segment will define the type of coaching / officiating required for particular segments and the training that they need.

If your NSO has a participant development model consider the training implications for coaches / officials. Such a model will inform the skills required for coaches / officials working with the defined participant segments.

Skills required of coaches / officials will most likely cover more than one participant segment, so consider directly matching your training levels to the participant map.

Describe the characteristics of current coaches / officials

Who are your current coaches / officials? We have already had a quick look at this in Step 1, but now we need some more details. To get more in-depth, you will need to:

• Access internal databases or annual reports. The numbers should cover gender, state and age for:
  • Course attendance / enrolments / completions
  • Accreditation
  • Re-accreditation
  • Lapsed accreditation
• A survey of your coach/official workforce can easily be done through Sport Australia online ‘Coach Workforce Survey’ and ‘Officials Workforce Survey’.  A generic survey question set has been prepared in Survey Monkey that can be readily adapted to your needs.  Guidelines and tips for use are at Sport Australia Clearinghouse for Sport.
• Parents and participants can also be surveyed. Ask them about what they value in their coaches and officials, as well as any issues that may be present.
• Consider contacting lapsed or unaccredited coaches or officials.
• Sector wide research including Sport Australia’s Market Segmentation for Volunteers and ‘Half Million Coaches’ reports
• Sport Australias Clearinghouse for Sport has links to useful sources of information on community sport coaching and community sport officiating.

Once you have this information, it is important to understand what these numbers mean.  Think about:

• What trends are there (e.g.demographics, gender, numbers, retention)?
• How long do they stay active in their roles?
• Are there issues in particular areas?
• We can see the numbers, but how good is the quality?
• Are there untapped sources of potential coaches and officials?

By understanding your current coaches / officials and considering your sport’s future needs, you will be able to decide whether you have the number of coaches / officials necessary to meet your participants’ needs, and if they have the right skills to do the job.

It is useful at this stage to guesstimate how many coaches / officials your sport needs – if it is difficult to do this for each participation segment, break it into states and add these up.  You might find that you already have enough coaches / officials, or it may start you thinking about how you might attract and retain more coaches / officials.

Develop a table like the table below for each participation segment you identified in Step 2.

Taking into consideration steps, you will be able to answer these questions:

• Are there too few, enough, or too many adequately trained coaches / officials?
• Does our current training provide coaches / officials the right skill sets, or do we have some training gaps?
• Does our current training deliver any unnecessary information to coaches / officials?
• Is there a system for recognising and rewarding prior learning / experience?
• Are there mechanisms for maintaining ongoing contact with coaches / officials?
• Is there a need to target particular coach / official demographics? Does your sport need more female coaches, younger officials, or more officials in a particular state?

After analysing the data and idetifiying the coaching / officiating support requred for the participants, consider:

• Who will deliver any programs designed to meet your training gaps? Do you have a group of coach / official educators who can do this? This might be paid staff at a regional / state / national level, or it might need to be higher level coaches / officials.
• What training and support will your course facilitators need? Remember, these facilitators are the “face” of your program. A large part of the quality of a program will depend on their capacity to facilitate.
• If face to face training is difficult in some regions, consider other options. This could be working with another sport, working with State Departments of Sport and Recreation, or moving some of the learning online.
• What is our capacity for training and development? If we are delivering at maximum capacity now, what else can we do to best use our resources?

For every coach / official there are some ‘must haves’.  Consider:

• Children
  If coaching / officiating children, clearance to work with children is required by law.  The minimum requirements vary between states. Individuals must undertake the clearance process themselves, so make this clear.
• Minimum age for coaching / officiating
  Different levels of coaching may require different minimum ages. For example, an under 8s sports team might have minimum coaching / officiating age of 16. However, this might not be an appropriate coaching / officiating age for an under 13s team, who would require someone over 18 years of age.
• First aid
  In many circumstances, particularly at training sessions, there may be no-one around capable of administering first aid. Coaches and officials have a duty of care for the people they are working with so in all sports it would be prudent to make some kind of basic first aid training mandatory.  In high risk sports, more thorough training and/or information specific to the sport should be considered.
• Injury prevention
  Similarly, duty of care includes taking measures to prevent injury.  Injury prevention should be either incorporated into the various training programs or provided as a stand-alone.
• Safety and risk management
  All sport should be conducted in an environment that is safe for their participants, coaches, officials and spectators. All coach / official programs should assist coaches / officials in managing the risk in their sporting environment.
• Code of conduct
  Requiring signup to a code of conduct or similar is a useful way to set standards of behaviour and provides a useful reference point on the rare occasions when coach / official behaviour becomes a problem and action needs to be taken.  There are examples here
• Complaints Handling
  All coaches / officials should be made aware of the complaints handling process when they enrol in a course, and if they receive registration. This doesn’t require a new process to developed – it is just a matter of providing the coach / official with the relevant section of your sport’s Member Protection Policy.

• Formal and informal learning
  Learning is not limited to a classroom, a computer or the playing field. Learning might be through a webinar, watching someone else coach / officiate,  through reading, or self-reflecting on coaching / officiating performance. Put simply, formal learning is assessed, informal learning is not. You may attend a workshop, take notes and learn a lot but not be assessed. In this case the learning is informal. You may attend a workshop, take notes, learn a lot and may be assessed as a coach / official based on the course content. In this case the learning is formal. Research recommends that developers of coach / official education programs should consider a range of learning opportunities, and that both informal and formal training has their mertis.
• Accreditation / registration
  Accreditation is what has been traditionally considered by NSOs. However this language has evolved to be similar to professional bodies, where many NSOs now refer to registration. Formal learning (such as assessed course, assessed on the job learning or post course assessment) and other requirements (such as working with children checks) will lead to a coach or official to being registered. Registration has minimum standards that a coach/official is required to meet in order to perform at a particular level. Registration has also has an expiry.
• Continuing professional development
  Just as teachers, accountants and other professionals need to undertake continuing professional development to maintain the currency of registration, so too do coaches and officials. This varies between sports, but it is often a mix between formal and informal learning.

Your learning and development overview is a logical extension of your NSO’s participation map.  When developing your plan, consider:

• Creating an outline
  This could be a graphic, table or statement that outlines the development for coaches / officials in your sport. A useful strategy is to prepare a high-level ‘conceptual’ graphic (or statement or table) and then add supplementary information for more detail.
• Coach / official pathways
  There is no requirement for a progressive pathway to training, rather the training should address the sport’s workforce needs and be presented in a way that encourages lifelong learning and continuing professional development.
• Registration versus further development
  Deciding what training will lead to registration is something for the NSO to consider based on the sport’s needs. Avoid learning plans where the only option for greater coach and official development and recognition is to work with participants at a higher performance level. Many coaches / officials have no ambition to coach / officiate participants beyond their current level, but many will want to improve how they do their current job. Providing a range of formal and informal learning experiences can meet this need.
• Recognition of prior learning (RPL)
  Recognition of prior learning is what it says: recognising that someone already has the knowledge, skills and experience to be a coach. In the past, sport has borrowed from the industry training method of RPL. This has made the progress onerous and often harder than completing a course. It is a matter of finding a balance between a cumbersome process and maintaining the integrity of standards. If a qualified coach from another sport can be observed safely and successfully coaching a practical session in your sport, consider if they need to undertake any further training to be recognised.
• Resources and courses
  Use a mixture of formal and informal learning. Decide what areas of training you would like to use as part of an accreditation and how that could be integrated into an overall approach. Also consider training or support that can be provided to coaches aimed at improving the quality of coaching that may not lead to accreditation. Don’t forget: not everything needs to be a course! If you have some content that would be helpful for coaches / officials, consider making it freely available for them to access in their own time.
  Your international federation may also have coach / official courses and resources that can be integrated into your framework.
  There’s no need for sports to do all the training themselves. You might also consider courses from other providers, e.g. Australian Sports Commission, Play for Life, Sports Medicine Australia, or even other NSOs to be part of your coach / official training.
• The details
  Add to your overall learning plan (on the graphic or in an attachment) a clear set of statements about pre-requisites, the commitment required, whether up-dating is required, who the coach or official will be able to work with, frequency of courses, location of courses, RPL etc. Think of all the questions you would want answered if you were setting out to do some training.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to participation maps and overall training plan graphics; each NSO's map will be different.
A high-level shell for an overall training plan is shown. Notice in the second column that coaches and officials are grouped to match the participation communities. Also note that some detail has been added to this hypothetical example showing that the foundation coaches have one accreditation level and two formal non-accreditation training program options as well as signalling that there are other informal options (see the ‘other’ box in the last column). Your NSO plan will probably look different.

Tips for developing your overall training plan

Frameworks and training programs are only as good as the system used to implement them. Below are some reminders of the practical things you may need to consider and Table 3 shows an example of how you might work through this process.

People

• to manage the process at different levels
• to train the deliverers
• to attract, retain and reward personnel
• to develop resources
• to maintain quality throughout the system
• to develop partnerships (sport, government, other)
• think about the workforce that you currently have, and if this is sufficient to meet your identified goals

Learning resources

• technology requirements and strategies
• venue / facility / equipment requirements
• hard-copy resources

Financial

• These will flow out of planning documents where strategies are linked to personnel, time-frames and resources
• Do you have a Board champion?
• Do you have strategies to generate ongoing revenue for continuous improvement?
• Is training a revenue raiser or a way of developing your sport?

With your training plan established, it is time to identify training approaches within your budget.
Develop a high-level overview of the delivery options for the training plan. This overview will provide a snapshot of the learning experiences for your NSO’s training. If this is something that you are still developing, show your best realistic guess. When you develop your training programs using the Training Program Toolkit you will be able to fill in any gaps. Think of this overview as a summary of what you are already doing and a wish-list of future learning strategies.

You may hear people talking about coaching or officiating and using the term pedagogy. If you are about coaching children or officiating a game played by children, this term is correct. However, when we are talking about the education of the coaches and officials themselves, where the learners are mostly adults, the correct term is andragogy. This requires a different mindset.

For example, adult learners:

• are independent people and independent learners:
  So training should have minimal instruction and allow for autonomy wherever possible
• bring extensive knowledge, skills and experiences that can be applied to coaching or officiating:
  Don’t assume the learners are blank slates. Facilitated discussion can allow the content to be covered through the contribution of learners is more powerful than
• prefer to learn about problem solving, rather than content accumulation:
  Develop a range of activities that allow learners to draw on existing experiences and solve problems that are meaningful to them.
• are intrinsically motivated to learn:
  BUT! They need a valid reason. Let them know why they need to complete formal training, or continuing professional development.

Coach and official education has traditionally been delivered face to face, but this is changing with the increasing prevalence and ease of use with technology. Due to the very practical nature of coaching and officiating, it is unlikely that NSOs could run a completely online training program, but it is possible to offer both online and face to face training in a blended program. Many NSOs are already doing this through the use of Sport Australia’s online learning portal to access the Community Coaching General Principles or the Community Officiating General Principles online.

If you want to deliver some of your own content online, there are a range of options. Two important points to consider:
you don’t need to invest in expensive technology to develop online learning. Here have some suggestions and examples that demonstrate this.
Just putting all of your content online is not online learning. It needs to be delivered in a way that encourages user engagement.

Integrating learning experiences

* The online delivery option may be Sport Australia’s Community Coaching or the Officiating General Principles course, sport-specific online courseware, or a third party resource.

How effective are your training programs?

You won’t be able to answer this question unless you have systems in place to gather information about the effectiveness of your training. But for your courses to be effective in the first place, it is important to have a quality assurance program in place. This will help to prevent things becoming dated. Ongoing reviews and a system of gathering user feedback are keys to continuous improvement.

Sport Australia strongly recommends that sports undertake an ongoing, continuous improvement process with the framework, reviewing it annually.
Some tips:

• Get immediate feedback from individuals or groups working in the new framework. There may be tweaks that need to be made immediately before they become significant issues.
• Schedule an evaluation of the new framework. This may be after a period of time or after a certain number of people have accessed the training.
• Establish a structure for ongoing oversight. This may be the responsibility of a committee, or individuals within the organisation, including yourself. Oversight may mean review and evaluation and may include ongoing communication to stakeholders – answering FAQs, promoting the benefits of training programs, etc.
• Finally, work to ensure that there are relevant ongoing strategies in the organisations strategic planning documents and appropriate resources committed in operational plans.

An expanded section dealing with quality assurance is included in the Training Program Toolkit.

Succession planning

Keeping records of what was done and how it was done is important for the next time a review is undertaken. Make sure that anyone who picks up the baton in the future, be it yourself or someone else, can quickly find relevant documents and understand the process. Make succinct recommendations for doing it better next time.

If and when you leave the organisation or take on a different role, it will be your responsibility to do a handover to the next person. You want to leave a legacy of your good work, and part of this is ensuring that the good work is continued. Make it easy on yourself by keeping good records. It is also good business practice to make sure that another person in the organisation is fully briefed and has preferably been involved in the project.

Organisational planning

Finally, work to ensure that there are relevant ongoing strategies in the organisations strategic planning documents and appropriate resources committed in operational plans.

With some preliminary thinking about the development and implementation challenges behind you, it is time to move onto the Training Program Toolkit. This will be your next port of call as you contemplate the fine detail of developing a suite of quality training programs for your coaches and officials.