How Chartstage made the Premiership in Community Sport
Since our formation, we have been passionate about the benefits that community sport can bring and we are now at the forefront of training and development in community sport in the UK.

We work with the Football Foundation to train community sport coaches at clubs in the Football Premiership, as well as with a range of leading sports organisations and local authorities and colleges.

This is all a long way from our humble beginnings on a Bristol council estate, where we teamed up with Avon and Somerset Police on a ‘Young People Matter’ project. The initiative was targeted at excluded young people between the ages of 11 and 16, and it provided activity-based programmes to re-engage young people and to integrate them back into the education system.

Since then, Chartstage has built a talented team of highly experienced and skilled staff that train people how to use community sport as a tool to reach and motivate young people who have been marginalised from mainstream society.

We have also developed relevant training and support for staff and managers in the sports and leisure industry as well as in local authorities and colleges.

Many tens of thousands of people work in the field of community sport, and it is one of the fastest growing sectors in the UK. This workforce has varied from part time volunteers to full time sports development officers, and research showed that within the industry there was a real need for a nationally recognised structure of courses and qualifications.

Chartstage, along with leading sports bodies such as Skills Active, Sport England, Positive Futures and the London Community Sports Network designed the first national qualifications for community sport, at Level 3, in the UK, awarded by Sports Leaders UK.

In 2006, we launched these two new national qualifications, the Certificate in Managing Community Sport and the Certificate in Community Sports Work. Chartstage has continued to build an exciting portfolio of vocational training and qualifications, ranging from NVQ level 1, through to Apprenticeship programmes and degree entry level qualifications, at level 3.