Community Use of Schools budget cut by Hull City Council

I have been involved in junior rugby league in Hull now for over 4 years but my involvement with Rugby League locally through open age rugby goes back 26 years – I have played, administered, fund raised and now I coach.

Not many clubs in the Hull area have their own training facilities let alone their own clubhouses or grounds and lots of clubs, including some of the biggest such as Skirlaugh Bulls, who my eldest son plays for at U12s and whose U6 team I help to coach, rely heavily on school facilities - be that an indoor sports hall or an outdoor all weather pitch – particularly for training purposes as few clubs, if any,  have floodlights on it’s playing grounds and need training facilities during the dark winter months.

For many years our local authority, Hull City Council, has borne the full cost of the use of school facilities for all youth clubs through the Community Use of Schools budget.

A few weeks ago a petition was doing the rounds on social media to be delivered to the Council to show them the public feeling against the proposal to cut this funding and charge clubs for the use of school facilities, the potential of which had been made public earlier in the year.

I signed the petition and passed it on to as many people as possible via Twitter and Facebook and the last time I looked over 3,000 signatures had been garnered – it appears that this has been meaningless and that the people’s voice has not been listened to.

A letter was distributed last week that states all youth clubs will now be charged for the use of school facilities and the affected clubs were given just 10 days to advise whether they wished to continue using the school facilities that they so desperately rely on. I am not sure of all of the costs but I believe that one all weather training pitch (the size of a football pitch) will be around £30.00 per hour.

My eldest son’s team use such a facility two nights a week for the majority of the year (apart from school holidays) – this means his team alone will have to pay £60.00 a week for, say, 40 weeks a year and that equals £2,400.00 per year – Skirlaugh run teams at all age levels from Shrimps (5 year olds) up to U18s and I am assuming that the majority of these teams will utilise school facilities at some time of the year somewhere in the city.

That’s 14 teams that will be forced to pay out a lot more money than they currently are and means that they will have to look at alternative training venues (which there are not that many of) or, more than likely, reduce the amount of time they spend training together.

Some smaller clubs that do not have the organisation or financial backing of the likes of Skirlaugh Bulls or West Hull Rugby League teams may even be forced into extinction altogether – meaning that young kids will have nowhere to go to learn about respect and good manners, to keep fit and make friends and learn social skills amongst many other things.

Kingston upon Hull has one of highest rates of childhood obesity in the country and it is already difficult to get many kids to leave behind their Xbox, IPad and IPhone to take up an individual or team sport.

Hull City Council are the last authority in the country to start charging youth clubs for the use of school facilities and they should be applauded for the work they have done in supporting youth sport and activities – but now is not the time to be removing this funding.

Parent’s are already struggling to make ends meet and it is at their door that sport’s clubs will more than likely have to divert the additional costs that they will be paying out through increased subscriptions and membership fees.

Some parent’s will not be able to afford increased costs and may decide to remove their children from sporting or youth clubs and some clubs could disappear altogether.

This would affect hundreds of children who are kept off street corners by the work carried out free of charge by thousands of volunteers throughout hundreds of sports clubs in the city across sports such as rugby league, rugby union, football, cricket, boxing, judo, hockey and gymnastics amongst others.

We should be ensuring that our youngsters have the best possible opportunity to enjoy sport and make friends and learn some valuable life lessons rather than being stuck in front of a TV or IPad watching sport rather than participating in it.

I urge everyone to contact Councillor Rosie Nicola at Hull City Council, who is the portfolio holder for learning, skills and safeguarding children, to show the strength of feeling against this decision.