Our school is a member of the Bexley School Sport Partnership which runs a Young Ambassador programme in the borough, with every school in the partnership nominating two ‘AdiStar’ school ambassadors to represent them. There are also two partnership ‘Gold’ ambassadors responsible for all the ‘AdiStars’ in the borough and finally, two ‘Platinum’ ambassadors who oversee the running of the entire Young Ambassador programme.

At Townley we are lucky enough to have two AdiStars – Casey Porritt & Lizzie Nash along with the Gold Ambassadors, myself Kathy Morrison and Rebecca O’Connor and the Platinum Ambassadors Beth Holmans and Olivia Blatch.

 

Our role as Young School Sports Ambassadors is:

·         To develop and support other young people as role models and Ambassadors inspired by the 2012 Games for other young people.

•        To promote and advocate the ethos and values of the Olympic and Paralympic movement amongst young people.

•        To champion PE & School Sport within schools and local communities and increase participation

In October, the group of about 20 Young Ambassadors from the Bexley School Sport Partnership went on a residential trip to Weymouth in order to get to know each other better and come up with strategies to promote sport in our school and the Borough. The two day trip involved us all introducing ourselves to one another and the Gold Ambassadors ensuring the AdiStars knew and understood what their role would be in their own schools. 

In order to fulfil our roles as Young Ambassadors as well as we can, we need to each have a good knowledge of the Olympic and Paralympic values so this was a focus over the two days. We created and shared ideas as to how we could promote the Olympics in our schools and try and get more people involved in sport. We met a Paralympic sailor, John Robertson, who provided us with plenty of inspiration for our roles and as young sportspeople. The trip ended with us all learning to sail small Pico boats around the 2012 Olympic Sailing course, this was a great activity which allowed us to all bond as a group and have some fun! 

On returning to school, we wanted to make sure the whole school knew who we were and what we wanted to achieve. So we created a notice board introducing ourselves and the Olympic and Paralympic values. It also includes an Olympic countdown, which is changed daily and aims to inform pupils about 2012. We have also been doing assemblies to all years, to make ourselves known and let them know what we want to do.