It’s about millions of euros

Sports vouchers are meant to help finance long undernourished Slovak sport
 

The first phase of sports reform, according to Minister Eugen Jurzyca, is to get children to sports grounds and money to sports clubs. Killing two birds with one stone – this is how the first stage of the planned reform of sport can be seen, presented on Monday by Minister Eugen Jurzyca as the Concept for the Development of Physical Activities of Children and Youth. The first “bird” is children’s sport in their free time, the second is the transfer of funds from the education sector to sports clubs. In the optimal case, this will mean several hundred million Slovak crowns.

“With this concept we are trying to overcome three barriers to why children don’t play sport. The first is their unwillingness to do sport, the second is parents’ inability to finance their children’s sporting interests, and the third is a lack of sports facilities,” says Igor Moška, General Secretary of the Slovak Tennis Federation (STZ) and member of the external advisory team of Minister of Education and Sport Eugen Jurzyca.

The Concept for the Development of Physical Activities of Children and Youth, prepared at the Ministry of Education in recent days, is the first and, according to Jozef Tokos, the leader of the advisory team, also the most important phase of the major reform of sport, which should be approved by the Slovak government by the end of 2011.

And while the objectives that this concept brings into physical education lessons from the 2012/2013 school year are very important (increasing the number of PE classes to three per week, changing PE lessons into more experiential forms, changing student assessment…), no less significant are other objectives of the concept, focused on children and youth doing sport in their free time. Because, as the authors say, another aim of the concept is to “make sports more attractive and increase the intensity of physical activity outside of school hours by motivating sports associations and clubs to cooperate more with schools.” A positive outcome of this cooperation could be more funding for sports clubs and associations, which have long been underfunded.

And the tool to change the current situation, where roughly a quarter of school-age children exercise only in PE lessons and, according to estimates, only about one-tenth play sport in clubs, is the project of sports vouchers.

At present, educational vouchers are used for children’s extracurricular activities, including sport. These are an annual state contribution for one pupil’s extracurricular education, including sport, worth €28. According to the concept, the state spent almost €18 million (about 540 million crowns) on these vouchers in 2010. From the perspective of potential financing of sport, this is an interesting sum (especially considering that for two decades the state has been giving about one billion crowns annually to sport from the Ministry of Education budget).

Here, a synergistic effect could arise – on one side, the authors of the concept are trying to overcome the second barrier, i.e. children’s sport in their free time, where they intend to involve underfunded sports clubs to a greater extent. Associations mainly focus on national team players and talented youth, says Moška, while clubs take care of themselves, live their own lives, and function based on club memberships. Probably for this reason, Jurzyca’s team of advisers is coming up with the idea of creating a project of sports vouchers based on a similar principle to educational vouchers and transferring part of these subsidies from the Ministry of Education directly to sports clubs. The goal is to tackle several problems at once – to involve children in sport either in schools or in clubs, to keep them physically active during the critical afternoon hours between 2 and 6 pm, to include children who otherwise couldn’t afford sport, to spark competition between clubs and schools for pupils, and to bring more or less interesting sums of money into clubs if they work with children. Of course, one cannot expect that most of this money will end up in clubs, nor that this indirect subsidy will pull clubs out of their chronic financial malnutrition, but the tens of millions of crowns that might be obtained would not be a step into the abyss.

Minister Jurzyca sees two ways to channel money into clubs – one is the already mentioned sports vouchers for the development of children’s and youth’s physical activities, which pupils could also use in sports associations and clubs; the other is the possibility to involve national sports associations and clubs in leading children to sport in their free time. These would receive support from the state budget through a grant call. Jozef Tokos specifies – since the Ministry of Education wants to get children moving in their free time, it will invite clubs and associations to apply for funding allocated for children’s sport, and depending on how many children the clubs attract, they will be financed by the state.

Both of the minister’s advisers – Tokos and Moška – however, trust more in the sports voucher project, the first experimental phase of which should start as early as September 1.

The essence of the project is that children at school will receive at the beginning of the school year an offer not only of school sports clubs but also of sports clubs in the city – a sort of menu, including the membership fees, on which they will be able to use sports vouchers of a certain value. For example, for a basketball or volleyball school club, a €50 voucher will be enough, while a tennis club in the city will want more, so parents will have to add something to the voucher. “And parents will then be able to decide whether their child stays at the school, where it costs nothing, or – if they want their child to play a sport in a club – they use the voucher and pay the remainder,” explains Moška. He also links this project with solving the basic problem of Slovak sport – “we lack children; instead of selection we often have recruitment, clubs take every child who comes.”

This pilot project will first be tested in 8 (16) schools in regional capitals, where parents will receive the offer of sports opportunities both at school and in the city, and will be able to choose one option for their children. Selected schools should have around 200–300 pupils in the lower grades and, in addition, a gym and sports fields. By the end of the year both variants (the grant call and the experiment) should run, and after an evaluation phase (how many parents chose school clubs, how many chose sports clubs, how many chose nothing at all, how successful clubs were in attracting children) it should be clear which way to move forward with this method of getting children active, engaging them in sport in their free time, and co-financing clubs.

“If it goes well, two things will happen – school principals will try to keep children at school and make them an interesting offer, and clubs will try the same. This way we will help the basic building blocks – the clubs, which today don’t have children,” says Moška.

According to Tokos, better results could be expected if the sports vouchers were worth, for example, €100, but in the current economic situation he considers this long-term ambition unrealistic.(...)