Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council has appointed KKP to deliver market research and develop a baseline position for the Authority on young people's participation in sport, arts and dance plus health, diet, habits and lifestyles.

KKP's Market Research team will assist Blaenau Gwent to review how participation rates and lifestyle behaviour vary by gender and age between the two year groups. The survey will cover a wide range of subjects associated with active and passive participation and include, for example:

• Involvement in (and views about) PE and school sport;
• Involvement in extracurricular sport/arts activity, and;
• Participation 'away from school' & club membership.

This will be supplemented by questions relating to participation in individual sports, frequency and duration of participation, along with awareness of and attendance at facilities and events. It will also assess lifestyle behaviours such as smoking, diet, access to the internet and time spent on computer games.

Project inception has links to KKP's longstanding relationship with nearby Bridgend for which we have been conducting similar studies since 2003. The vital management information generated has become integral to Bridgend Council's ongoing monitoring and fine-tuning of the impact of delivery of its Sports Strategy and annual service plans.

Anthony Hughes, Community Development Manager at Blaenau Gwent CBC commissioned the research. He said,

"This study will lay the foundations for the improvements to children's and young people's services that we wish to drive. We have a key role to play in encouraging healthy lifestyles but to be truly effective we must target resource in the right places - this research will help us to do this."

KKP is widely recognised for its innovative ‘strata' surveys. It has one of the most comprehensive youth participation datasets in the UK - the largest one that utilises responses gathered direct from young people. This allows it to offer the added benefit of enabling clients to compare their results with the responses of 200,000 young people across the UK. Strata surveys have now been used by more than 100 local authorities to inform, influence and shape policy, strategies, facilities planning and multi-agency work planning.

For further details, please contact Peter Millward, Principal Consultant - peter.millward@kkp.co.uk