There were smiles around at the beginning of July for Easton Gymnastics in Norwich as they welcomed their first Level 4 Sport Coach Apprentice who will be specialising in High Performance Coaching.
Helen Barnett-Moore, Business Support Partner Manager, at British Gymnastics commented,
It’s great to be working in collaboration with Bridgwater & Taunton college on yet another fantastic apprenticeship programme and to offer our gymnastics community such an incredible opportunity to upskill their workforce.
The new Level 4 Apprenticeship not only means more options for current apprentices to progress and develop their experiences, but it also allows for experienced coaches to broaden their opportunities further and enhance their knowledge in several pathways. This is an amazing opportunity to expand the expertise of our gymnastics community and to create lasting sustainability for our sport.
Hopefully, we will see many apprentices thrive on this new programme, supporting the growth of participation in gymnastics.
Amy Gales, who started gymnastics at 8 years old, will be the first to enrol on the programme run by British Gymnastics in partnership with Bridgwater & Taunton College. In her training days Amy achieved many medals in County and Regional competitions. She has been with the club for the last nine years and plans to go far in her gymnastics career. With her favourite skill being a free cartwheel on floor and her favourite piece of equipment being beam she wants to fly high and has a dream to coach an Olympic gymnast one day.
Olivia Saunders, Club Manager, said the Senior management team and Trustees decided to invest in two apprentices for 2021, Amy on the level 4 and Jessica on the Level 3 Community Sport and Health Officer. After surviving through the pandemic Olivia said,
It’s been a really tough couple of years for everyone involved in gymnastics. The club as a whole decided with our ever growing waiting list it would be a good idea to really invest in our staff and coaches; the apprenticeship programmes were the perfect fit and everything just fell into place.
Our level 4 apprentice Amy will help the club increase participation and performance. We have big goals for the club over the next few years and the knowledge Amy will gain will be so valuable to our development and the future competitive aspirations we have.
Level 3 apprentice, Jess has been with the club most of her life. Jess will help run the club’s new leadership academy. Along with this, she will support efforts to improve customer relationships and service quality by creating feedback questionnaires. Olivia Saunders, Club Manager added,
The apprenticeship programmes are a great step and are an opportunity I wish I had when I left school. Achieving qualifications both academically and in gymnastics while gaining all the work experience you will need to run sessions of your own is amazing and both of our apprentices are really enjoying the programme. We are really looking forward to working with Bridgwater & Taunton college to help our club grow.
Amanda Charlton, Curriculum Manager at Bridgwater & Taunton College said,
We are delighted to be working with Easton Gymnastics with their exciting step into apprenticeships. We are very proud of our partnership with British Gymnastics which has seen over 100 apprentices participate in the programme. We work very closely with our End Point Awarding Organisation – ActiveIQ who provide superb support, resources and guidance to help us to ensure all our apprentices develop and grow into their careers as coaches.
Tad Chapman, Active IQ Head of EPA added,
We are delighted to see Jess and Amy enrolling on their respective apprenticeships and wish them every success. We are particularly keen to see how Amy progresses as she is among the first to embark on the brand new Level 4 Sport Coach standard which we are bringing first to market. The high level of specialism and professionalism required in both the training and assessment for this standard will equip Amy with fantastic skills and certainly set her on a career pathway which may well lead to her achieving her goal of coaching an Olympic gymnast in years to come!
Key to our decision to put the Level 4 Sports Coach EPA front and centre in our post-lockdown plan was to help community sports clubs, NGBs and schools engage with more sports coaches in order to rebuild their provision post-pandemic. We are delighted to see British Gymnastics and Bridgwater & Taunton College get on board so quickly and look forward to working with everyone to achieve excellent outcomes.
To find out more, visit https://www.btc.ac.uk/employers/sports-coaching-fitness/
