In 1000 days on the London 2012 website

London 2012 have been celebrating the fact that there is now just 1000 days to go until the start of the 2012 Olympics. They’ve been asking on twitter and their website what people want to achieve in the next 1000 days.

For us, we’ve got a number of roles to play in staging the Olympics, and we’re involved in quite a few projects which have London 2012 as the catalyst.

The Advanced Apprenticeship in Sporting Excellence is one, developed to help athletes succeed at the highest level. Originally developed with the intention of seeing athletes succeed at London 2012, we were obviously delighted to see nine AASE athletes compete in the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics , including double gold medalist Rebecca Adlington.

While it is great to help athletes in their quest for success over the next 1000 days, we also want the sector as a whole to be a success in line with our vision: More People, Better Skilled, Better Qualified. Some of the other projects we’re involved with will certainly help us in meeting that challenge.

With the news that more than five million people are currently participating in London 2012 Games-related projects, initiatives such as Personal Best certainly help get more people better skilled and better qualified.

Personal Best is the national pre-employment training programme, which uses the prospect of being a volunteer at London 2012 to engage workless and socially excluded people with education and help them gain skills, lift their aspirations and open up new life and career opportunities.

Recruit into Coaching is another project we’re involved in which will provide more people, better skilled and better qualified. We aid Sport England in delivering the Recruit into Coaching programme, which aims to recruit, train and deploy 10,000 new volunteers by 2011, greatly increasing our volunteer coaching workforce and directly increasing the sporting activity in both school and community settings.

Sport England have recently produced the following case study looking at the impact of the programme on participants and how these coaches can then go on to help others through sport.

So what do you want to achieve in 1000 days? Let us know through comments below and let London 2012 know through their website or by using the twitter hashtag #in1000days.

Tonight the NBA comes to London with the O2 Arena hosting an exhibition match between the Chicago Bulls and Utah Jazz.

Amongst those taking part is British basketball star Luol Deng, who has admitted he is relishing the opportunity to play on home soil. The 24-year-old started his basketball career in Brixton as a nine year old before moving to America to play high school basketball and being drafted in by the Chicago Bulls.

While returning to your home town having become a star overseas may be a fairy story for some, the opportunities for the further development of British basketball stars are improving, and young talent won’t have to move abroad to gain access to top quality coaching while studying.

Last week English Basketball celebrated the launch of the Advanced Apprenticeship in Sporting Excellence (AASE) for Basketball following a year long trial. The AASE programme combines high calibre coaching for top athletes while they continue their education, meaning that those who don’t manage to make the grade at the highest level still have qualifications to fall back on.

Back in February we visited one of the pilot projects at Southend College, as part of our filming for the AASE celebration events, and as we recently mentioned they have also hosted cameras for the Extra Time programme on Sky Sports. The show provides a good background to the growth of basketball in this country, and how AASE will help our young athletes further. You can view the programme below:

If you want to find out more about AASE, check out the pages over on our website: www.skillsactive.com/AASE

Back in February we visited Southend to see the AASE Basketball apprentices in action at a training camp and get some footage for the Advanced Apprenticeship in Sporting Excellence Video that we produced for National Apprenticeships Week. Now the AASE basketballers will be basking in the limelight of even more coverage, this time on Sky Sports.

The Extra Time programme visited Southend in June to take in a GB U20 warm up match for July’s U20 European Championships, covering a local school sports basketball competition coached and refereed by AASE players prior to the international game, as well as capturing exclusive interviews with the GB Team’s U20 coach Tim Lewis, and AASE coordinator for Essex Ian Mollard.

You can see the programme on Sky Sports 1 on Monday 17 August at 5pm, with repeats at 7pm on Sky Sports 3 later that day and 1pm (SS3) and 2.30pm (SS2) on Tuesday 18 August. We’ve had a sneak preview, and it is a fantastic feature on the AASE programme and how it is benefiting British Basketball, so watch out for it. If you do miss it, we hope to be able to bring you the footage here on the SkillsActive blog afterwards.

You can see some of the AASE basketball players in action and interviewed in February’s video below, around the 3:50 mark:

Following the video we made about the Advanced Apprenticeship in Sporting Excellence, we’ve now got even more video content available on our main website covering each type of apprenticeship that we’re involved in. So now if you visit our Apprenticeships section on our website you’ll find videos on the Young Apprenticeship scheme and the Apprenticeship in Active Leisure and Learning, including videos covering the Advanced Apprenticeships in Coaching, Fitness and the Outdoors.

The videos feature both employers and students talking about the schemes and the benefits that apprenticeships have to offer.

We’ve also uploaded a number of our older videos on the Advanced Apprenticeship in Sporting Excellence to complement the one we made back in February, and you can see these below:

Hopefully these video’s will help prospective employers and students understand the different apprenticeship schemes and how they offer an innovative work based education experience. For more information on all our apprenticeship schemes, visit the apprenticeship pages of our website.

Last week saw National Apprenticeship Week, an opportunity to celebrate and recognise the essential role that Apprenticeships are playing in today’s business world, ensuring that the workforce has the skills it needs in order to remain competitive, even in difficult economic circumstances.

Local school pupils, college students, training providers and employers joined representatives from SkillsActive and sports stars such as Sharron Davies MBE, Dame Kelly Holmes and Mickey Bushell to participate in a varied programme of presentations, talks, meetings and activity sessions. These ran throughout the week in London, Brighton, Bristol, Bolton, Buxton, Telford, Wellingborough, Sunderland, Harrogate and Benfleet.

Some of the events were organised and run by the apprentices themselves, with one event in Northampton seeing 170 young school children taking part in a multisport festival put on by 30 Young Apprentices. 

The Young Apprenticeship also programme received praise this week from the apprentices and employers alike, following SkillsActive’s evaluation of the programme between September 2006 and July 2008.

One of the London event’s focussed on the Advanced Apprenticeship in Sporting Excellence, and was hosted by former Commonwealth Games gymnast and TV presenter, Gabby Logan. Over 100 AASE athletes attended, and were able to attend workshops, discussions and a Q&A session with former elite athletes. The workshops proved especially popular, and althletes were given advice from Dame Kelly Holmes on “What it takes to be a champion”,  Barry Shillabeer presented elements of Rebecca Adlington’s gold medal winning strength and conditioning programme, and Sky TV presenter Graham Little offered up media training. 

We managed to find a few minutes to catch up with Gabby and ask her about the AASE programme and the impact it is having, and what impact it might have had on her sporting career had it existed when she was an elite athlete.

We also spent some time travelling round the country to interview current and past AASE athletes, those involved in delivering the programme, representitives of National Governing Bodies of Sport and the head of Performance Sport at UK Sport about their views on AASE:

Of course, we’re not the only ones who are throwing our weight behind the importance of Apprenticeships. Sir Alan Sugar has recently been starring in TV advertising (see below) to raise the awareness of apprenticeships, a video which also features Luke Power. Luke of course was Young Apprentice of the Year in 2008, studying his Young Apprentice in Sports Management, Leadership and Coaching at Eltham Green Specialist Sports College.

For anyone looking to find out more about apprenticeships in any form, you can find out more on our website or on the national apprenticeships website.