Justine Williams

It’s no surprise that ‘fun is the answer’ when it comes to engaging kids in activity. The Sport England Active Lives: Children & Young People report is fascinating and a call to action. But please, let’s not make this too complicated… Let’s release our inner kid and not sit still a moment longer. We must act now to implement interventions based on the evidence we have to create fun activities for children.

Here at Les Mills Born to Move we specialise in getting kids active. Since launching five years ago, we’ve learned a lot – mostly from children themselves. We go where the kids go: schools, holiday parks and now, with the launch of our free five-minute Move like the Avengers workout on Youtube, into their homes.

We’ve done our homework and for leisure operators this means we know what works.

A direct line to children doesn’t exist as it does with adults. Kids trust their parents, teachers and friends first, hence our new Activators progamme allows parents, teachers and kids themselves to take the lead.

We also know ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ and multi-component interventions and collaboration with key partners aligning to suit their space, staff and delivery options is essential. We’re happy to change the plan, but never the goal!

It’s time everyone pulled together to bring fun fitness to every child. Interesting as they are, we don’t need more policies and reports. We know we need to make changes and we know how to engage kids. Let’s get on with it.

Born to Move has released a free workout video for kids, based on The Avengers

The key to getting kids active is to make it fun

Anthony Stewart

I was interested to read the feature on instructor pay, as well as the recent news story on the instructor white paper (HCM May 2019, p48), it certainly is true that treating your instructors right is key to success.

We’ve always valued our instructors, understanding they are central to our members’ experience and critical to building relationships. Rather than have an ever-growing list of cover instructors – typical in this industry – we want a smaller team who are committed to Third Space and don’t work anywhere else. You’re only as good as your worst class. So a bad experience caused by the wrong choice of cover instructor can damage the member experience overall.

So we pay our instructors well and make it the best place to work, but are now considering whether we need to pay people more to work on weekends and bank holidays too.

We currently have around 200 instructors working across our five clubs, running 4,000 classes every month, and over the last two years have been using the OurPeople workforce management platform to manage class cover.

Interrogating the data we can see who’s asking for the most cover and when, how far in advance they’re asking and which class categories need the most support.

It’s clear the biggest holes are Friday nights, weekends and bank holidays.

While we’re not surprised by the data, we haven’t had this detailed insight before. Plus, what have we, or the rest of the industry, ever done about it in the past?

Based on these trends we’ve been able to make tactical decisions to recruit more instructors at specific times of the day or days of the week; literally advertising for pilates instructors on a Sunday morning in East London, for example. It’s completely changed the way we recruit. We have fewer people attend our auditions, because of the criteria, but they’re all relevant, so there’s a lot less wasted time for everyone.

Knowing what’s ‘normal’ has been a big eye opener into what’s going on in our clubs, and while we’ve been able to reduce cover by three per cent, when we recruit staff for new sites, we may well test the theory of paying more at weekends.

Third Space now recruits instructors based on when they’re most needed