By Jianing Qiao
Sport for Development (SFD) initiatives use sports to foster social inclusion, particularly among disengaged youth.
This blog applies Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework—redistribution, recognition, and representation—to examine how two UK-based sport social enterprises collaborate with schools to support 11-14-year-olds through sports opportunities and curricula.
It questions whether SFD initiatives challenge systemic inequalities or merely compensate for existing social structure.
Challenges that Sport Organisations Seek to Address
Sport organisations operate within existing social and educational inequalities. This small study highlights some of the key challenges faced by the young people. These include:
• Limited Educational Resources: Many participants come from disadvantaged backgrounds with insufficient access to learning opportunities, hindering their academic and personal development.
• School Resource Disparities: These programmes primarily partner with schools in highly deprived areas, where educators struggle to meet diverse student needs due to limited resources.
• Inadequate Mental Health Support: A persistent lack of mental health resources means that many young people face delays or a lack of support from teachers, parents, and professional services.
• Systemic Discrimination: Ethnic minorities and students from low-income backgrounds frequently experience bias, leading to underrepresentation and feelings of disempowerment.
• Mislabeling and Behavioral Stigma: Many participants come from backgrounds of poverty, neglect, and trauma. Their emotional expressions are often misinterpreted as behavioral problems, resulting in further marginalization.
• Narrow Evaluation Systems: Traditional school assessments fail to recognize students’ strengths beyond academics, limiting opportunities for self-expression and alternative pathways to success.
Sport Organizations as Agents of Social Justice
Sport organizations are crucial in terms of redistribution, recognition, and representation within their programmes.
Redistribution
• By offering free sports programmes, reward trips, and public showcases, these organisations remove barriers to participation. These opportunities expose young people to new experiences, broadening their future development prospects.
• Sports function as both an entry point and a support system, fostering self-confidence, teamwork, and social belonging. Additionally, sports-based curricula integrate social-emotional learning through indoor sessions, making education more accessible and relevant to youth’s interests.
• Sports-based initiatives provide mental health resources by creating safe spaces that foster trust, emotional expression, and de-stigmatization. For example, using informal language in one-to-one sessions instead of formal therapy terms, and having practitioners rather than traditional therapist helps normalize mental health support.
Recognition
• Sport organisations integrate discussions on gender, race, and identity, using dialogue-based cultural education to enhance peer understanding and mutual recognition of different backgrounds. By providing a platform for self-expression, they create spaces where young people feel seen and valued.
• By ensuring diverse participation and integrating peer role models, these programmes prevent “exclusionary inclusion”, where marginalized youth are labeled as separate from their peers.
• Recognition is further reinforced through meaningful connections between practitioners and participants, grounded in unconditional acceptance, trust, and care. These trusted adults provide emotional support that many young people may not receive elsewhere.
• Beyond direct engagement, these organisations aim to reshape how marginalized youth are perceived. By involving parents and teachers through positive feedback, they challenge existing biases and contribute to a more supportive environment both within and outside the program.
Representation
• These organisations cultivate informal, judgment-free spaces where young people can express themselves freely. Through discussion-based education and participatory learning, youth are encouraged to take an active role in shaping their own educational experiences.
• By integrating cultural education, sport organisations help disadvantaged youth develop a stronger sense of identity and self-worth. Encouraging a growth mindset allows them to reframe challenges as opportunities, reinforcing their agency in shaping their own futures.
• Public platforms and events serve as spaces for youth representation, allowing their voices to be heard beyond the program. By engaging in social justice advocacy, these organisations empower young people to participate in broader conversations about equity and inclusion, fostering hope, agency, and proactive engagement with their communities.
Challenges and Unanswered Questions
While these contributions are significant, SFD programmes continue to face tensions and dilemmas that raise critical questions about their broader role in social justice:
Are Gender-Based Programmes Reinforcing Biases?
Over half of the schools in this study prioritised boys’ programmes due to urgent behavioural concerns, potentially neglecting the needs of girls, whose challenges may be less visible but equally pressing.
Educate for Whom?
The influence of neoliberal educational discourse is a critical issue. While self-discipline, resilience, and self-regulation are valuable, do such narratives place the burden of success on individuals rather than challenging the systemic barriers that create exclusion in the first place?
Are Schools Outsourcing Their Responsibilities?
Commercialisation of SFD programmes like one-on-one mentoring and behavioural support may lead schools to shift core responsibilities onto external organisations, creating tensions between meeting Ofsted targets and fostering student-centered approaches for sport organisations.
What Happens When The Programmes End?
Since SFD programmes operate within mainstream education—an environment that often is challenging for marginalized youth—their long-term impact remains uncertain. If broader educational structures do not change, can these programmes create lasting transformation?
Beyond Sport: Structural Changes for Greater Impact
For SFD programmes to drive meaningful and lasting change, broader structural reforms must support sport organisations and the youth they seek to serve. Sport organisations in this study called for:
• Greater investment in social enterprises delivering sport-based programmes thus attempting to ensure longer-term sustainability and impact.
• Shifting away from rigid academic assessments to recognize students’ broader capabilities.
• Expanding accessible mental health services beyond sport programmes to provide continuous and integrated support for young people.
• Integrating social-emotional education into mainstream curricula, especially in the digital age.
• Moving beyond treating young people as passive beneficiaries to active agents in shaping education policies.
Final Thoughts
Sport has the power to engage, inspire, and educate, but it cannot replace structural reform. The contributions of sport organisations to marginalized youth are undeniable, yet they do not operate in isolation. Their impact is deeply intertwined with broader social, educational, and policy structures. For SFD to drive real social justice, it must be part of a larger movement for systemic change—one that ensures lasting equity beyond the playing field.
