Parents, Carers & Coaches Survey results 24/25
Feedback from parents’ and coaches’ surveys
This week (Monday 2 June – Sunday 8 June) is both Volunteers’ Week and UK Coaching Week in the UK, making it the perfect time to provide some feedback on the findings from parent and carer, and coaches’ surveys that we circulated earlier this year.
We really appreciated the level of engagement with the surveys, which meant that the findings from the surveys should be fairly robust and can help the club with planning and thinking about improvements that can be made. Links to summary reports on the surveys can be found at the bottom of this page.
As with the parents’ surveys last season, responses suggested very high levels of satisfaction with the club and the benefits that it brings to young people across a wide range of themes, and in different ways. The bullet points below highlight some topics that can be found across all three groups (parents of boys, parents of girls, coaches), and/or are particularly interesting or important:
- There was a generally high level of satisfaction across all areas surveyed – communication, facilities, sense of community and belonging, environment/atmosphere, safety, coaching and overall satisfaction.
- A lot of respondents spoke positively about a sense of pride about being involved with the club. Parents believed that their children were proud to play for the club, they themselves were proud of their children and of their development as a young person in some cases, and coaches were proud to be involved with a club with as strong a reputation of Wallsend Boy’s Club.
- Respondents also spoke of the positive impact that involvement with the club had on the children involved and themselves and, in many cases, wider family members and relationships as well. Parents spoke about how much their children enjoyed or looked forward to football and they also valued the time that it allowed them to spend with their children, and sometimes wider family members such as grandparents and aunties and uncles. Parents also spoke about new friendships with other parents being a positive of being involved with the club.
- Parents recognised the time and effort that coaches put into the club, and into the support and development of their children. Most of the feedback around coaching, and the coaches more generally, was overwhelmingly positive.
- Coaches noted that their involvement often gave them great pleasure and pride, and also offered them the opportunity to focus on something that wasn’t work and provided a different environment, and possibly challenges, to family life and pressures.
- Across all groups of respondents, there was generally strong support for the aims of the club around its motto of ‘more than football’ and, again, there were a range of different ways of interpreting this. Many people appreciated the wider benefits of players being involved with the club beyond football development, while others expressed support for the work that the club is trying to do with the POCH and other activities outside of competitive football provision.
- Coaches appreciated a lot of the support they received from the club, but also highlighted some areas where they believed improvements could be made, especially in relation to the provision of equipment and kit, but also in relation to coaching development and recognition.
- Many people had used the POCH for club-related activities or birthday parties, but, in contrast, fewer people had used the POCH for activities or sessions organised by other organisations. Some parents expressed a desire for space within the POCH to meet before training and games and to be inside during training.
- Some parents suggested that if there was dedicated room or space within the POCH where parents and players could spend time together before, during and after training, this might help to foster a stronger sense of community across different teams and within the club more broadly, and make it more ‘family-friendly’.
The club are actively considering many of these points, and some of them are already being addressed through ongoing work and projects already in the pipeline. We also hope to share a fuller version of the findings from the coaches’ survey with coaches before the start of next season.
Finally, thank you so much for your engagement with the surveys, and other aspects of the research. It really helps us to get a good idea of what the club means to people and also how it can improve different areas of the work that it does.
If anyone has any questions, thoughts or concerns about the survey, or the research more widely, please do feel free to contact Stephen Crossley at stephen.j.crossley@durham.ac.uk
