Enlargement of European School Sport Day – 2016

The European School Sport Day (ESSD) is inspired by the Hungarian School Sport Day, an event which has been organized by the Hungarian School Sport Federation (HSSF) for the last 10 years. It is a day dedicated to promote physical activity, to try out new ways of physical activities and sports, and of course to empower the „belonging to the school” experience for every participant. During the first ESSD in 2015, around 1.000 events were organized in Hungary, Bulgaria and Poland with more than 300.000 participants. This scale-up and extension of the Program has been implemented with the financial support of the European Union in the frame of the Erasmus + Program (hereinafter: “ESSD 1”, agreement number: 2015-1147/001-001). ESSD 1 not only involved other countries to join this unique initiative as a pilot but also developed the basic documents that ensure the sustainability and enlargement of ESSD: a toolkit and an action plan were prepared and published by the members of the consortium that was now ready to use for all organizations and schools interested in joining ESSD. The Enlargement of ESSD provided a magnificent opportunity to expand the international presence and popularity of the ESSD. With the link of multiple new partner countries we were also able to extend the added value and goals of ESSD on many levels. The project has been implemented successfully in line with the set objectives, planned activities and budget: Recruiting was one of the key elements of the project. As we had very limited time before school year end we had to make all efforts to be able to start selecting organizations that would like to be ESSD organisers as we called them later: national coordinators. Although this task was planned to end until the end of June, HSSF decided to allow new countries to join later on as well. This was a very well made decision as finally we could involve 20 countries, some of them joining just two weeks prior the event (e.g. Spain, Cyprus, Latvia, Portugal). This was a massive work for the management to prepare and support the event Organizing of these last minute joined countries but HSSF was pleased to welcome them on board. HSSF aimed to ensure an international website of the project where online registration and reporting is available and the joined countries and their schools can find the Toolkit, as a ready to use document for Organizing ESSD. We focused on the idea that each country shall be able to reach the website in one of its official languages (for instance we had English but we did not have Maltese, or Irish). After the events and the reporting period we collected all feedbacks in terms of content, design, functions and during the evaluation phase the project team prepared the suggested second version of the website that already took all feedbacks into consideration. A two days training was organized on 30 June-01 July in Budapest. We had a preparatory meeting with our former consortium members of BG BE Active and Youth Sport Trust on 29 June after their arrival in Budapest. We had altogether 18 participants, representing our partner organizations such as (ISCA, EUPEA, Youth Sport Trust and BGBE Active) and candidates for national coordinators of ESSD who were attending the meeting as delegated either by ISCA or by EUPEA as a result of the recruitment until that time. After the training all coordinators started the promotion and preparation of the event at national level and in the meantime, some further countries joined as well. European School Sport Day has been organized altogether in 20 European countries with the participation of 1,5 million children exceeding our expectations by all means. The official date was 30 September, but two countries had their events on a different day (France on 14 September and Latvia on 28 September). We are very proud of these results and would like to further widen the number of countries involved and the scale of the events organized in the future.

Project website:
https://www.essd.eu/