Coventry University to host second football ‘living lab’ for children with Cerebral Palsy with support from Birmingham County Football Association

As well as providing a fun activity focused on football for the children, we're investigating physical literacy. If you want people to be physically active as children and to continue as they get older, you need to create a situation where they are competent, confident, motivated and enjoy movement skills. If you can do that for a child, then the idea is that they will continue to be active for life.

With this Living Lab, we are engineering a situation for children who are living with Cerebral Palsy because they have a different set of circumstances to typically developing children. Participants will include some children who can only walk with a frame and others who have callipers on their legs to help them to walk.

Michael Duncan, Centre Director for Coventry University’s Centre for Physical Activity, Sport and Exercise Sciences

When hearing about the Cerebral Palsy football event, it sounded amazing and was something the County FA was interested in being a part of.

Events like this one, that Ambleside JFC and Coventry University are hosting, have such positive impact for children with Cerebral Palsy and other disabilities and we will look to support the event by sourcing key resources like equipment or potential funding pots to provide additional support to the event as well as utilising our social media platforms to raise awareness and increase promotion within the regions we cover.

Ryan Kimberley, Disability Football Development Officer at the Birmingham County Football Association

We do something called a write, draw, show and tell task with the kids, which is because some of them are quite young and can't always answer questionnaires or they can't give you really robust responses to some psychometric questionnaires.

We have a technique where we ask the children questions and they draw a picture of what they think, and we’ll use that as a discussion point. We empower them to investigate the science behind movement and football as well as having fun playing football.

Michael Duncan, Centre Director for Coventry University’s Centre for Physical Activity, Sport and Exercise Sciences

The response since the last event has been very encouraging and we are excited to build upon the successes of last summer. The support of other organisations has really helped widen the reach of our work. I am looking forward to continuing to positively impacting the lives of the children involved, through this unique approach to both coaching and research.

Will Pattison, PhD Student, Centre for Physical Activity, Sport and Exercise Sciences