What was the Opening School Facilities Investment?
The fund, provided by the Department for Education, was designed to help schools deliver extra-curricular activities and open their facilities outside of the school day during evenings, weekends and school holidays.
Opening Schools Facilities (OSF) was a funding programme to meet the goals of the Government’s School Sport and Activity Action Plan (SSAAP). The aim was to help schools to open their existing sport facilities, including school swimming pools, to a broader range of young people and to support the wider community by partnering with sporting organisations, who can help deliver activities in these settings.
The programme spanned three academic years, running from January 2023 until March 2025, and it was implemented by a consortium of partners.
These partners, including the Active Partnerships National Organisation (APNO), StreetGames, ukactive and Youth Sport Trust, worked alongside the 42 local Active Partnerships who, using their local knowledge, approached schools who they felt would benefit most from the funding.
Evaluation and Learning
As the Active Partnership for Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes, Leap proudly invested £547,529 through the Opening School Facilities (OSF) programme, supporting 23 schools over three years to open their doors beyond the school day.
The national programme, backed by the Department for Education, has now published its final report—showing it exceeded all targets:
- 251,543 pupils and 93,264 community members took part
- 189,071 activity sessions delivered in 1,580 schools
- Pupils engaged in activities on 3.2 million occasions
Locally, Leap helped schools offer inclusive activities like swimming, cheerleading and drumming fitness — reaching groups facing inequalities including women and girls, low-income families, ethnically diverse communities, and those with disabilities or long-term health conditions.
Leap is proud to have played a part in this transformative programme, helping schools become hubs for health, inclusion, and community connection.
It is hoped that this insight will be effectively utilised to help inform the new long-term strategic approach and to ensure that programmes like OSF can continue to support the activity levels of children and young people across the UK.
The final Opening School Facilities report showing national impact of the programme is available now and you can read examples of local case studies below.
Next steps
Major learnings from the programme will now be shared with the Department for Education and other Government departments to determine any next steps for the development of this project. The insight the report and partners can provide is considered to be very timely following the recent Government announcement on a new approach to school sport.
A toolkit has also been created by Youth Sport Trust to support schools to unlock the potential of their facilities and make them available for community use. You can also read ukactive’s qualitative evaluation report and a report from StreetGames which looks at how youth voice was embedded into the OSF programme.
