Sport For Life 2026 - Annual review

#SportForLife26 is our annual review. It covers the seventh year of our corporate strategy, Sport for Life.

Minister’s foreword

NEEDS UPDATED FOR 2026

Maree Todd, Minister for Drugs and Alcohol Policy and Sport

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Overview

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sportscotland is the national agency for sport. Our vision is an active Scotland where everyone benefits from sport.  

We invest Scottish Government and National Lottery resources to help the people of Scotland get the most from the sporting system.

A sporting system for everyone

Sport For Life 2025 is our annual review. It covers the sixth year of our corporate strategy, Sport for Life.

In April 2025, we refreshed our Corporate Strategy Sport for Life in line with the Physical activity for health: framework which will be the basis of our Annual Report in future years. 

In April 2024 we agreed our business plan for 2024 and beyond. This describes how we will deliver our commitment to Sport For Life, while supporting the sporting system to respond to the current economic challenges and drive inclusion and recovery.

This annual review aims to demonstrate our progress between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025 through:

• Key performance indicators that show participation trends across each environment in the sporting system, focusing on scale and diversity of participants

• Infographics demonstrating our support to the sport sector, aligned to the Active Scotland Outcomes

• Personal stories highlighting the impact of our collaborative work with partners across the system

 #SportForLife25

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Chief Executive’s review

Scottish sport continued to deliver this year, demonstrating the powerful impact of our coaches, volunteers, athletes and clubs.

Sport inspired at every level, from top performing athletes to those helping local communities thrive. We saw activity from major events like the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games to our Active Schools programme, which ensures every young person can enjoy the benefits of sport and physical activity.

I attended the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games earlier this year, an inspiring display of talent, resilience and teamwork. It was encouraging to see our winter sports governing bodies experience increased interest in the featured sports.

Another major highlight was the Orkney Island Games - a week of outstanding competition in glorious sunshine. Over 2,000 athletes and officials travelled from around the world to compete in 12 sports, drawing record visitor numbers to the islands.

Over the course of 2025/26, work began on the £1.6 million Clyde Cycle Park expansion, marking the next stage in developing the Cambuslang site into the leading regional cycling centre in western Scotland.

We celebrated the opening of a new tennis centre in Dumfries, supported by nearly £1.7 million from the Transforming Scottish Indoor Tennis fund, in what represents a major milestone for the sport locally and nationally. Thanks to National Lottery players, around £33 million is raised weekly for Good Causes, supporting projects that strengthen communities.

We gathered in Glasgow in December for our Scottish Sports Awards 2025, celebrating outstanding achievements from grassroots sport to high performance endeavours on the national and international stage.

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the Scottish Sports Concussion Guidance, a world first in 2015 that united medics, academics, parents, sports bodies, the Scottish Government and sportscotland to create a single set of advice for all grassroots sports. Ongoing work has reduced risk for participants and increased awareness of this important issue.

We know the benefits of sport and physical activity, and with an exceptional summer of sport ahead, it’s encouraging to see extra funding helping ensure more people across communities can access opportunities to get active.

The Scottish Government’s additional £40 million announced in early 2026 will strengthen the sporting system, with a focus on clubs and communities, helping us deliver an accessible, inclusive system that maximises participation.

We’re all looking forward to an exciting Summer of Sport, with the national men’s team playing at a World Cup tournament for the first time in 28 years and the Commonwealth Games returning to Glasgow. These events inspire future generations, bring people together and help grow sport at every level.

My thanks go to our local and national partners, the sportscotland team and especially the volunteers who give their time to sport. With the progress made this year, I’m confident we’re in a good place.

Forbes Dunlop, Chief Executive, sportscotland

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Playing our part

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Our business plan shows how we planned to deliver Sport for Life in this year. We delivered well in 2024/25, reaching 1.1 million people. This headline position is static on 2023/24, however adjusting for known data revisions, our overall reach has increased by 1.6%. Our key performance indicators show mixed results. Our equality indicators are maintaining consistent with prior year. We achieved well on the world stage. We improved our support to the sector. We strengthened how we work.

Programmes

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Our key programmes are maintaining or improving. In August 2024, we celebrated 20 years of Active Schools – our key schools and education programme. We reached 280,000 participants this year, a 3.5% increase on last year. This programme has delivered continued growth since Covid-19. We also:

• have 48% of Scottish schools registered with School Sport Awards.

• delivered six Young Ambassador Conferences, reaching over 600 young leaders in sport.

Our key clubs and communities programme is our investment in Scottish Governing Bodies (SBGs). There were 800,129 playing club members in 2024/25. While this is a headline 1.3% decrease since last year, this is largely driven by new system and associated data cleanse of reporting club figures for football, the sector’s second largest sport. Adjusting for this change across both years, the SGB club membership figures are maintaining compared with last year. We also:

• made progress in equalities, diversity and inclusion, with 22 SGBs completing the new Moving to Inclusion tool.

• provided more support to SGBs, including a new case management support service, and a new governance audit contract.

• provided safety and wellbeing support, with learning and development on child wellbeing and protection reaching 600 attendees, and a UK wide Vision for Welfare and Safeguarding in Sport in the UK project.

We achieved well on the world stage. At Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games we had a good representation of athletes competing, with 33 Scottish athletes on Team GB securing 13 medals and 21 Scottish athletes on ParalympicsGB securing 20 medals.

There was a further boost to Scottish performance sport with the Commonwealth Games confirmed to be returning to Glasgow in 2026.

Partners

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We brought senior leaders from our key partners together through the strategic forum. This informed our long-term planning proposals to Scottish Government and responded to the latest data on the financial position of publicly funded sport. We made strong proposals to support the Scottish Government fulfilling their commitment to double the sport and active living budget by the end of this parliamentary term. Scottish Government financial challenges meant this commitment was not fulfilled in 2024/25. We also:

• supported 12 local authorities on physical activity and sport strategies.

• supported targeted EDI work in seven local authorities: Glasgow, Fife, Dundee, Clackmannanshire, West Lothian, North Ayrshire and Orkney.

People

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We provided significant learning and development support to the sector:

• We continue to support sports to develop and embed the Scottish Coaching Certificate.

• We have 44,232 Scottish learners on our Brightspace learning and development platform.

• We completed our 2024/25 coach education subsidy. Over £400k was awarded across 27 sports. The top five EDI focus areas this year are females, young people, rural accessibility, SIMD, and disability.

• We launched The Coaching Scotland Development Tool. Local and national partners are engaging in themes and collaboration to share practice and agree actions aligned to Coaching Scotland.

• We launched our second SGB CEO executive coaching programme cohort.

• We piloted the national progression awards in sports coaching. We procured five suppliers for our Sport Educator Framework to support learning and development for local and national partners. 

Places

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We commissioned a review of the sports estate in Scotland. Local authorities, leisure trusts, colleges and universities have shared their data. This includes the age, condition and investment needed. We are working to address gaps in utilisation data. We made over 200 site visits to club owned facilities. We are working with local authorities and SGBs to monitor the risk of facilities fully or partly closing. In 2024/25 we committed to invest:

• £1.7m into nineteen Sports Facility Fund projects.

• nearly £1m into six Cycling Facilities Fund projects.

• £850k into one Transforming Scottish Indoor Tennis project.

• We also found the financial climate is still affecting planning and implementation of capital projects.

Making it happen

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We strengthened how we work. We revised our corporate strategy which will relaunch in 2025/26. We progressed an in-depth review of our business plan and budget. 

We made improvements to how we work:

• Continued to emphasise the importance of staff wellbeing.

• Introduced a new 35 hour working week.

• Repeated our Good Day at Work survey.

• Commissioned a strategic workforce review to inform our future workforce needs.

• Successfully implemented measures to help manage our internal costs.

• Progressed the sale of our Caledonia House and Cumbrae centres, helping manage our costs and our environmental sustainability goals.

We continue to enable our work through software development and cyber secure infrastructure:

• Increasing our learning and development on cyber security, records management, and business continuity

• Took part in a cyber resilience pilot with HEFESTIS to assess our compliance against the upcoming Scottish Public Sector Cyber Resilience Framework (SPSCRF) v2.0.

We supported data driven decisions by publishing interactive Power BI reports on our key programmes, with positive partner feedback. We significantly added to the evidence base, publishing:

• Equality and Sport Research 2024

• Economic Importance of Sport 2024

• Review of Culture and Leisure Services in Scotland 2024

• Facilities Charges Review 2024.

We brought the sporting community together to celebrate the successes of those involved in sport from grassroots to high performance through the Coaching and Volunteering (COV) Awards and Scottish Sport Awards.

We celebrated the 30th birthday of The National Lottery. Since the first draw, National Lottery players have supported more than 690,000 projects, raising over £50 billion for Good Causes across the country.                                       

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Our support

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Our data

Our key performance indicators are summarised in the dashboard below. This illustrates our contribution to sport and physical activity across Scotland. All indicators are gathered through routine monitoring and evaluation. 

We applied a 1% threshold for the one-year comparison. We will continue to review these thresholds as we collect longer term trend data.

Commentary on indicators

In the last year there has been a slight reduction in SGB club members (just outside the 1% threshold). It is a mixed picture for SGBs with some membership decreasing and others increasing. While this is a headline 1.3% decrease since last year, this is largely driven by new system and associated data cleanse of reporting club figures for football, the sector’s second largest sport. Adjusting for this change across both years, the SGB club membership figures are maintaining compared with last year. 

Participant days for Inverclyde reduced after the highest ever number of participant days in 2023/24. Glenmore Lodge also saw a reduction, but numbers are within the trends seen over the last few years. 

Facilities investment and associated enabled investment reduced, with fewer projects awarded in 2024/25 compared to 2023/24. It should be noted figures can vary year-on-year depending on the number, type and size of facility investment applications received. 

Total number of SIS supported athletes reduced this year, but data is within trends seen across the last 5 years.

Our full data reports provide trend data and commentary on all indicators as well as a breakdown of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) characteristics of participants, where available. 

 View the full set of data reports 

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About the data

The data is from routine, internal monitoring across our programmes and national centres. 

The data for Active Schools relates to academic year 2023/24 but is reported in 2024/25. This is due to when the academic and financial year line up.  

The figure for people accessing training opportunities is not distinct. This means there may be double counting of people accessing more than one training opportunity.  

Facilities investment includes Sports Facilities Fund which is funded through National Lottery, Cycling Facilities Fund which is funded equally through Scottish Government and the National Lottery, and Transforming Scottish Indoor Tennis fund which is funded through National Lottery.

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Financial summary

Sources of funding

Breakdown of expenditure

The difference between income and expenditure relates to timing difference at year end, with some committed projects yet to commence. More information on the amounts (£) invested in individual sports, national partners and local authorities.

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Archive

View every sportscotland annual review from 1999-2000 to the present day

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