Sports are popularly believed to have positive integrative functions and are thought therefore, to be able to galvanise different, and sometimes divided, communities through a shared sporting interest. UK Government and policy rhetoric over the last two decades has consistently emphasised the positive role sport can play in building more cohesive, empowered and active communities. These positive impacts are particularly important for communities with high numbers of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the challenges associated with co-producing a participatory community sport initiative with 28 young people in working towards greater social cohesion in an ethnically segregated borough in North West England. Although a great deal was learnt from working towards this, the initiative was ultimately unsuccessful as young people, for a variety of reasons, removed themselves from the process. A major contribution of this paper is how we reflect on the realities of project failure and how future community sport initiatives might have greater success. In particular, we argue that for sport to make a difference, participants must be enabled to develop a sense of civic engagement and critical awareness which go beyond either sport or community development, emphasising instead, wider socio-political development.

Since the global economic recession, public services in the UK have badly affected by austerity measures. However, whilst public services, including health, defence and the police faced significant cuts to their budgets, Primary Physical Education in England has actually received additional ring-fenced funding through the Physical Education and Sport Premium since 2013. This funding is provided directly to schools, and though the Department for Education provides guidance on how the Premium might be spent, schools effectively have autonomy to spend it in ways that they believe will best meet the needs of their learners and wider stakeholders. Utilising a mixed method approach involving analysing published material on school websites and semi-structured interviews with primary school and local authority staff, the aim of this article is to critically analyse how primary schools across a borough in the North West of England are spending the Premium. Our analysis is underpinned by principles of social justice, which we interpret as a marker for concerns to do with fairness, equality, exclusion, discrimination, power differentials and privilege. We argue that, in large part due to the autonomy of implementation, the Physical Education and Sport Premium has failed to realise its inherent social justice agenda, in large part because investment in PE and school sport is unequal and too heavily dependent on the value placed upon it by individual schools. It is our contention therefore, that equal opportunities will remain unobtainable if the central tenets of the reproduction of privilege are allowed to remain uncontested.

This is the first systematic qualitative review to examine and organise the current body of research that addresses the practical application of critical pedagogy within Physical Education and Sport for Development. Following a rigorous systematic review process, this paper analyses critical pedagogy, social justice and social transformation through Freire's (1972) concept of dialogical and anti-dialogical action. The themes generated through the analysis of Physical Education were (1) the challenge of teaching social justice through dialogue and negotiation in Physical Education, (2) the challenge of using critical pedagogy to inform about social justice in Physical Education Teacher Education and (3) the challenge of applying critical pedagogy in Physical Education Teacher Education. The themes that were generated through the analysis for Sport for Development were (1) challenging dominant approaches towards pedagogy in Sport for Development and (2) the challenge of designing professional development in Sport for Development. The internationally relevant results explore the challenges faced in the implementation of critical pedagogy in both Physical Education and Sport for Development and critically analyse the capacity for future applications of critical pedagogy within Sport for Development. Findings suggest that social transformation in Sport for Development is more likely to be realised through a critical shift in curriculum and professional development that embraces dialogue, reflection, negotiation and collaboration.Further to this, developing pedagogy within a culture of social justice will enable Sport for Development organisations to further challenge their own values, attitudes and beliefs whilst critically exploring the wider social implications of their practice.

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