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The LTAD (Long Term Athlete Development) model has come to represent a sports-wide set of principles that significantly influences national sports policy in England. However, little is known about its impact 'on the ground.'This study is concerned with how national sporting bodies have adapted the model to their specific requirements and how local interpretation and implementation of this is operationalized and delivered. Interpretation and implementation of the LTAD model used in English swimming was investigated through interviews with six elite and five non-elite swimming coaches in the north of England. While there were concerns with aspects of the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA) regulations governing competition for age-group swimmers, the major concern expressed by participants was with over-emphasizing volumes of training, leading to the neglect of technique.

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It has been suggested that child safety discourses are creating an environment in which safety from abuse defines every act of adult-child touch as suspicious, resulting in adults who work with children being positioned as 'risky' and child-related settings becoming no-touch zones. Research on the impact of these discourses on coaches is limited and there have been few attempts to theorize coaches' behaviours to better understand how child safety concerns impact on their practice. Focusing on coaches' avoidance of child touch, this paper uses a Foucauldian perspective to explore coaches' embodied disciplinary and emancipatory responses to child protection discourses in competitive youth swimming. It also discusses the implications of coaches' apprehension about child touch on swimming practice and young athletes.

He has undertaken life-history research with men and women who were subjected to sexual violence as children within sport settings and has taught safeguarding in sport to undergraduate students since 2003. Melanie Lang's research and teaching centres on the policy and practice of safeguarding and child protection. She served as the national expert for the UK and a member of the strategic team for the European Commission-funded project Gender-based Violence in Sport, is an expert member of the Pool of European Experts on Sexual Violence in Sport, and is a member of the Sport England/ NSPCC Child Protection in Sport Unit Research Evidence and Advisory Group. Reports of child protection and safeguarding concerns in sport and leisure settings: an analysis of English Local Authority data between 2010 and 2015 The abuse of children in sport has received considerable attention in recent years not least in the UK, where high-profile disclosures of abuse by former sports professionals has led to several independent inquiries and reviews. Subsequent public and media interest has focused on the potential scale of child abuse in sport. This scrutiny has highlighted how little data there are in this area, in a sector that thrives on statistics. This paper analyses official reports of child abuse in sport and leisure settings received by local authorities (LAs) in England during a five-year period (2010-15) across a range of factors. Findings show that English LAs have varying capacity to provide data on sport/leisure contexts; receive substantively different volumes of reports of child abuse in sport/leisure; and record reports of sexual abuse in sport at higher levels than other forms of abuse. These data suggest that abuse in English sport is significantly underreported but that reports per annum increased over the period.