Premier Skills brought together 50 Egyptian and Syrian grassroots football coaches to work side by side for a week of intensive community development coaching. The course offered the Syrian and Egyptian coaches the chance to work together on a shared passion: football.
The Community Coach training course took place from Wednesday 30 April to Tuesday 6 May at the Olympic Training Centre in Cairo.
Premier Skills takes the best of UK expertise in using football as a force for good and uses it to create opportunities for young people all over the world. The training in Egypt was led by head coach Paul Hughes, Director of Innovative Sports Consultancy. Paul was supported by Corinne Mitchell, Coach Educator at Aston Villa Football Club Girls Centre of Excellence, Anthony Witterick, Community Coach at Everton Football Club, and Daniel Rook, Education Officer at Portsmouth Football Club.
Run by the Premier League and the British Council, Premier Skills meets a global need for community intervention through the power of football, and one that is highly appealing for local partners. In Egypt Premier Skills works in partnership with the Egyptian Ministry of Youth and Sports, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Catholic Relief Services (CRS), and the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) to use football as a tool to develop a brighter future for all young people in Egypt.
“In coordination with the Ministry of Sport and Youth as well as Catholic Relief Services, UNHCR provides its full support to the British Council’s ‘Premier Skills’ project,” said Mohamed Dayri, the UNHCR Regional Representative in Egypt. “This project is an initiative that will promote coexistence between the host community and Syrian refugee population through community leadership and empowerment, in addition to providing targeted skills training to a large proportion of the community in some areas in Greater Cairo.”
Premier Skills combines the reach of the British Council with the global appeal of the Premier League to break new ground internationally by using football to tackle a variety of social issues in the community, such as health, disability, gender, inclusion and education. Through Premier Skills, young people, including the most vulnerable in society, are given opportunities to become better integrated into their local communities, to develop their skills for employability and raise their self-esteem.
Premier Skills aims as well at reaching and supporting young people – particularly girls – who are less privileged and who might not get the opportunity to make their dreams come true, which is why in its second phase, starting 2010, the programme started to present small grants to coaches to help them initiating and developing projects that support their communities through football in Egypt. Also, football-based community projects were established to encourage female enrolment in football.
Premier Skills is a proven model, having already delivered tremendous impact in 21 countries up to 2013: Afghanistan, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Korea, Malawi, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Tunisia (including Libyan participants), Uganda and Vietnam.
Since 2007 Premier Skills has created training opportunities benefitting 2,300 grassroots coaches and referees who in turn have reached more than 500,000 young people.
In addition to coaching, a range of materials, including a dedicated website, have been created for teachers and learners of English that utilise football-based content and the British Council’s world-class expertise in English.
Under the programme 6,000 teachers have received face to face training in the use of the Premier Skills English materials, applying these in the classroom to reach thousands of pupils. In addition there have been 3.5 million views of the English materials online.
