"Sport's media visibility is still [...] self-centred at the highest level in all the countries of Europe. This fact makes it difficult to develop and promote the educational and social role of sport, which is, however, still at the heart of doing sport," said Nathalie Rossel, co-founder of APELS, the French agency for education through sport.
She thinks it would be worthwhile to look at how the topic is treated in the media and try to both promote the visibility of sports stakeholders and develop journalists' awareness of the topic.
"Sport is not integrational by itself - there is a need to create conditions for it to become so," said Rossel, calling on federations, governments and associations to develop a policy that encourages the use of sport as a tool for integration and education. "Sport has a specific place in the world: it is one of the rare domains with universal recognition of its rules. It can facilitate dialogue for example between people from different cultural backgrounds," she added.
Following a conference on sport and diversity late last year, APELS drew up a number of proposals to promote education through sport. These include the need to define the meaning of education through sports, which "too often is abstract for people," Rossel said.
"It is important to be precise about what we are talking about," particularly when referring to "improving living together by means of sport" or "promoting inter-cultural dialogue through sport," she explained, "so that we can define our objectives".
Rossel noted that while some federations put in place initiatives around major championships, "it would be beneficial to promote the emergence of perennial policies for education through sport by the European federations and promote local and regional exchanges around education through sport. In addition, "cross-disciplinary and European research teams have to be created into the questions of integration and education through sport," she said.
While EU money could help here, Rossel said information about the bloc's funding possibilities for education through sport was "still hard to access" and local players were encountering problems in identifying the available programmes and funds. If information was better communicated, the number of initiatives and exchanges at European level on the issue would be increased, she underlined.
