Salford Community Leisure  (SCL) were the first Greater Manchester leisure trust to undertake Activity Alliance’s Lead (Leading Equitable and Accessible Delivery) and Inclusion Programme.  The programme involves a two-day workshop where an organisation is taken an improvement journey focussing on how they can become more inclusive for disabled people. With the overall aim of supporting to learn and embrace way they can be more inclusive.

As part of this workshop, it was identified that sites and service audits did not account for disabled people’s experiences, and access had been consistently identified as a barrier across the city. Therefore, getting perspectives from disabled people around accessibility was key to SCL’s EDI programme which has been identified as a key pillar for Salford place partnership deepening work.

What did they do?  

To help better identify and understand the access barriers that disabled people faced for leisure centres SCL wanted to co-produce a facility access audit that was built by people with lived experience. As an initial step SCL, collaborated with Beyond Empower (a local charity that supports disabled people live more healthy and active lives), the GM Commitment to Disability inclusion group and GM place partnership team to build and test the impact and usability of an access audit in leisure centres.  The intention of this audit would be to create a checklist that would;

• Empower SCL staff to be able to internally audit all their facilities. Identifying how they can make sites more inclusive. This would be built of the guidance of those with a diverse range of lived experience
• The checklist would also help leisure centres managers identify long, mediums and short term barriers and understand what checks and changes can be made daily  (signage or layout of cafes) vs changes that might only be able to be addressed in the medium to long term (building modifications, staff training etc..)

The collaboration with Beyond Empower allowed SCL to utilise their expertise and recruit a diverse group of disabled people. The group undertook a walkthrough of a leisure and community centre, to identify barriers and enablers for accessibility. The recommendations and learnings identified by the group formed the basis of the accessibility checklists, which was then tested, adapted and rolled out across all SCL leisure facilities.  This early testing created a feedback loop from centres managers, and resulted in some modifications and creation of a guidance questions.

The GM Commitment to disability inclusion network and GM place partnership team acted as a critical friend throughout, and help secured match funding for this pilot.

The impact and what next

Since its rollout the impact of this checklist has been felt at both an operational and strategic level with SCL rolling it out across all of their leisure and community centres.

At a strategic level SCL recognised that their centres could become more accessible through simple changes, and quick wins which has triggered the commissioning of a similar audit to be done on the local libraries. While at an operational level the checklist has helped centre managers and staff understand disabled people lived experience more.

Since the creation of the initial audit the accompanying checklist this has now been piloted in multiple leisure centres across Salford, with the intention of rolling it out across the borough. The success of this approach as also seen SCL commit additional funding to undertake a similar audit of their library and museum facilities.

As a member of the GM commitment to inclusive leisure for disabled people’s network and in the spirit sharing knowledge and learning to help active lives for all, SCL are now proud to share the accessibility audit checklist user guide to help other leisure centres along on their inclusion journey.

The accessibility audit checklist and the user guide can be downloaded here.