Jade Buckingham

Sport and Leisure Management BA (Hons)

Jade Buckingham placement at Brighton and Hove City Council
My work placement was a great experience and I learnt a lot of new skills and broadened my existing skills. I wanted to study Sport and Leisure Management and the work placement was one of the main reasons I chose this course at Chelsea School. Other university’s offered a work placement although they weren’t as long as the three month work placement offered with this course and this wouldn’t have given me the same experience.

I decided to undertake my work placement within the sport development team at Brighton and Hove City Council. For 3 days a week, I was helping to organise the Easter holiday sports programme. This included various sports events such as tennis and golf. To increase participation one of my ideas was to send an email out to everyone who had booked onto similar programmes in the past. This proved to be very successful and 30 per cent of participants who took part on the programme stated they knew about the courses via this email. We also had more participants on the programme than in any years previously. It was really nice to make a positive difference whilst on placement.

I spent 1 day a week working with the manager on TakePart an international sport festival, and my final day was spent with the Active 4 Life team who provide free sport and physical activities to the local community, I feel I was very lucky to be able to go on placement with Brighton and Hove City Council. Everyone was really helpful throughout my time there and I was always given the opportunity to experience a variety work. They gave me a choice of the work I could carry out and I was asked if there was anything in particular I wanted to focus or would like to help with.

I was also given the responsibility of helping to run meetings and leading speeches to people from the sports development team. I made lots of important contacts for the future and worked with major organsiation such as Active Sussex and various national governing bodies.

As I hadn’t worked in an office before I learnt about this as well as gaining an insight into the sport industry and about organising sports events.

Overall my placement was a really good experience. I have since been offered paid work with Brighton and Hove City Council and will be working with them in organising their summer programme. After I graduate I would now like to go into sport development which would probably not have been the case before my placement.