The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—in collaboration with the European Commission and the World Health Organization—has deemed investment in quality physical education (PE) a low-cost/high-impact action as it enables students to develop the essential physical, cognitive, and socio-emotional skills needed to become healthy, active, and engaged citizens who form the basis of sustainable development (UNESCO, 2021). Despite the recognized power of quality PE, its potential has not been fully realized in schools and universities around the world (MacPhail & Lawson, 2020). Several causal factors are implicated. Sub-optimal policies and policy configurations have been identified in a recent world-wide survey as critical factors given that policies influence virtually all aspects of PE realities (e.g., curriculum content, teacher standards, instructional practices, student outcomes; UNESCO, 2014). In response, a suite of international policy documents developed by UNESCO (and in partnership with the European Commission, the International Bureau of Education, the International Council of Sport Science and PE, the International Olympic Committee, Nike, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and the World Health Organization) have outlined the critical need to prioritize attention to, and action on, PE policy to improve quality provision (UNESCO, 2021). These documents specify that such policy efforts are the responsibility of all the professional stakeholders involved in PE (e.g., teachers, teacher educators, policymakers, professional development providers, professional association directors). This multi-stakeholder approach is argued to increase the likelihood of policy processes and products that are inclusive, relevant, more likely to be well-implemented, and empowering for professionals. Yet, despite some positive developments in the last few years, policy neglect remains largely normative in PE (van der Mars et al., 2021). A key reason for this policy neglect is that preparation for policy engagement is rarely offered in PE initial teacher education, continuing professional development, or postgraduate programmes (Lorusso et al., 2020). Furthermore, research on what such preparation should entail has not been conducted. These deficits are despite PE stakeholders reporting their desire for policy preparation (Scanlon et al., 2022b). The consequences of this lack of policy preparation, and ultimately policy neglect, are serious. PE experts have warned that, given threats to the status of PE in many countries, continued failure to engage adequately with policy may put the future of PE, and its contributions to students’ wellbeing, at risk (Lorusso & Richards, 2018). This project aims to address the significant and urgent need to build PE stakeholders’ capacity to engage strategically in policy efforts such that the quality of PE provision may be enhanced, and important student outcomes achieved. To do so, the question investigated in this research is: what are key facilitators, barriers, and content in the development of PE stakeholders’ policy capacity? The intention is that this information can then be used to inform the development of evidence-based policy preparation initiatives in initial teacher education, continuing professional development, and graduate education within PE, education, and other public sector arenas in Europe in beyond.

Method: This study takes the form of an interview Delphi (Fletcher & Marchildon, 2014). This group facilitation technique involves asking a panel of experts for their opinion on an issue independently, compiling the resulting responses into an anonymized summary, and feeding back that summary to the expert panel in another interview where they are asked to react to the group’s responses (e.g., indicate agreement or disagreement). Participant sample: The 25 European and other international expert participants include academics who study PE policy as well as professional stakeholders who are engaged in PE policy initiatives (e.g., UNESCO’s Quality PE Policy Project). The former group were purposefully sampled from the results of a scoping review on PE policy research (Scanlon et al., 2022a), and the latter group were identified through the digital method of search-as-research (Rogers, 2019). The expert participants represent a diversity of geographical contexts and stakeholder roles as well as a balance in gender. Data gathering and analysis: In the round one interview, participants are asked to describe what they consider to be the key facilitators, barriers, and content in the development of PE stakeholders’ policy capacity. Data is then organized by question (i.e., facilitators, barriers, content), reduced for meaning, and content analysed to group similar opinions. Once the final list of individual and grouped responses is determined, the number of experts contributing to specific responses are indicated in a frequency column. This anonymous summary is fed-back to participants in a second interview where they are asked to comment on responses in terms of relevance and priority. Analysis of round two data involves first following the same analysis process as before, and then following Braun and Clarke’s (2019) reflexive thematic analysis approach to inductively code and thematize.

Expected findings are organized by whether they relate to key facilitators, barriers, or content in the development of PE stakeholders’ policy capacity. The expected findings are derived from the literature as well as the authors’ various pilot projects informing the current project. In terms of facilitators, a particularly effective way for PE stakeholders to develop their policy capacity is for them to engage in small, and sustained, multi-stakeholder groups where they can collaboratively and reflexively interrogate their lived policy experiences in relation to policy process theories. In terms of barriers, a key upfront challenge to developing policy capacity is to dispel the unrealistic and limiting, although widely-held, assumptions many PE stakeholders have about policy processes as linear and top-down in nature. Appreciating the messy, unpredictable, and multidirectional nature of policy processes can be an initially overwhelming, although ultimately very productive, exercise. In terms of key content, developing policy capacity might best start with information about the importance of policy, followed by information about key policy concepts, such as understanding policy as process rather than static text. Following this, information about key practical aspects of the interrelated policy process, particularly development, advocacy, and enactment, are important to PE stakeholders. Finally, any development initiative designed with the intention to develop one’s policy capacity must consider ways to encourage the motivation and confidence to not only see oneself as a policy actor, but also to act on any developed policy know-how within one’s sphere of influence. The findings of this project will inform the development of an Open Educational Resource for European and other international stakeholders in PE and beyond who wish to engage in professional learning about policy in order to enact their own agency as policy actors.

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