We are delighted to introduce Kyle Genner as one of our Data Impact Fellows. He shares his background, his current work and research and what he hopes to get out of the Fellows scheme.
My background
Children and young people growing up in poverty or coming from deprived backgrounds tend to have worse life outcomes and less opportunities than their more affluent peers. Of course, you almost certainly know that already because, well, who doesn’t?
I certainly know this because I was one of those children and so were most of my childhood friends.
Childhood
I won’t bore you with all the detail but, after a bit of a tough childhood, I left school at 16 without any qualifications. In the months that followed I became homeless for almost a year, living in a tent on the local football pitch.
For about 3 years after becoming homeless I tried hard to put my life back together. I tried to go to College, I tried to go to work, and I tried to find somewhere to live.
Despite all my efforts, and despite a handful of well-meaning people trying to help, my life was still a metaphorical car wreck that I couldn’t seem to fix.
The Army and beyond
I was pretty certain that I was destined to a life of precarity and early death, so at 19 years old I joined the Army as a sort of desperate attempt to change that trajectory.
Whilst in the Army I excelled. I served in multiple locations across Europe and Afghanistan and, more importantly, also gained valuable skills, experience and qualifications that my earlier life had been unable to provide.
Upon leaving the Army I was able to use what I’d gained as a base to build a life for myself. I completed a Degree and then a Master’s Degree, worked in some good jobs, and then built a series of relatively successful small businesses.
Despite this, when learning of the life outcomes of the other kids I grew up with, some of which were deeply tragic, I was always hit with the sense that I had been incredibly fortunate.
From what I knew, many of the kids I grew up with were both smart and capable. It seemed to me that they just hadn’t managed to find a route out of their early existence that could give them the basic foundations that the Army had provided for me.
Challenges which keep repeating
Looking around at areas like the one where I grew up, I could see that many of the problems that existed back then were still evident in the same places today.
There are children and young people, still growing up in poverty, still having their lives negatively defined by early life experiences, and society still hasn’t figured out how to deal with this and how to give those kids a fair shot at reaching their potential and building a meaningful life.
This isn’t only tragic for the individuals involved, but also for wider society.
Not only do we have the social and economic cost of dealing with the problems that radiate from those early experiences, we miss out on the additional benefit that such individuals could bring to the table with circumstances that allow them to flourish. This raises the following questions:
- What are we still getting wrong?
- And what do we need to do to change it?
Among the domains where children and young people growing up in poverty tend to face measurable disadvantage and have far less favourable outcomes are sports participation and sporting success. In 2022 I started a PhD that, at least to some degree, aims to answer those two previous questions in relation to these domains.
My Research
Children and young people growing up and living in poverty or deprivation face substantial challenges in participating in sports, accessing talent pathways, and progressing through those pathways to reach higher levels of sporting competition and success.
Although much research has been devoted to deeply understanding barriers to participation, little research has been devoted specifically to understanding the challenges faced by deprived children and young people in relation to accessing and progressing through talent pathways and progressing through to the elite levels of sport.
These problems have been highlighted by Sport England at a national level, and by Tees Valley Sport more locally to Teesside where my research project is focussed.
Understanding the gap
This gap in understanding has made the design, delivery and evaluation of interventions difficult for local organisations such as Tees Valley Sport, and this was highlighted within their application for funding from the Sport England Talent Plan Project.
My research therefore aims to develop that understanding by gaining insights into the lived reality of children and young people living in deprivation, specifically as it relates to sports and engagement with talent identification and development programmes.
This understanding can then be used to provide a contextual foundation from which evaluation of current interventions, delivered by TVS and other organisations, can be undertaken.
The new knowledge and perspectives generated can then be used to inform future policy direction for sporting bodies, ensuring that interventions are better tailored to meet the needs of children living in deprivation, and to promote a more equitable entry and ascension onto and through sports talent pathways.
The aims of this project
- Understand the specific barriers to entry and progression through the Talent Plan.
- Evaluate current strategies and initiatives to overcoming the barriers faced by children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
- Inform the development of Sport England’s Talent Plan and Tees Valley Sport’s “Amplify” programme.
Day-to-day experience
In practical terms this project has meant that the last 4 years of my life have been spent immersed in day to day life at a local boxing club, deeply engaged with the lives and experiences of the children and young people who inhabit it.
Boxing is a particularly pertinent sport for this topic because it is widely regarded as a sport uniquely capable of attracting those living in deprivation, allegedly enhancing the opportunities and outcomes they are able to attain across a wide array of important domains.
Whilst the stories of personal and social transformation emerging from boxing clubs are often inspiring, there is little evidence to support their veracity beyond the anecdotal.
Despite this, the narrative around the sport has meant that boxing clubs have become sites for and targets of a vast array of social interventions, with potentially lucrative funding often available for their delivery.
Given that this funding is often specifically intended to benefit the most deprived in our society, it is imperative that we know exactly who and in what ways such funding is or is not helping. My research is already providing a robust challenge to many of the assumptions we have about the sport.
Objective Reality vs Subjective Perception
Previous research looking at the relationship between boxing participation and socioeconomic status has largely taken a qualitative and interpretative approach.
Whilst this approach has provided a rich account of the cultural aspects of the sport and of the lives of some of the individuals who participate in it, it has broadly failed to provide the quantitative data support the boxing and deprivation narrative it purports to uncover.
The first study from my project sought to resolve this problem by using postcode and the English Indices of Deprivation to compare the distribution of deprivation amongst a large group of boxers (n= 856) against the distribution of deprivation nationally.
In contrast to the dominant narratives around boxing, this study highlighted two important considerations.
- Although boxers came from more deprived areas than the wider population nationally, they were far less deprived on average than dominant cultural and academic narratives have typically depicted.
- Boxers were far more socioeconomically diverse, than typically depicted, with factors such as age and gender also appearing to have an important influence.
The conclusion from this paper was both simple and important.
Stakeholders, funders and policy makers should cease viewing boxers and boxing clubs as homogenous, and should instead make policy and funding decisions based on the individual boxing club or participant. This is vital if we are to ensure that funds intended to support and help the most deprived children and young people in our communities actually go to and help those intended.
This doesn’t mean that boxing can’t do social good, in fact my experience tells me that it can and does. It just means that we need to be more informed and nuanced in our approach to ensure our support and interventions do the good we intend for the people who need it most.
My Future Research Plans
Over the next 18 months my plans are quite simple and straightforward. Finish the current project!
Study 2
The second study from this project looks at a wider range of socioeconomic measures in relation to position in the talent system.
Although boxers may skew slightly towards the more deprived end of the scale on average, my observation from deep immersion in the boxing world has been that it’s still the most affluent from within the group that are progressing onto and through the talent system. Given that talent is an emergent phenomenon that is both resource and time intensive, this would make perfect sense.
Despite that, we need more data to assess this objectively and see if and to what extent this expectation applies specifically to boxing. This is again vital, because it will help us be clear on where the line between talent and deprivation is and to what extent the two are likely able to coexist.
Unless we understand this we’ll continue allocating resources to the “talented” on the assumption that they are deprived, and potentially leaving the most deprived even further behind.
Study 3
The third study from this project is a deep analysis into the life and experiences of a talented young boxer who truly has grown up in deep poverty and deprivation.
This study is based on a relationship that was built over a 4 year period which has included my attendance to support him at multiple court appearances as he grappled with the delayed consequences of his early life and a judicial system that seems poorly equipped for giving him a fair hearing.
As alluded to in previous sections, decisions about how to allocate resources and which interventions to use are often being made by people who don’t understand the reality on the ground for the children and young people who need our help.
Before we can design and implement better interventions we need to have a better grasp on this reality. This study is aimed at bringing that reality to life and giving it the exposure it truly needs.
And what’s next?
Beyond this project I’m not currently certain on what the future holds.
Throughout the project I have been proactive in building relationships with wonderful organisations that mean there is great potential for this research to continue beyond my PhD. Among these organisations are Matchroom Boxing and Empire Fighting Chance, a charity based in Bristol who use boxing as a vehicle for personal and social transformation.
Currently there are talks ongoing between Teesside University and Empire Fighting Chance that I hope will lead to more research that can give us further information into boxing and what it may or may not be able to do for those growing up and living in our most deprived communities.
Aside from that, one of my observations whilst undertaking this project has been that researchers are ultimately very limited in the impact they can have unless they can influence policy and the subsequent outcomes that flow from it.
For that reason I recently ran as a candidate in the local elections and I was elected as the County Councillor for the Division where I live.
Politics is new to me, and it’s not something I ever felt I wanted to be involved in, but the time I’ve spent immersed in some of the old industrial areas of the North East similar to the area where I grew up left me feeling that there are many people in these areas who had been neglected and without a seat at the political table.
I have no idea where it will take me, but at the very least, I hope I can be a voice for those like the young man I mentioned in the previous section.
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