January 2013 For immediate release

Leeds Met and The FA score a winning goal in coaching excellence

The English Football Association (The FA) has commissioned Leeds Metropolitan University to deliver a Sport Coaching Postgraduate Certificate (PG Cert) course for 12 members of their staff.

The part-time course, which will run up until June 2013, is being carried out at St. Georges Park - the home of The FAs new National Football Centre for players, coaches and coach educators. It is also the training base for the 24 England teams.

Andy Abraham, Principal Lecturer in Sport Coaching at Leeds Metropolitan and Programme Leader of the postgraduate certificate, said: This is a fantastic opportunity for the University to collaborate with the FA the very heart of English football. The participants are all very experienced coaches. They have been employed by the FA to work as Youth Coach Educators in partnership with professional club academies to develop their youth coaches. The PG Cert is intended to support their transition from excellent coaches to excellent coach educators. We are proud to be delivering the programme which will formalise and add to the participants already considerable skills and knowledge. Ultimately, the course will improve their capacity to make professional judgments relating to the development of more effective youth football coaches.

The PG Cert is an integrated package of classroom and work based learning.

Head of Player Development and Research for The FA, Andy Cale, added: The Football Association is fully committed to developing coaches and coach educators at all levels. This course is part of the drive to support Coaching as a Profession and to keep FA staff at the forefront of academic developments in sports coaching. This innovative course helps our staff understand the latest theories of coach education and development and translate them into cutting edge practical support for the coaches in the professional clubs. Students will receive further support through Leeds Mets online virtual learning system where all individual modules have their own page that students are automatically allocated to as a result as registering on that module.

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For further details please contact Julia Williams in the Communications team at Leeds Met on 0113 812 5978 or email j.t.williams@leedsmet.ac.uk

Notes for editors:

Leeds Metropolitan University has more than 27,000 students and around 3,000 staff. The Vice Chancellor of Leeds Metropolitan University is Professor Susan Price and the Chair of the Board is Lord Woolmer of Leeds. Leeds Metropolitans four faculties are: Arts, Environment and Technology, Business & Law, Health and Social Sciences, and Carnegie.

Leeds Metropolitans heritage can be traced back to the founding of the Mechanics Institute in Leeds in 1824. The Destination of Leavers in Higher Education (DLHE) showed that the proportion of Leeds Metropolitan 2010/11 graduates in work, further study or both six months after leaving university was 91.87%.

Libraries and Learning Innovation at Leeds Metropolitan was awarded the CSE standard for the tenth year running in 2012. In 2012, Leeds Metropolitan was awarded a First in the People & Planet Green League, a league table of environmentally friendly universities, for the sixth consecutive year.