Youth charity The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and The Football League Trust have launched a ground breaking national partnership which will inspire, enthuse and motivate young people to achieve a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award through football across England and Wales.   On Friday 17^th October, Gerry Sutcliffe MP – Minister for Sport in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Clive Betts MP - Member of the Parliamentary Football Team launched the partnership at Sheffield United Football Club.  Margaret Hillyer from the Cobblers Study Centre and Russell Lewis from the NTFC Community Department made the journey up to Sheffield.  Northampton Town Football Club is now recognised as an approve centre to run The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award in partnership with the Football League Trust.

 Update by Rebecca (Kingsthorpe College)

At the Cobblers Study Centre we have been doing a lot of things and it has been really fun and exciting.  We have  been working on coaching younger children football skills.  We went over to Upton Meadows and taught them.  They listened  really well to Jordan when he introduced himself and Katie, Matthew and me, we played stuck in the mud without the footballs and the kids listened really well.  They were really good and they enjoyed playing the games.  They had fun but it was a shame that the room wasn’t bigger because we could have played a little match but because there wasn’t room we couldn’t do it. Next Monday we are going over to the school again and we are going to teach them again and give them certificates.  We are going to do some relays and I am going to do the introduction.  I am going to say “hello my name is Rebecca and I’m here from Kingsthorpe College today to teach you some more football skills.” I am doing the the first warm up game then Zac is going to do the second warm up game,  Katie is going to do the third warm up game which is traffic lights.  After that we are going on to do the skill games which are C-Factor with Zac, Cobblers Replay with Matthew and then the Penalty Shootout with all the coaches. Then after we have done all  of this we are going to do the presentation where all the children receive a certificate and all of us coaches take it in turns to hand them out to all the children.