Belvoir Education and Sports Trust report
In 2024, the Orienteering Foundation provided the Belvoir Cricket & Countryside Trust (now named the Belvoir Education & Sports Trust - BEST), with a grant to support putting on an Orienteering Festival. See their original award and previous interim report. Here we bring you their report.
The main activities that have been undertaken and a summary of the impact is as follows:
- Following on from our rebranding to BEST, we decided to enlarge the Orienteering Festival to be a Summer Family Fun Day. This event has been held for the last two years (on 15 June 2025 and 16 August 2026). Orienteering remains a key sport / activity during the day. We have decided to focus the orienteering more on families, rather than orienteers/runners and have a shorter course that uses the flags and pin punches purchased with the Foundation's grant. This year, about 20 families and pairs took part, and one family enjoyed it so much they did it twice! We decided to include a prize giving and awarded trophies for the first three families/pairs, which made the event even more exciting, and helped to provide a focus to the end of the day.
- One of the aims of the original grant was to use the experience to improve links with the local Schools Sport Physical Activity Network (SSPAN). This has been achieved, and BEST has hosted the Melton & Belvoir, and South Charnwood Schools Championships for the last two years (for children in Year 5 and Year 6). In 2025, we had 99 pairs (~200 children) taking part, and in 2026, we had 69 pairs (138 children) taking part. Numbers were lower in 2026 owing to problems with transportation providers and staff illnesses on the day. Both events were highly successful with many positive comments being received from both teachers and pupils. One class wrote thank you letters that included map drawings. We expect to host the event again in 2027.
- We continue to include orienteering as a principal activity on our primary school Cricket & Countryside Education Days that are held throughout June and early July each year. Orienteering activities were held on 18 of these days in 2026. The Education Days were attended by 1,416 primary school children.
- We have expanded our orienteering offering to our Summer Camps that are held in August. The orienteering at the Summer Camps is based on the experience of the new shorter course used in the BEST Family Fun Day. We had camps two in 2026, each attended by approximately 20 children.
- The principal aim of BEST is ‘to promote the love of sport, develop appreciation for the British countryside and learn the value of community so that children and adults make healthy, informed life choices’. We are therefore interested in our local community. We have loaned the orienteering flags purchased with the Foundation grant to the Friends of Stathern School who host an annual village orienteering event in June. This year, about 80 villagers took part in the event, which used an ISOM 2017 georeferenced map and the MapRun app, and £1,800 was raised. This money was used to support the local primary school. The event will be held again on Sunday 13th June 2027.
- We work closely with local orienteers, including Matt White of Derwent Valley Orienteers (DVO), who supports and volunteers at BEST. In 2025, Matt ran two
training courses for orienteering novices (total of 15-20 newcomers introduced to the sport) using the flags purchased with the Foundation grant. This included a course he led as part of his Orienteering Coach Qualification, which was awarded in July 2025. Matt has gone on to lead coaching days with the East Midlands Junior Squad and has just launched a monthly club coaching programme for DVO members.
It is difficult to quantify the impact that the grant has had on orienteering. However, orienteering has been firmly established as part of the sporting fabric in our part of north-east Leicestershire with regular, well-supported and eagerly anticipated activities aimed at introducing the sport to novices. We also know of at least one person who has joined Leicestershire Orienteering Club and is now a regular participant in orienteering events as a direct result of our activities.
With best wishes from the BEST team, and help from Matt for compiling this report.
Find out more about the Belvoir Education & Sports Trust.