The evidence

The problem is recognised at the highest level. Delivery has never been independently verified.

For over a decade, the most senior bodies in world sport and public policy have formally recognised that elite athletes in education depend on the environment around them. Each has called on institutions to build that environment. None has created an independent mechanism to verify whether any institution actually has.

That verification is the work ALC exists to do.

The founding document

The European Commission

In November 2012, the European Commission published the EU Guidelines on Dual Careers of Athletes, the document that shaped the entire European approach to athletes in education.

The Guidelines state the problem in institutional terms. An athlete’s own motivation, commitment, and resilience are recognised as necessary and insufficient. Special arrangements are needed so that talented and elite sportspeople are not, in the Commission’s words, “forced to choose between education and sport.”

The Guidelines call on governments, sport governing bodies, and educational institutions to create the right environment for dual careers. The Commission’s own word is environment. Dual careers have since been affirmed as a strategic objective of the European Union by the European Parliament.

Fourteen years on, no independent mechanism exists to verify whether any institution has built the environment the Commission described.

European Commission (2012). EU Guidelines on Dual Careers of Athletes: Recommended Policy Actions in Support of Dual Careers in High-Performance Sport. Brussels. Read the Guidelines

Recognised at the top of world sport

The International Olympic Committee

The IOC Athletes’ Commission operates Athlete365 Career+, a programme that has supported more than 59,000 athletes worldwide since 2005 in preparing for dual and post-sport careers.

The world’s highest sporting body invests in preparing the athlete. The environment the athlete steps into remains unexamined. Preparation on one side of the relationship cannot compensate for design that has never been assessed on the other.

IOC Athletes’ Commission, Athlete365 Career+. Programme overview

Every major sporting nation has responded

National systems, worldwide

UNITED KINGDOM

TASS, the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme, accredits dual career sites across UK higher education. ALC is complementary to TASS and affirmative of its work: accreditation recognises commitment, and an independent audit examines how the environment is operating in practice. The two are different instruments, and a mature system carries both.

AUSTRALIA

The Australian Institute of Sport leads the Elite Sport Education Network, through which dozens of universities commit to academic support and flexibility for endorsed elite student-athletes.

CANADA

Game Plan, a collaboration between the Canadian Olympic Committee, the Canadian Paralympic Committee, Sport Canada, and the national sport institute network, includes an Education Network of institutions that plan academic delivery around training and competition.

Each scheme reflects the same recognition: the environment shapes the outcome. Membership of a scheme signals commitment. Independent verification of delivery is a separate discipline, and it has not existed anywhere.

Grounded in published scholarship

The research

A decade of peer-reviewed European research has followed the Commission’s Guidelines, examining how athletes experience the combination of elite sport and study. The consistent finding across that literature is that outcomes for this cohort are shaped by the configuration of the environment around the athlete rather than by individual resilience alone.

ALC’s audit method is grounded in the doctoral theory of readiness under fluctuating demand, developed by the firm’s founding director in his academic capacity at Loughborough University London, and cited by ALC as published academic work.

The method and framework

Recognition is universal. Verification is absent.

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