ABSTRACT
In the most recent policy statement (Cabinet Office 2015, p. 7), the Prime Minister identified, as one of the three policy objectives, ‘long term elite success’ and noted that this objective would require ‘examining how our investments in school sport, coaching and facilities can best support the identification and development of talent’. This prioritisation of elite success and effective talent identification can be found in a series of previous policy statements going back to the mid-1990s and the publication of Sport: Raising the Game (Department of National Heritage 1995). The acceptance by government of international sporting success as a strategic objective was supported by a series of distributional (funding), regulatory and organisational policies.
