WE had words of wisdom from Holyrood’s Health and Sport Committee who have been researching the sports participation habits of the nation, and it seems that their initial findings were not so positive!

However I think it is fair to say that whilst they did find participation rates dropping, there is evidence that in many quarters female participation is on the increase.

My first reaction to this, when contacted to give a response to a journalist who was writing a piece on this subject, was slight confusion.

I hear and read daily, through the various social media channels that I follow, about the programmes that are being created to encourage more women into sport, and the success that follows these programmes.

However it is difficult when you are in the middle of the storm to see your way outside, and perhaps that is what I have to do to make sense of this. Following pro-active people on social media only gives me positive messages, of course, so perhaps it is time to take a look on the outside to really grasp the size of the problem.

A couple of the areas highlighted were lack of confidence and lack of role models. This was particularly relevant for young women and girls – and by role models I don’t necessarily mean elite athletes.

In fact, to be honest, the best role models for young children are their parents and extended family – if they are fit and active, then it is an easy step for the children to become part of that lifestyle, and much more likely that they will continue their activity into later life.

One of the programmes Scottish Women in Sport tried to get off the ground in 2016 was Women Active at Work and the whole premise surrounding this was understanding how women could fit activity into their busy lifestyle and become active during their working day. This activity, we felt, would help to create role models who were tangible, accessible and real.

That is not to say that our high performance athletes cannot add to this mix, but in the short term and on a regular basis, our Women Active at Work programme offered real solutions – however, that in itself was a victim of lack of finance!

Another stumbling block to participation identified was an initial bad experience when participating in sport in the early years and how we can encourage those who feel as if they are outside of the team to become an integral part. I can understand this myself – brown school knickers, red blaze pitches, poor changing facilities and a coach or teacher who is only looking for the gem to nurture into an elite player, to polish their own ego. Whilst this may have been many years ago, too many for me to admit to, and it is fair to say a lot has been done to rectify this, there is still room for improvement.

The quick fix to this problem is finance, or at least the right use of the money that is available. Sport is facing a major problem as funding continues to be slashed and Scottish Governing Bodies of sport (SGBs) are put under more and more pressure to deliver.

The funding both from government and sportscotland needs to be supplemented with more commercial investment into sport, and many of the smaller SGBs do not have the capacity to invest in personnel, or even agencies to pursue this funding for them.

However this in itself is not a panacea. We need to offer more support in many other areas and I believe that there is a lot of goodwill that can be harnessed through the social corporate responsibility budgets of major companies.

This is not just about a financial investment by them – it is more about investing time, knowledge and expertise into a small sport to enable them to function in a more creative and effective manner.

We need a vehicle to bring all these players together to talk to each other, to help each other. Using the proverbial “at the end of the day”, it is the health of our future generations that we are putting at stake here. What price will we put on that?