As we fast approach the "Two Years to Go” anniversary for the London 2012 Paralympic Games, it’s timely that I write this from the Czech Republic where our Aviva Great Britain and Northern Ireland under-23 team are taking part in the IWAS World Junior Championships.

For those on our 18-strong team it’s a brilliant opportunity to show us how well they can cope with high class international competition on the global stage only two years out from London.

But, in addition, it offers a significant stepping stone as it presents one of the final opportunities for our athletes to achieve qualifying standards for the IPC World Athletics Championships in January 2011, one of the biggest events outside of the Paralympic Games.

From a personal perspective I think that we concentrate so hard on 2012 and "life after London" that we forget that there’s more to the next two years than simply counting down to the most prominent "go live" date in the past decade.

First and foremost for our young athletes is this week’s World Juniors. We’ve got a great team out here which is mainly thanks to the competitive selection process with multiple qualifiers targeting a limited number of slots.

October’s Commonwealth Games in Delhi also offers an excellent opportunity for a number of our athletes to compete in a multi-sport competition. The benefit of a limited competition programme - it’s only T46 100m, T37 100, T54 1500m and mixed classification shot put - is that the disability events are integrated within the non-disability portion of the Games rather than stand alone and all of that helps raise the profile of the sport.

Across the Home Countries, I think that the England team is likely to have the most significant representation across the disability events and I feel strongly that the domestic events we’ve staged this year, as well as the overseas competition opportunities, have contributed to the overall progress of the sport from talent identification - which is one of the areas I’m really involved with - through to elite level performance to put athletes in the mix for selection.

Domestically, our UKA Disability Athletics Challenge has been a great showcase for the sport. Having been piloted as a single event in 2009, it’s evolved to become a three event series in 2010 with the recent final event at Crystal Palace the largest international Paralympic athletics event in the UK for the second successive year with 120 athletes from 19 different nations represented.

Our main objectives for the series include promoting and integrating opportunities for athletes to compete in an elite environment, while also providing and maintaining a sustainable, inclusive and invigorated competition pathway which helps offer our athletes greater opportunities to achieve qualification standards for major events.

Clearly we also want to raise the overall profile and standards of disability athletics and expose them to competition with athletes of a similar or higher standard to aid their preparation for higher level competition.

We’ve been fortunate throughout 2010 that our DAC events have followed on from the Aviva British Grand Prix and the Aviva London Grand Prix, both IAAF/Samsung Diamond League meetings (and the latter a sell out on both days) – our Crystal Palace event definitely benefited from some of the quality international athletes doubling up across both events, while on the European track and field circuit generally, a few of our athletes, including multiple Paralympic medallist Dave Weir (pictured), have had an amazing opportunity to compete in world-class races on a regular basis throughout the summer.

Perhaps the only downside has been the mixed classification sprints events in particular which can often confuse an uneducated audience.

It’s a catch-22 situation, because we want to get the sport "out there", but we know it’s complex and we don’t want to make it any harder to understand than it already is by lining up eight sprinters who might be a mixture of visually impaired and amputee athletes. I suppose it’s another challenge we face, but it’s better we have them out there than not at all.

Before I go, I should add that it’s not all about sporting performance...as we look ahead to the World Championships in 2011 and Paralympic Games in 2012 we also want to see our athletes develop their media skills and general organisation and communication skills.

We want people to buy into our sport and we want to create new role models.

On that note, look out for Stef Reid – our new F44 world record holder in the long jump – and Jonnie Peacock, one of our up and coming juniors in Channel 4’s feature-length documentary “Inside Incredible Athletes” on Sunday (August 29)  - the programme is on at 9pm and launches Channel 4’s pre-Paralympic Games coverage which will run on a regular basis in peak time slots right through until 2012.

Paula Dunn is the Paralympic Performance Manager of UK Athletics. She competed for Britain more than any other female sprinter, representing them in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.