Deloitte and the British Paralympic Association (BPA) are in a celebratory mood, as the Deloitte Parasport website, a search engine for disability sport, has just turned five years old – a huge milestone in the disability sport field.

Back in 2007, we started working with disabled athletes and identified that disability sport was an under supported area, and wanted to help change this ahead of London 2012. We met with the BPA and together sought to tackle one of the main challenges they had identified: in order to have a great Paralympic team you need a pipeline of people entering disability sport at grass roots level.


To find the people at grass roots level, you need to be able to identify and develop those talented individuals so they can be on as successful as the likes of Sarah Storey (pictured). And so, working in partnership, Parasport was born.

Our team at Deloitte worked with the BPA and identified the barriers preventing disabled people from accessing sport and identified the areas that were lacking across the United Kingdom. We discovered there were some excellent disability facilities and clubs being provided by the National Governing Bodies, but what became apparent was the lack of signposting to local opportunities and awareness that these clubs existed.  Even clearer was the need for a tool to help disabled people find out which sports might be suitable for them to participate in.  This research and insight bore the seeds of Parasport, a website which has become "the" search engine for disability sport.

The website www.parasport.org.uk houses a "Classification Wizard", allowing the visitor to enter details on their impairment, and is then provided with a list of sports that might be suitable for them. The user is then able to choose a sport and is directed to a local club that has been quality assured, to ensure a high standard of accessibility and support for disabled people is on offer.


The website is now used by a range of people, from those who want to play recreational sport to keep them active, to others that have aspirations to represent ParalympicsGB at a Paralympic Games. Some users have managed to realise their dreams and are now competing at international level – including Sam Scowen (pictured above, right) whose father used the site to find a rowing club for Sam, and she is now part of the British adaptive rowing squad.

Since Deloitte Parasport was launched in 2007, over 2,000 clubs across the UK have registered with the site, which has received over 22 million hits. On average in 2012, the website received 40,000 visits a month, which is a huge amount of people across the UK using this facility to become more active.


Everyone at Deloitte is enormously proud of this programme and of what they have been able to achieve so far. London 2012 provides the biggest opportunity of all to inspire disabled people to take up sport and perhaps one day follow in the footseps of 11-time Paralympic champion Baroness Tanni Grey Thompson (pictured) , and when the Games has been and gone Deloitte Parasport will be part of maintaining the momentum post-Games, helping all those inspired by what they have seen to find their personal best in sport.

Catherine Bayley is the London 2012 sponsorship manager at Deloitte