Our principles

As the national agency for sport in Scotland we recognise our responsibility to set the tone for sport in Scotland. Our key principles reflect this:

• Impact – working with sports and with partners who can make the biggest difference to delivering the changes we seek for the greatest number of people. We will use evidence of past and ongoing performance to analyse the impact we are having in our work together. Our high performance investment will be driven by performance impact towards agreed outcomes.
  
• Sustainability – giving high priority to activity that can be shown to have medium to long term sustainability (to 2015 and beyond). This means we will look to invest where a long term approach is planned for. Our investment will be delivered where sustained access and opportunities can be supported and are a viable part of sport system with a national and local impact. We will also share risks and innovate where some evidence of a likely sustainable outcome can be demonstrated.
  
• Holistic approach – prioritising activity that develops a holistic approach to sport in Scotland. This means we will work with those who want to be part of a bigger vision and who are willing to share in the risks and the challenges of delivering that through a focused and shared set of outcomes
  
• High standards – delivering our duties and our aspirations in relation to good governance, sustainability and equality. We will only work with partners who seek to do likewise. Where we or our partners fall short of standards our first approach will be a supportive one but we will act quickly when standards fail to improve
  
• Additionality – as a distributor of National Lottery resources, continuing to invest in line with national guidance, in particular ensuring additionality. This means lottery investment adds to, and does not replace, other funding sources, achieving additional impact to what otherwise would have been achieved.

Taken together we believe that the application of these key principles will help us to work as a single system with national and local partners, for the long term with shared leadership, risk taking and accountability for outcomes.