Is sport the key to reducing the number of young people ending up in the criminal justice system?

Watch: Young people from Pill, Newport talk about how difficult life under lockdowns have been for them.

On a warm and sunny Friday evening in the Newport area known as Pill, the air is alive with the sound of young people and their families playing and laughing together.

At the heart of the community, there is a weekly sports session at the Pill Millennium Centre for children and teenagers, which is back on after countless quieter weekends where gatherings were not allowed due to the pandemic.

"It was probably the worse experience of my life", Hilmee Mohamed said about the lockdowns. "I've missed been being here a lot", he added.

"I love to play football, it helps with my confidence and relieves my stresses from home. When I'm having a bad day, it motivates me to be better footballer and it makes me stronger in life as well".

Those who run this session see this impact on many of the young people who attend regularly, and this is a community that needs support after a difficult time.

Lucy Donovan, who works for Newport Lives and leads on the Positive Futures programme, spoke to Wales at Six on Friday about the importance of the session in Pill.

This session is one of many put on through a collaboration between multiple community organisations and projects, as well as the Police and Crime Commissioner in Gwent.

The work they are doing in Pill is part of something much bigger though: something that could have a meaningful positive impact on reducing problems in communities across Wales and beyond.

Newport Live is a local partner in a £1.7m three year UK-wide project called 'Levelling the Playing Field', which aims to increase the number of ethnically diverse children in sport and physical activity.

The overall goal of the project is to prevent and divert these same children and young people away from being involved in the criminal justice system.

There is a pressing reason for this. According to the latest figures, the proportion of black children cautioned or sentenced by police is now double what it was a decade ago.

Sport Wales also says the pandemic has also "widened inequalities" across socio-economic status, age and gender.

Two of the role models that support the Positive Futures project in Newport are Leon Brown and Ashton Hewitt. They grew up just a few miles from the Pill Millennium Centre, and now both play for the Dragons rugby region and the Wales senior squad.

For most of the last year, young people have been stopped from playing sport in teams and groups because of the pandemic, something that Leon and Ashton both said would have been unthinkable when they were younger.

"It must have been incredibly difficult, especially at that age with all that energy to burn", Ashton said. "It's just cut off an option for how to exert that energy and forcing their hand into doing something else".

"The lockdowns I think were tough for everyone, but especially for kids", Leon told me. "Having to stay in when they'd normally be going out and playing, I think it took a toll on people.

"The more we can help people have the option of playing sport and taking a different path I think will be massive. But it needs funding, these things are not free", he added.

Leon and Ashton both called on more investment to improve access to sport in communities like Pill around Wales.

"Access is the main thing really and if we can get more initiatives like Positive Futures then that work can be done because I've seen what they do and it's amazing, and the kids appreciate it too", Ashton said.

"But there's only so many kids they can reach so the more investment into organisations like that the better it's going to be for the kids and the more opportunities they're going to have.

"Sport is a huge thing to just opening the world to these young kids".

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