Magna Vitae has been on a 14-year journey with Sport England’s quality benchmarking scheme, Quest, to achieve a rating of Excellent at its flagship facility, Meridian Leisure Centre, putting it in the top 6% of all Quest facilities, whilst Skegness Pool & Fitness Suite and Horncastle Pool & Fitness Suite both achieved Very Good.
The trust uses its sites’ individual Quest assessments to lead continuous improvement across all the venues.
Director of Operations, Naomi Wilkinson-Baker explains: “Without Quest’s guidance we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Across our sites, we could have different Quest assessors with different objectives and specialism areas, so we compile our reports to capture all the recommended areas for improvement (AFIs).
“Our duty managers meet every other month and work together. For instance, we have a real advocate for environmental management, who leads on that for all our sites.
The team choose what module they want to lead on or be a part of, and share their ideas. For example, someone may want to join the customer journey steering group to learn more as they don’t deal with it day to day.
This same approach feeds into the physical Quest assessment day, with the wider teams involved from receptionist to duty manager level. It’s a great way to develop our team and strengthen our cross-site bond.
“We’ve changed the stigma of Quest being viewed as someone checking up on us, to someone offering support and assistance with our continuous improvement journey.
Our team now can’t wait to show off what we’ve been doing and how we can take it to the next level. When you hear that you know our efforts will have a great impact on the community.”
Quest also feeds heavily into Magna Vitae’s leisure strategy plan. “Every section of the plan tells you what Quest module it supports and who’s leading on that,” says Wilkinson-Baker.
“For example, crash course swimming lessons feed into our customer journey and tackling inequalities modules.
We also ask how it aligns with and supports our partners and what’s the impact if we don’t do it. It’s like a giant to-do list shared across all venues that feed into everything we do.
When it’s Quest assessment time, we can easily view what we’ve done and the results.”
Observing that Environmental Management is Quest’s weakest scoring module nationwide, Magna Vitae chose to change its approach.
Wilkinson-Baker explains: “Thanks to an AFI from a Quest assessor, we now have environmental notice boards that tell people what we’re doing, such as lowering the pool temperature in winter; if it’s really cold outside customers don’t notice the pool is a little cooler.
We’ve always done this but didn’t share it with our customers. It really helps with buying in and our environmental management score has greatly improved.”
Meridian Leisure Centre also undertook the Tackling Inequalities in Leisure module, which has its own award Standard within Quest, to test how they fare ahead of a new venue opening in an area of high deprivation and health-related issues.
Wilkinson-Baker says: “As a result, we developed a community steering group for the new venue to enable us to understand the needs, demands and, more importantly, barriers to participation our community faces.
We will now implement this across all our venues as a way to get to know our current and future users more clearly.”
Quest’s operations director, Caroline Constantine, said: “By meeting Quest’s demanding standards for ‘excellent’ centres, Magna Vitae has shown its commitment to providing quality facilities and services.
In these tough economic times it is even more important than local leisure facilities can demonstrate their value, and the Quest process helps them do just that; enabling facilities and their teams to have the quality of their work both recognised and nationally accredited, as well as showing how they measure up against national standards.”