CUPEST Conference Announcement – 19th-21st October 2026
By David Grecic, University of Lancashire
The IPLA continues to support CUPEST’s mission to develop and share knowledge and research insight across both academic and practitioner communities.
The upcoming conference in Manchester on October 19th to 21st sees IPLA colleagues and international experts deliver keynote presentations and lead a series of workshops that aim to pool all of the delegates collective intelligence, and build consensus on how best we can practically solve some of the major challenges Physical Literacy currently faces.
Our Chair Nigel Green was one of the first speakers at CUPEST’s inaugural conference in Changsha, China in 2024, and has subsequently delivered a series of follow up presentations and workshops exploring how Physical Literacy can be adopted and applied in both physical education and sports training contexts.
The Manchester event builds on CUPEST’s network of East and West partners by sharing the keynote presenters’ organisations diverse perspectives to facilitate shared learning about the needs, context and potential that each identifies. Of course many events and conferences provide this experience but we hope our event offers more that just the transmission and receipt of information and knowledge. For this reason we have arranged a series of workshops each afternoon that will build on these expert insights so that delegates can co-develop proposals that enable fuller Physical Literacy operation in their domains. Specifically, Day 1 will ask: What is Physical Literacy and how does it relate to other traditions and philosophies? It’s purpose is to explore similarities and differences, build shared language, highlight surface tensions and assumptions, and generate common principles. The intended output will be to draft a “Human Flourishing Through Movement” framework, and develop an initial proposition statement.
Day 2’s question will be: What does Physical Literacy-informed pedagogy and assessment look like? It’s purpose will be for delegates to consider how best can we apply the varied concepts to practice, examine inclusion and sustainability considerations, and generate practical solutions. The desired outputs from Day 2 will be to draft pedagogical and assessment principles, as well as practical recommendations for practice in all 3 worlds of operation.
Day 3’s question will be: How can Physical Literacy become embedded within systems? The purpose here is to support delegates to move from ideas to implementation, identify leverage points, and build collective commitments to future actions. The intended outputs here are to create a Future roadmap, agree a research agenda, and provide policy recommendations around system change.
We believe that the CUPEST conference will provide a fantastic opportunity for all our sport, health and education advocates to come together, share ideas and contribute to developing new perspectives and outputs that will drive the next exciting developments for Physical Literacy across all of our sectors.