LAST week I talked about going to the FA Youth League Conference at St Georges Park and the positives afterwards.

The next question is what are we doing about it.

I can assure you our committee doesn’t rest on its laurels, as we held a meeting to discuss more than 20 proposals to improve the game, referee development and the football infrastructure.

The key themes we are working on at the moment are as follows: 1) Review our league development plan to ensure all our members get the opportunity to add their views to how we can enhance football in our area. Our league secretary Lesley Allon has taken this on as a piece of work.

2) Give a voice to the youth of our league, by setting up a youth council and forge links with the National FA Youth Council structures and FA Football Futures Programmes. Our referee development officer Bill Eaton has taken this task.

3) Provide better opportunities for our coaches by linking into FA Learning which is a department of the FA based at St Georges Park and responsible for the design of all the coach development programmes. They maintain a database of more than 27,000 licensed FA coaches, produce the “future game”, ensure that all licensed coaches are up to date with their qualifications including first aid, safeguarding children and continuous professional development opportunities. Our under-7s secretary and highly regarded young coach, Michael Worthington is tasked with developing these links and ensuring we give all coaches the very best information to enhance their skills.

4) I am tasked with looking at ways we can get the best out of IT to make the job easier for our managers, club and league secretaries, referee secretaries, Respect monitoring and all administrative tasks.

To that aim I am looking at commissioning an online player registration system and building an FA Full Time database. FA Full Time is a fully integrated FA system which allows for text messages to be sent in as results and the system automatically updates the league database, it also has automated respect monitoring, referee allocations and supports the county and national FA IT systems.

5) On the football development side, futsal is now starting to grow each Sunday at St Catherine’s Academy as we offer under-10s futsal in the morning and 16-plus futsal from 12.30pm onwards. There are limited places available but any teams or individuals interested should contact Brad Adams at Bolton Wanderers Community Trust at BAdams@bwct.org.uk.