Jennie Price to step down as Sport England CEO

Jennie Price will stand down as chief executive of Sport England at the end of October after 11 years in the job, the grassroots funding agency has announced.

Price joined Sport England in April 2007, nearly two years after London won the right to stage the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics, and she was awarded a CBE in 2017 for services to sport.

The two main achievements of her tenure are boosting the number of people who regularly play sport in England by 1.6 million since London 2012 was announced and the award-winning 'This Girl Can' campaign to help women get more active.

She has also presided over a change of strategy for Sport England, which dishes out more than £300m of exchequer and lottery money a year, as it moved away from subsidising organised sport for sporty people to backing initiatives aimed at getting the inactive off the sofa.

In a statement, Price said: "Sport and physical activity is a powerful force for good and I am proud to have worked on opening it up to a wider group of people, especially women and girls through 'This Girl Can'."

Price came to Sport England after a successful stint in the recycling industry and she will now concentrate on her long-standing work with Cranfield School of Management and the Youth United Foundation, a charity supporting uniformed youth organisations.

Sport England has appointed SRI Executive, a specialist sports executive search firm, to find her successor.