For once Lord Coe appeared lost for words when the London 2012 chairman was asked for his highlight of the Paralympic Games. "It's all been pretty bloody good, actually," he said eventually.

The British Paralympic Association unveiled plans on Saturday to try to capitalise on the unprecedented success of the London Games, including a new UK-wide talent search to find the next Jonnie Peacock and grow grassroots disability sport.

London 2012 organisers sold 2.7m tickets for the Games amid huge media interest, with Channel 4 revealing that a peak audience of 6.7m tuned in to watch Peacock's victory in the T43/44 100m final on Thursday.

"They come into the Park and they're excited. They watch the sport and the excitement moves to exhilaration," said Coe, who said he had been told by friends that Peacock's performance was one of the best British sporting moments ever. "Then they are educated, if you like, into the nature of the elite level sport and then leave edified. I don't think anybody will see sport or disability in the same way again in this country."

The BPA's chief executive, Tim Hollingsworth, said the joint approach to the two Games taken by the organising committee, but with an emphasis on marketing them separately, and the media coverage had enabled the Paralympics to grip the nation.

A series of British Paralympians have burst into the public consciousness with performances that helped the team meet their target of bettering the 102 medals they won in Beijing with four days of competition to spare. Hollingsworth said the organisation had met its twin goals of meeting performance targets while also changing the perception of the population towards disability.

In particular, added the BPA's corporate relations manager, Jane Jones, it had been a vehicle to engage children in Paralympic sport and shape their view of disability. There have been many more children in the Park during the Paralympics, owing to special rates for schools and cheap family tickets.

But Hollingsworth said the Games had also proved how much the depth of competition had improved. He said that made it even more important to find and develop new talent, while at the same time growing grassroots participation and, in the words of Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, "defending the rights of disabled people to be rubbish at sport".

Peacock, who lost his leg to viral meningitis at the age of five and delivered one of the standout moments of either Games in the Olympic Stadium, was discovered at a talent identification day at Mile End Stadium in the wake of the Beijing Games. "About 100 came through the door in Mile End, one of whom was a 15-year-old boy called Jonnie Peacock. That was his first exposure to disability sport in an organised fashion," Hollingsworth said. "It was that inspirational impact of Beijing that got him into it and we hope that we can find not just the next Jonnie Peacock, but many like him."

The expanded festivals, one in each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, are likely to take place in December. The BPA is also in talks with a number of London 2012 sponsors about continuing their involvement with Paralympic sport.

Hollingsworth and Coe said they hoped the media would continue to cover disability sport, but the former also recognised it was incumbent on the Paralympic movement to make its product as attractive as possible.

The BPA and the IPC hope to reap a commercial dividend in signing up sponsors. The BPA will hear in December from UK Sport how much it will get from public funds to prepare the team for the next Games in Rio. It received £1.8m for London, with the sports themselves receiving another £49.2m. The IPC has committed to trying to simplify the classification system further, removing combined events from the athletics programme over the next four years, and introducing more international standard competitions between Games.

Hollingsworth said: "It's a fast-moving journey. The challenge now is to learn from all the positives that have come out of London, to create an environment where the competition is robust. Ultimately you would want to have the separation of classes, to have singular events where people are competing on a level playing field."

Coe said that continuing the upward trajectory of Paralympic athletes and sport would depend on continued media focus. "It's the big challenge, it's the challenge for Olympic sport and Paralympic sport. The speed with which we reverted to back page leads for England v Moldova, that relegation happened too quickly last night."

Challenging broadcasters and the press to continue their coverage, he added: "We have moved this on. We could not have done more in the last 10 days to move this on."

Channel 4 has committed to returning its magazine programme That Paralympic Show to the schedules from next year and will invest £250,000 in finding further opportunities for the new disabled presenters recruited to front its coverage.

According to a survey carried out for Channel 4 by BDRC Continental and YouGov, two-thirds of viewers said its coverage of the Paralympics had had a favourable impact on their perception of disabled people. More than four in five agreed that disabled athletes were as talented as non-disabled athletes, rising to more than nine in 10 among those who had watched the event on Channel 4, and 64% of adults agreed that the Paralympics was "as good as the Olympics", rising to 79% among those who had watched Channel 4's coverage.