Alternative ways of encouraging increasing physical activity in Schools

By GreaterSport | 01 September 2021 | TAGS: Children and young people, schools, Education, Stories, walking, Active environments, Local Pilot, Place based partnerships

Greenside Primary wanted to ensure that their children and families were active throughout the lockdown and explored different ways to engage their cohort. They delivered online lessons and took part in fun challenges but wanted to ensure that all children were inspired by the activities and not just the motivated and engaged who were logging online. At the same time, the SSP had had conversations with the Public Health team in Tameside council about more unusual ways to engage families and to encourage 2 metre social distancing. One idea was to encourage the children to be active whilst walking to school or standing in queues at the school gates. We identified a primary school (Greenside) to work with on this pilot and came up with a plan. ‘Active Pavements’ was born.

In addition, the school have used resources from PESP to develop active trails across their local parks to encourage more walking/ cycling. They have used a duck template to set up a competition to design a duck and then laminated the winning duck, set up a QR code for the children to scan and encourage them to do an Active challenge linked to it when found.

‘Active pavements’ encouraged a drawing and design competition amongst children to create a fun challenge or game that families could play on or with either when walking to or around school, or when stood waiting to be taken in to school. It could be a curvy ladder, hopscotch type game, circles to jump in or a fun track for scooting. Children had to use their imagination and create! Lots of designs were drawn with chalk outside school and many children and families played with them. It created family fun that children wanted to play on. Fun and wacky designs which engaged all children. Scooter tracks, running tracks, challenges and games. It was extremely popular. The Duck challenge was based on the Bee trail in Manchester- different designs and different things to look for. It was local so within walking distance for most families.

Through various meetings and discussions, we set the competition up within school, with a class winner created. Tameside council selected 2 winners (all children received a ‘That Counts’ wristband or keyring) and their designs will be being set up and printed semi- permanently on the schools pavements outside. We are hoping to run this out across all schools.

The Duck trail idea has already been used in another school very successfully. The hits on the website can be counted and they had a significant increase in visits. The school will be speaking at our PE network to support other schools with how to do something simple like this.

Watch the Greenside Pavement Games video here: