What is being healthy within UK primary school setting?

This paper explores the focus of ’Be Healthy’ not only on being overweight or obese but also on maintaining high physical activity levels. A success indicator of the Be Healthy outcome (of the ECM agenda, Article 2) is a reduction in under the 11s’ obesity levels, yet there are no regularly measured statistics of this target. The research within this project focused on the amount of high physical activity levels that was possible within primary school.

Data were collected within a case study setting in one school over one school year, 20 children wore Actigraph accelerometers to record physical activity intensity levels through the school day (9am until 3.10pm). A repeated measures 3 factor ANOVA was used to analyse the effects of factors – including: type of day (days including a Physical Education lesson (PE days) and those that did not (Non PE days); year group (infants / juniors); and gender (male / female). P values of <0.05 were taken as the value for statistical significance � one standard deviation. Statistical analysis was completed using SPSS 17.0.

The findings reveal that on average children completed 53 � 19 minutes of high physical activity levels on PE days and on Non PE days, the children completed, on average, 43 � 15 minutes of high physical activity levels within the school day. Further data will be presented according to age and also gender to show that although there are worrying predictions for the rates of obese and overweight children, such as Article 1 who predict that by 2050 it is suggested that 25% of children will be obese and 30% will be overweight. However data from this case study school found that it is possible for primary schools to support high levels of physical activity and these predictions are challenged.