The case for change
Funded by Essex County Council Public Health, Active Essex is now in the second year of this exciting pilot including up to 50 Essex Schools. The programme is focused on developing system cohesion and providing strategic support enabling schools to take a ‘whole school approach to healthy behaviours’.
Since the Covid–19 pandemic, schools have been under increasing pressure from issues exacerbated by lost school hours, decreasing mental wellbeing of children and increasing absenteeism and staff challenges. We know that healthy, happy and active children are more likely to achieve and importantly, be ready and able to learn. There is strong evidence to suggest that physically active children achieve higher levels of academic attainment than their less physically active peers.
Despite most schools committing to supporting and improving children’s health and wellbeing, currently just 63% of children in Essex are active for 30 minutes a day within schooltime*. The Chief Medical Officer guidelines are for children to be active for an average of 60 minutes or more per day with 30 minutes of physical activity in school and 30 minutes outside of school each day. The school-day figure is a key benchmark for evaluating how well schools are supporting daily movement.
*Active Lives Survey, 2024
Attitudes Matter
- CYP who report 3 or more positive attitudes toward physical activity are twice as likely to be active.
- The Physical Literacy Consensus Statement for England emphasises the importance of early, positive experiences with movement to create lifelong habits.
What we currently don’t understand is the conditions that enable certain schools to be able to successfully implement initiatives and what more we can do to ensure movement is embedded into everyday school and community life.
This pilot aims to change how we collectively work with schools in Essex and will deliver a recommendation for a framework to address inactivity in schools. The work will ensure that recommendations and implementation will deliver on objectives in school improvement plans and make long lasting, cultural changes to daily school life, both within the school day and beyond the school gate.
The Creating Active Schools Framework (CAS) was developed by an independent group of experts from public health, education, sport and local authorities to promote a whole systems approach to school improvement. Formulated in June 2019, (led by Yorkshire Sport Foundation & Leeds Beckett University), the framework supports senior leaders to embed activity at the heart of school ethos and policy, to create a culture which supports increased physical activity behaviours and more sustainable opportunities for pupils to be physically active before, during and beyond the school day.
The Essex pilot allows us to take an innovative ‘test and learn’ approach focusing on 2 key programme streams:
Recommendations and next steps
Our programme report including evaluation, recommendations and next steps will be released in January 2026.
Community of learning
More information about our communities of practice and how to engage will be published here.
Case studies
Case studies from our schools engaged to date will be shared here creating a library of good practice.
