Being Active: Children and Young People JSNA (2024)
Recommendations
- Take a whole-systems approach to physical activity, encouraging and supporting physical activity in all settings as appropriate.
- Better understand the challenges, barriers and opportunities that sports clubs (grassroot, academy, amateur and professional) and community organisations face to increase participation.
- Work with council departments and partners to ensure open and greenspaces are welcoming, safe and inclusive.
- Map the physical activity opportunities across Cheshire West and Chester; Consider developing a directory or series of directories to detail places parents and carers can take their child to be physically active.
- Support the health and social care workforce to be able to promote the importance of physical activity through the Making Every Contact Count for Physical Activity programme.
- Support schools to increase the opportunities for their pupils to be physically active.
- Encourage schools to review the curriculum and whether it is meeting the needs of the young people. Signposting to relevant Youth Sport Trust resources to make improvements.
- Consider how active children are in lessons and encourage schools to increase this where needed.
- Encourage schools to Increase activity outside lessons including break times, movement around the school, travel to and from school. Make schools aware of opportunities for training, e.g. play activities or working with parents to create a walking bus could be considered as effective ways to add activity.
- Explore how to use pupil voice to shape the physical activity offer, for example talk to the pupils who don’t enjoy physical activity as much as their peers to understand why they don’t engage as strongly and what they’d like to do.
- Encourage schools to work with their School Sport Partnership to ensure they access all the opportunities which will help you become a more active school.
- Work with schools to encourage and promote active travel to school, providing opportunities to incorporate walking, wheeling and cycling into daily routines, as well as improving road safety and air quality at the school gate.
- Consider how we can support sixth forms, colleges, universities to increase the opportunities for their pupils to be physically active.
- Take a family approach, supporting physical activity across the life course, for health and wellbeing benefits, positive role modelling and active ageing.
- Develop resources for use from pregnancy onwards to ensure a clear and consistent message on the importance of physical activity during the early years and beyond.
- Share consistent evidence-based guidance, resources and training to practitioners working with children and families to encourage physical activity.
- Use the data available to understand how best families, schools, GPs and communities can help their children and young people to be physically active.
- Use data to understand the physical activity levels of our children and young people, including barriers and opportunities which exist. Do this by:
- Increasing the number of children and young people who take part in the Active Lives survey to improve the data quality.
- Commission and inform the Koboca survey to understand why physical activity is important for our children and young people, the challenges for different cohorts (age/sex/geography) and opportunities to increase engagement.
- Consider how we can gather insight into the physical activity needs or our 16-19 population.
- Progress work to support women and girls to be more physically active, understanding the particular barriers females face across the life course.
- Increase and improve access to physical education, school sport and physical activity for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND).
- Use findings from ActiveCHILD research to support work with children during the early years; use this research to inform and continually evolve the workplan for children during the early years.
