An Enterprising Approach To Tackling Youth Inactivity
Tom Ravenscroft, Founder and managing director of Enabling Enterprise, explains the role that enterprise skills that can play in helping to tackle inactivity among primary school children… Increasingly, the government is sitting up and taking notice of the growing youth inactivity crisis in the UK. Children are not currently meeting the recommended guidelines for physical […]
Tom Ravenscroft, Founder and managing director of Enabling Enterprise, explains the role that enterprise skills that can play in helping to tackle inactivity among primary school children…
Increasingly, the government is sitting up and taking notice of the growing youth inactivity crisis in the UK. Children are not currently meeting the recommended guidelines for physical activity, whether it be due to a lack of available opportunities, lack of resources in their schools or negative attitudes towards sport and activity.
At Enabling Enterprise, we work to ensure that all students develop the enterprise skills to succeed in later life – being able to work with others, communicate effectively, problem solve and set their own goals. Many of these skills and attributes can be supported by greater levels of physical activity.
We’ve also found that children engage best with compelling projects. So, bringing these elements together – an idea was born.
A collaborative experience
Against a backdrop of rising youth inactivity levels we partnered with Virgin Active to create the Active Minds programme, developed to find ways to improve children’s enterprise skills through activeness. This forms part of Virgin Active’s Active Inspiration campaign, which is working with a number of partners to get 500,000 kids active over a five-year period.
The aim was to create an innovative 10-week primary and secondary school programme that looks for ways to take activeness into the classroom, and change the way activeness is addressed in schools and tied in with the curriculum. It was a collaborative experience, bringing together the creative fitness expertise of Virgin Active and our experience in developing enterprise skills.
The result is an exciting project which gives students the chance to really lead and take ownership of their own activeness. In our first pilot year across 2014-15, the programme was delivered in two terms, working with 25 schools and 1550 Year 5 students. We also committed to supporting the training of 64 teachers to deliver the programme. We introduced a diverse range of active movements that would inspire students to think creatively about how to get active.
Put off for life
If children are only given an hour a week to do a “PE” or ‘sport lesson’ and they do not enjoy the way it is taught, they can be put off activeness for life. Critically, the project worked because it gave students real ownership. Students loved generating their own ideas. The creativity they showed and the confidence with which they went about communicating the benefits of their routines was brilliant to see.
Students were given the chance to develop, test and encourage others to take part in their own fitness sessions. They then presented these sessions to their year group. It is really important for students to reflect on what they have learnt to ensure this stays with them over the long term.
The first results of the project showed that it was a real hit with teachers. No teacher gave less than a 4 out of 5 for the programme overall, but more importantly, we saw a tangible shift in students’ enterprise skills – particularly around staying positive when facing setbacks, leading others and working in a team.
The impact on students’ attitudes to activeness was also clear. As one teacher said, “The best part was children understanding the concept of what a fitness session was and actually completing some of them. As a result they then understood their goal of creating their own fitness session and what it would look like.”
We are excited about the impact the programme has had to date – encouraging children to not think that the prescribed subjects of ‘sport’ and ‘PE’ are the only ways to be physically active.
After such a successful pilot, we’re now working to roll this programme out more widely to thousands of students across England. We’re excited to see how it develops, as more students take the lead on their own fitness. What we love about Active Minds is that it is fundamentally by young people, for young people.
For more information about Enabling Enterprise, visit enablingenterprise.org or follow @enablingent
You can download four KS1/KS2 PE resources developed by Virgin Active from Teachwire’s resource archive via the following links: • Mini Mudder Adventure • Animal Dance • Adventure Circuits • Tig Tag Games
