Active Gloucestershire

 

About 

Active Gloucestershire is an independent charity with a vision for everyone in Gloucestershire to be active everyday.

We have a key responsibility for increasing physical activity levels across Gloucestershire and are an agent of change, uniting individuals and a huge range of national policy makers and organisations around one of the greatest challenges facing our society today: inactivity.

We want to inspire, connect and enable people in Gloucestershire to get active in a way that works for them, and we want to support those who can help others move more, like activity providers, sports clubs and key partners in the county. We do this through we can move – Gloucestershire’s social movement that brings people together from across the sports and physical activity sector, public sector of voluntary and community sector.

We all work together to help people benefit from a more active lifestyle.

Do you support someone to get active? Join the we can move movement by becoming a we can move changemaker and access free advice, guidance, resources and more.

Would you like to become more physically active? Take a look at our website and find helpful tips, challenges and campaigns to help you get started on your active journey.

www.wecanmove.net

The Daily Mile

Below you'll find a great new resource from The Daily Mile™ to help your school stay active.  

We know the start of a new term can be challenging – especially right now – so please get in touch if you need any additional help or support.

What is The Daily Mile?

The Daily Mile is a fully inclusive, simple initiative which improves the physical and mental health and wellbeing of children. As a result of regular participation children are physically fitter, more focused in the classroom, more confident and more resilient. Children should be active for 30 minutes in school every day, by participating in the Daily Mile they easily achieve 15 minutes.

It may not always be possible to get outside so identifying an alternative indoor activity is a good idea to make sure being active is another routine part of the school day. The Daily Mile Foundation highlight that if children run at least three times a week, for four weeks they will see a significant positive progression in their fitness levels.

Getting started

It is recommended that the Daily Mile is introduced as a whole school initiative, this ensures children can continue to participate as they move through the school years or as teaching staff change. In the first instance it can be introduced with a class or whole key stage, allowing for trial and error before rolling out to the rest of the school.

How can my school get involved?

To take part, aim to achieve 100 days of doing The Daily Mile. Try to complete your Daily Mile 3 – 5 times a week to move closer towards achieving a new destination sticker and certificate for your school! 

Sign up to receive:

• A laminated Daily Mile Destinations map;
• School markers to track your classes’ movement;
• Individual class passports with destination stickers;
• A cross-curricular fact sheet to aid your children's learning;
• A ‘How to’ guide;
• An assembly PowerPoint and video;
• Daily Mile Destination school certificates;
• Fun facts for each destination to aid children's learning.  

The Daily Mile™ initiative                                                   

It’s a profoundly simple, free programme that gets children walking, jogging or running for 15 minutes each day.

The Daily Mile is easy to implement and is great fun for both pupils and teachers with over 2,000 pupils in Gloucestershire already taking part! Teachers report that children concentrate better in class and come back from their Daily Mile refreshed and ready to learn, whilst parents comment that their children are eating and sleeping better.

To encourage more schools to get involved in The Daily Mile, Active Gloucestershire has launched “Old Spot’s European Trot” to all 246 primary schools in Gloucestershire. This is a fun, free, easy to use and sustainable challenge involving the whole school during the summer term.

You can download your sign up form and all supportive information by clicking the downloadable links on the left hand side of this page, or simply email our Head of Education, Tom Hall for more information.

To see how Churchdown Village Junior School, Gloucestershire has seen whole school benefit from The Daily Mile initiative watch here.

Dr Seymour, Clinical Chair at NHS Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), said:

“The Daily Mile is a great initiative, and I wholeheartedly encourage primary schools to participate. Running or walking a mile each day not only offers physical and mental health benefits, but is also great fun for both children and teachers. Children’s lifestyles have become increasingly sedentary in recent years, and this takes its toll on their physical and mental wellbeing. The Daily Mile is a simple, accessible and enjoyable initiative which provides massive public health benefits and protects the future health of the county’s young people. We are pleased to be working with health partners to introduce this initiative across Gloucestershire.”

 

Using the Daily Mile towards your GHLL Healthy Schools / Mental Health Champions Award

The Daily Mile as an intervention

The GHLL interventions ask schools to identify a targeted group, usually a group which are most vulnerable or in most need of the interventions. For the Daily Mile you may wish to identify your target group as those children who do not take part in any other form of physical activity outside of the statutory PE curriculum i.e. they do not attend any physical activity clubs provided by the school (you may also wish to survey children to find out if they attend any physical activity clubs outside of school).

For example, a primary school may have 120 pupils in Key Stage Two, all of whom will participate in the Daily Mile but you may identify 43 children in KS2 who do not participate in any physical activity outside of the PE curriculum.

Staff can be included in the intervention if appropriate, this may be more suitable in a Mental Health capacity to show the benefits of staff having time out of the classroom and the health benefits of being more physically active/outside/ with other staff.

Measuring progress and significant progress – physical health

For your GHLL award you will need to demonstrate how pupils have made progress against the outcome. In the list of outcomes provided by GHLL there is a specific outcome for the Daily Mile.

Healthier behaviour outcome:

‘Increase in number of children and young people who participate in The Daily Mile/ Active 15 minutes’

At a basic level this can be an easy outcome to achieve. If children weren’t doing the Daily Mile before and you then introduce it to the whole school or Key Stage then they will all be achieving the outcome.

However, you may wish to develop this further to look at pupils who have made significant progress. On a physical level you could ask pupils to record and report at the start of the intervention how far they manage to walk or jog in the 15 minutes they spend doing the Daily Mile. That might be laps of the playground or however you’ve defined the Daily Mile circuit. When you come to do your final measure (four weeks is the recommended amount of time to see progression) you can ask pupils to record how far they now can cover in the 15 minutes. Pupils who have increased the distance they cover (e.g. they can now do six laps of the playground instead of four) could be deemed as having made significant progress.

 

Use as a Mental Health Intervention

The Daily Mile outcome has the Mental Health (MH) symbol alongside it which shows it can be used as a Mental Health intervention. However, it cannot be used as a Mental Health intervention if you are only measuring progress in terms of physical activity, as in the section above. To use the Daily Mile as a Mental Health intervention would require you to demonstrate how it had impacted on children’s emotional and mental state.

This is a very sound use for The Daily Mile as it has significant mental health benefits associated with it. This could be done by asking children to state (verbally or in written form) what benefit they feel the Daily Mile has been to them. Pupils who only mention physical health benefits would not have achieved the Mental Health part of this outcome, however children that refer to other benefits could be deemed to have made progress.

Those benefits could include:

• It gives the child time to talk to someone about things that are worrying them;
• If helps them calm down when feeling uptight;
• It helps them to concentrate during lessons;
• It helps to clear their head when they’ve been working hard;
• It makes the child feel happier when they're feeling sad;
• It helps them take notice of the environment around them;
• It gives them time to talk to others in their class/school that they wouldn’t usually talk to.

Additional Questions:

1. How does the Daily Mile make you feel?
2. Do you feel any different after you have finished your Daily Mile? If so in what way?

In your impact statement on the GHLL planning and reporting tool you can also include qualitative data which may be quotes from children or observations from staff.

Please find below a guide for completing the intervention report, this includes examples but should adjusted to represent the specific intervention carried out in your school. Hopefully the above guidance has been useful in helping you to plan, run and report your interventions but if you have any queries or get stuck on anything then please do not hesitate to contact your assigned GHLL Lead Teacher who will be happy to assist.

Click here to download Example of Intervention Report

 

The Daily Mile Destinations

The Daily Mile has been a useful activity for schools during the pandemic, as it allows children and staff to get outdoors while socially distancing. We hope the new Daily Mile Destinations resource can help get children moving more in school and bring extra fun and learning to the school day.

Travel the Great Wall of China, soak up the spray at Niagara Falls, stand in awe as the sun rises over the pyramids of Giza and visit Chile’s Easter Island!

Whatever your journey looks like this year, let The Daily Mile Destinations help you along the way, keeping your pupils fit, focused and flourishing – the journey is in your hands.

 

Activity on Referral

 

Activity on referral within schools is a supportive programme that links young people to local, community-based activities that we know will support their mental health. It is aimed at students experiencing mild to moderate mental health issues in school, where being active would greatly support their wellbeing.

Active Gloucestershire offer a variety of activities, run by trusted providers who will support a young person to take part in an activity. These sessions are part of regular clubs and activity programmes with trained coaches delivering fun and inclusive sessions, encouraging friendship and helping promote a positive frame of mind. Our ethos is that exercise should be fun and a choice, not a chore.

Sessions are free for the first 12 weeks but following this the young person can choose to stay with the activity provider and sign up to become a paying member.

To find out more click here or contact us via the email addresses below:

Lisa - lisakankowski@activegloucestershire.org

Nicky - nickyharverson@activegloucestershire.org

 

Resources

Please find attached and below some resources that we have recently distributed to all schools via school games organiser/local school sport networks.

Desk to Daily Mile

School Games Home Learning Pack

Daily Mile New Year Bingo Certificate

The Daily Mile Bingo 

Wellbeing Boosting Home Challenges