Table 3 Community efforts to support healthy eating and drinking (HED) and physical activity (PA)
Type of initiative | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
Community based | Family Lifestyle Club (FLIC) | Eight-week targeted intervention for families with an overweight or obese child or those that would benefit from additional support identified through GP practices [32]. |
Girl Guides | Guides included working towards achieving health related badges such as the Healthy Heart and cookery badge. | |
Change 4 Life | “I think you know social marketing campaigns have helped you know, Change 4 Life etc.” Healthy Schools Advisor | |
School Food Support service | “We put [school] menu’s together. We work very closely with the county dietician. (…) We also talk to school councils. So we actually talk to the children themselves (…) I also talk to head teachers about improving lunch time experiences for children.” School Food Advisor | |
Holiday PA programmes | Held in two local leisure centres. | |
Adopt a school | “We offer them [a primary school] the leisure centre, for free of charge (…) because they haven’t got a sports hall, (…), so they’ll do activities (…), we’ve done football, cricket, basketball, badminton, tennis, we’re possibly looking at gymnastics. (…) I get a coach to coach the first term (…) I’ll go through what I’m going to do on my 6 weeks lesson plan [with the teacher], (…) and then the following six weeks, I clear off and I let the teacher then, carry it on (…) so the idea is not only are we providing professional coaching for the children (…) but we’re up-skilling the teachers.” Sports Development Officer | |
Wild Card | “If you live in the Charnwood Borough and you’re aged between 5 and 16 you can apply for a Wild Card. It gives you discounts in certain places it’s not just sport but (…) the cinema (…).” Parent, Most Deprived School | |
Dance classes such as cheerleading | ||
Girls’ football | ||
Real Planning | “[someone had] graffiti’d (…) swear words all over the walls so parents are refusing to take their kids there [park], (…) so that will be one of the things that the (…) [real planning leaders] are going to (…) to get cleaned off (…).”School Sports Coach | |
Family Based | Cook and Eat session | “(…) the lady from the Adult Learning Service she demonstrated cooking and preparing (…) a healthy meal which they [families] then had to do at the same time and that was brilliant (…). We have had parents who would never engage with school before who were like ‘oh yeah I’ll come and do that.’” Teaching Assistant, Medium Deprived school |
School based | Breakfast club | |
Life buses | The Life Bus came to schools and covered a range of issues relating to health including diet [33]. | |
Food detectives | “We did food detectives (…) some of the older children, were (…) coming into the hall when the younger ones were eating and looking what was in their lunch box. Well sort of delving through it or whatever (…) and checking that they’d got a healthy lunch box and then they were giving out stickers (…) eyes on what’s a healthy lunch | |
R: how do you think that worked? | ||
It worked well (…) they like that, because they like stickers” Teaching Assistant, Medium Deprived School | ||
Allotments/gardening club | ||
School fruit scheme | ||
School food policy | “We went down a route of saying ‘ok at break if they bring an unhealthy snack, they will be asked to have it at lunch time’ (…) ‘it’s saying to them that it’s ok to have it sometimes during the day and you know a moderate (…) amount of it but not all the time.” Deputy Head Teacher, Medium Deprived School | |
Afterschool clubs | ||
Physical Education | ||
Multi-sports | “It’s more sort of fun based stuff, I suppose, rather than sports specific”.Football Development Officer | |
Cycling proficiency lessons | ||
Trim Trail | Wooden climbing frame | |
Walk to school schemes | ||
Sports day | ||
Recreational times | ||
Little Leaders | “The year 6’s they lead it, so I’ve trained them to be leaders and then they lead it so (…) and it just gives them really good skills for sort of later on in life and like prepares them for sort of the little leadership courses they can do when they get to secondary school”. School Sports Coach | |
National healthy school status | “The Healthy Schools programme is like the umbrella really (…) that brings everything [health policies] together” | |
School Councils | Some schools had formed councils composed of “two [child] representatives from every year”, who met to “discuss what they would like to see promoted under healthy eating”. School Food Advisor |