The school effect on children's school time physical activity: The PEACH Project
Introduction
A physically active lifestyle during childhood is associated with good mental and physical well-being (Chief Medical Officer, 2004). However up to 30% of UK children do not achieve 1 h of moderate intensity physical activity on most days as recommended for good health (Craig et al., 2009). Both individual and environmental variables have been established as influential in children's physical activity behaviours (Ferreira et al., 2006, Sallis et al., 2000), thus to further understand differences in children's physical activity choices the environments in which children spend time, as well as their individual characteristics, should be accounted for.
The school is an important environment for physical activity (Fein et al., 2004) where children spend a significant proportion of their time (Fox, 2004). Differences between schools may lead to a clustering effect with children attending one school found to be more or less active than children from another (Diez Roux, 2008). Clustering effects here may be compositional or contextual (Diez Roux, 2002). For instance, school composition (e.g. percentage of low socio-economic position (SEP) or ethnic minority students) may vary significantly between schools. Alternatively contextual effects could include differences in the school environment itself through (1) school policy (e.g. the duration of break periods), (2) the social climate (e.g. teacher encouragement) and (3) the physical environment (e.g. sporting facilities or campus size) (Wechsler et al., 2000).
Physical environmental factors within schools such as improvements to playground markings and increased provision of sporting equipment are effective in increasing physical activity (Ridgers et al., 2007, Verstraete et al., 2006) while a larger campus size and higher numbers of sporting facilities are associated with higher school-time physical activity (Cradock et al., 2007, Haug et al., 2008). Social environmental factors such as teacher and peer encouragement are also shown to positively relate to pupil physical activity participation (Birnbaum et al., 2005, Hohepa et al., 2006).
Environmental associations with physical activity may vary for boys and girls, for instance Cardon et al. (2008) found the presence of hard playground surfaces were associated with significantly higher break-time activity for boys, but were non-significant in girls' activity. A potentially important consideration given the consistently lower levels of physical activity reported by girls compared to boys (Van Der Horst et al., 2007).
Despite the potentially important effect of the school, this is rarely specifically investigated in analyses. This paper examines the effect of school clustering on children's school-time physical activity, accounting for both individual and school demographics, and investigates how the findings vary between boys and girls.
Section snippets
Methods
Year 6 pupils (aged 10–11 years) from a large UK city were invited to participate in the PEACH Project (Personal & Environmental Associations with Children's Health) (Page et al., 2009). Ethical approval for the study was provided by a University of Bristol Ethics Committee.
Results
Results from model 1 show a statistically significant difference in physical activity between schools (p < 0.001) prior to adjusting for individual or school variables, with 14.5% of the total variance in children's school-time physical activity attributable to differences between schools (Table 3).
When individual and school variables were entered separately into the initial model (Table 2) boys were found to be significantly more active than girls (p < 0.001) and gender explained the greatest
Discussion
The aim of this research was to investigate whether children's school-time physical activity is associated with the school they attend. Results identified a significant school effect explaining 14.5% of the variation in pupils' school-time physical activity.
Consistent with previous research boys were significantly (p < 0.001) more active than girls (Van Der Horst et al., 2007). In additional greater variability in school-time physical activity was seen between boys than between girls. The
Conclusion
Within a large UK city children's school-time physical activity varied according to the primary school they attend even after accounting for individual demographic and the school compositional factors and this effect varied significantly by gender. Further investigation of the school environment and the factors that may explain the between school differences is necessary, preferable using a larger number of schools from more varied locations. Equivalent research in secondary schools is also
Role of the funding sources
The authors declare that the funding sources (National Prevention Research Initiative and World Cancer Research Fund) have had no input into the study design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data, in the writing of the report or the decision to submit the paper for publication.
Conflict of interest statement
None.
Acknowledgments
The authors are very grateful to the participating schools, pupils and their families who gave up their time for the study. We would also like to acknowledge all members of the PEACH Project team not listed as co-authors. This work was supported by the National Prevention Research Initiative (Grant no: G0501311) and the World Cancer Research Fund.
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