Using Data-Driven Insights to Support Physical Activity in Primary Schools

: (Alternative Format Thesis)

Abstract

Physical activity is beneficial for children’s physical and mental wellbeing, their cognitive and social development, and has been shown to positively impact academic achievements. Children should be achieving 60-minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity on average per day, with 30-minutes of this being achieved within school hours. However, many children, globally and within the UK, are insufficiently active to achieve such targets and reap the benefits. Furthermore, there are inequalities in physical activity, both in and outside of school hours, which disadvantage girls, those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and minority ethnic groups. Schools are an appropriate place to positively impact children’s physical activity and tackle the associated inequalities. However, whilst some school-based interventions have shown promise, previous approaches have typically lacked meaningful and sustained improvements, particularly when considering the least active pupils. The availability and use of wearable technologies for physical activity behaviour change has continued to increase and has been introduced into educational spaces. Moki Health is a wearable technology company which has developed physical activity devices specifically for the use within educational spaces to enhance pupils’ physical activity by providing user-friendly and accessible data to school stakeholders in a timely manner. The aim of this thesis is to understand physical activity differences across UK primary schools and explore whether the use of such commercially available wearable technologies which measure physical activity, and the accompanying data insights, could be used alongside co-design to help address physical inactivity and the associated inequalities. Throughout this thesis, quantitative and qualitative methods were employed to address this aim, and an overview of the theoretical and methodological underpinnings is detailed in Chapter 3. Firstly, a secondary analysis of data from a commercially available wearable physical activity device demonstrated the large variability between English primary schools’ physical activity. Secondly, the visualisations created from this analysis were used within an online questionnaire to explore stakeholders’ perspectives and responses to such data-insights, with findings suggesting that such visualisations could play a role in changing perspectives regarding physical activity and the associated inequalities. The next step was to understand whether school-specific data visualisations could be used to inform teacher-led strategies to improve class pupils’ physical activity. Importantly, teachers understood and reflected on the data, using their knowledge of the school context to implement strategies, successfully increasing pupils’ activity with a desire to continue addressing physical activity and the associated inequalities. It was important to understand pupils’ experiences and perceptions of physical activity, the associated inequalities and use of wearable technologies in schools, therefore, focus groups were conducted. Among the key findings was that whilst pupils wanted to see their own data, and saw the value in teachers knowing, they were mindful that comparisons in class could lead to negative emotions for some. The final study aimed to explore whether data-insights could be used within whole-school approaches alongside co-design to
improve pupils’ physical activity. Together these findings suggest that wearable technologies, and data-driven insights could play a valuable role in highlighting physical activity and inequalities within and across schools, in turn supporting pupils’ physical activity if sufficiently integrated into changing whole-school systems and practices.

Date of Award	22 Jan 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Sponsors	South West Doctoral Training Partnership
Supervisor	Dylan Thompson (Supervisor), Oliver Peacock (Supervisor), Gareth Wiltshire (Supervisor) & Simon Sebire (Supervisor)