 Hello everyone my name is Ross McGill and I hope you are well. Thank you for joining me in this webinar how active learning supports cognition in our primary peoples. A lot of you have signed up from lots of different places across the world and this has also been broadcast live on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube so if you're logged in to those devices then you will be able to leave some comments on the live stream which would be great and we'll pin some of your questions to our participants and you'll see on the holding slide that I am delighted to be joined by Professor Lauren Shearer and John Smedley who are introduced shortly. Just before we get into the details if I just give you a little demographic map of where everyone is tuning in so we've got people tuning in from lots and lots of different places which is always very very exciting and so there's a world map and I believe I've got someone watching live from New Zealand so if that's the case please do say hello in the chat box. If we close in to where we are broadcasting from here in England you'll see lots of people across the country across the UK tuning in to find out more about research on cognition and active learning and to find some practical solutions for our classrooms and if you're interested in a bit more just kind of general statistics of people tuning in so we had 200 people sign up and there'll be people watching live just off chance on all those different channels and so without further ado I'm just going to come off the slides because we're going to have just a general chat about cognition, active learning, let me just put that back on there, just to kind of go through if you're in the right place so we're here on a webinar of Teach Active. I'm going to introduce our people presenting in a moment you'll see them pop up on the screen and again as that mentioned just in terms of kind online etiquette you'll be able to leave a comment in the chat box and we'll pin your question on the screen so that everybody can see what you've asked and we'll ask our people presenting to respond but a bit of a kind of talking heads today rather than show some slides and at the very end of our session we're going to do a little demonstration on the Brilliant Tool Teach Active which I've had the pleasure of working with for a number of months now looking at their solutions that they provide to our primary teachers in terms of lesson planning so without further ado I'm going to ask Professor Lauren Sheeran and John to join me so here they come I'm going to ask them each to take a moment just to introduce themselves to everybody watching and tell us what you do so let's start with Lauren how are you Lauren? Oh hi Ross I'm very well thank you my pleasure to be here hello everyone always seems quite surreal to think that many people are behind the screen but it's really my pleasure to be here and thank you so much to Ross for the invitation. Thank you Lauren and to John could you say hello to everyone John? Yeah good evening everyone and thanks for joining us I've stayed in the office today some of you may be able to see so joining you from Chester in the UK and yeah delighted to be working with you all and yeah talking about something which is very dear to my heart. Now John won't mention it but I will but a recently awarded winning organization John isn't that right? Yeah thank you I mean in yeah so this year we've been looking off to have the education resource award and the better award for teaching learning and well-being as well so yeah it's nice to be recognized for those thank you. Now we'll come back to teach active but Lauren can I just ask you to just describe your day-to-day role I know you'll have lots of things going on at Loughborough but just a general introduction into your background and and then we'll slowly move into your research which is fascinating. Yeah sure so as Ross said my name is Lauren Sherar I'm a professor of physical activity and public health at Loughborough University I guess for some of you international people it is right in the middle we're amongst lots of fields in the Midlands in the middle of the UK our university is known for sport I think especially those of you that are within the UK will probably recognize it and it's kind of reputation within the sporting field we're also very kind of knowledgeable and have lots of expertise around how physical activity relates to health which is kind of where my area of expertise comes from so as well as being a professor of physical activity and public health I'm also the associate dean for teaching fairly newly appointed August one was when I started so in that it's slightly different I guess for lots of your background backgrounds but does overlay in the fact that I'm kind of responsible for high standards of teaching good student experience but within the university setting. My general research area really relates to public health so I'm interested in how we can get a nation to move more sit less for their health whether that be physical health mental health or a little bit of the focus of this webinar when it relates to academic achievement and also cognition so while I do work across the lifespan my main focus area is within children and young people and certainly that's where my passion lies and I've recently done some work while over the last probably five years around active learning and how that could be used as an intervention for schools. Thank you Lauren very fascinating and I'll encourage everyone watching to post some questions for Lauren there's an opportunity to pick her brains and her expertise and we'll be digging into the details of some of her insights shortly. John I'm going to bring you in now John could you just give us a little bit more in terms of your background your life as a teacher how you established TeachActive? Of course yeah so I was a teacher for 18 years I've taught primary and secondary but you see I certainly mainly primary school I was a local authority advisor on the will for any of you who know the will hence my love of getting children active and then I went back into school and I was a deputy head for seven years and then left six years ago I always said I did love my job but I'm very lucky and very fortunate in my role now I mean TeachActive do two things yes we have the resource which you know we'll talk a little bit about later on but mainly I work with lots of schools and have done over the last six years about the the opportunities to make the school day more active about why physical activity is so important in particular perhaps now more than ever and actually about the links as Lauren said about to the wider benefits and also including you know academic achievement within that as well as the wider benefits to the whole child so yeah very lucky enough to do that and that takes up the most of my role at the moment keeps you busy now before John before you and I work together I'll be honest the word active learning I didn't use in my vocabulary I don't know if that was because I wasn't a primary specialist or I wasn't a PE teacher I'm not quite sure but can I just ask you yet a question to both you could I give ask for a simple definition of what is active learning so let's start with Lauren how would you define active learning it's interesting Ross because even within the more kind of academic research literature there are so many terms that are used and they differ for example between North America and how they would be called in Europe one common term it actually which I quite like is movement integration because I think that's quite a kind of a flexible holistic term because actually active learning can be lots of different things so it could be delivering a whole lesson actively it could be delivering a lesson outside for example where there's lots of light activity there could be just breaks in seated learning so this could be with curricula or outside of curricula so really there's lots of different ways of delivering learning through active means or through movement and these could be at a vigorous intensity and be very short or they could be over a longer duration and be more kind of light intensity activity they could be with curricula with learning or even without where they kind of have the energizer breaks or the shakeup breaks which I think lots of schools are probably quite familiar with so I think in general I kind of use the word movement integration as well as part of that I guess one thing that's on the periphery of active learning is actually changing the environment of a classroom to promote activity and this could often just be standing which is a form of activity so something that's hit the media quite a lot is the use of standing desks I'm standing at my standing desk at the moment so that's another alternative as well. It's hard to see that if you are standing or sitting but yeah that's interesting that you pointed out right great now there's the academic version John as a teacher could you give us your definition of what active learning means to you? Yeah funny enough today I've been writing a keynote conference a keynote speech and I've written it's called active learning it's called physically active learning it's called movement integration so whichever one of those I mean for me exactly it's just about getting children up and about bums off seats and actually thinking for example with our maths and our English you know do we have to be sat down to learn those subjects or can we take learning can we take it outside can we take it to the gym in the hall actually can we just be in the classroom but again as we've said just in integrating some movement into it and of course we'll explore why we would want to do that and the benefits are but simply bums off seats non sedentary behavior and getting children up and about fantastic now Laura I'd like to talk to you about your research and your expertise a little bit more the first question I've got for you is the kind of role that active learning plays in supporting children's health and well-being we all know that active learning and looking after yourself is important I guess it's a dialogue we are talking about a lot more than we were maybe a decade ago but could you just give us a few insights few recommendations some research headlines please yeah sure I think the challenge you always get when you ask an academic this is that often the research is not completely conclusive on anything and I think that's just the reality there's lots of different ways of measuring lots of different populations and we often don't get the same results when we measure twice in the same population let alone in different populations but what we have shown is that there's really good evidence to suggest that active learning as one might expect increases physical activity and also decreases time spent sitting within the classroom so usually if the intervention for example is delivered well we absolutely see that and we have very good robust measures of measuring that for example using device such as movement trackers to measure that so with that if we we can believe that we can increase physical activity and decrease sitting time we have a host of evidence which suggests that if we can increase physical activity for example by 10 15 minutes per day of children then we can extrapolate that out and we can know there can be a whole host of benefits whether they be physical so this could be cardiometabolic health benefits such as blood pressure lipids glucose control it could be around muscular strength fitness bone development but also those really important kind of mental health benefits so for example decreasing stress and anxiety there's a lot of strong evidence which suggests that the more active a child is the better those are and then there's also those kind of ones around increased in confidence which we absolutely see in the children and adolescent population so while we don't necessarily have very good evidence to suggest that active lessons actually leads to those physical and mental health benefits we do have lots of good evidence to suggest that they actually increase physical activity decrease sedentary behavior and we know that those increase in physical activity will have those knock-on benefits especially if they're done over a prolonged period of time sure now you're I've looked at some of your research that you shared with me and you looked at the kind of patterns of UK children particularly over the last decade and I know you've probably got some insights into what happened during the pandemic and prior to the pandemic you know using mobile devices kids exercising less general obesity stats and things but could you give us a broad I know it's a really trying to develop my own understanding of academic research but it's a very poor question to an academic but could you give us a broad overview of some of your insights yes yes sure Ross so we know we've got reasonable surveillance data and I think we could be doing better within the UK about how we measure our whole population our whole child and young people population in terms of physical activity but we do have some some good data to suggest that the physical activity levels of children and young people have gone down so the most recent data which I've got to always read this I always forget the name of the survey but it's basically Sport England survey which has active lights children and young people survey that's one of our most recent data it is self-reported so with that comes a little bit of limitations there's some probably some self-report bias that comes in here but that's our most recent data and what that suggests is pre pandemic that about 18 percent of children and young people were meeting physical activity guidelines and just as a reminder physical activity guidelines is meet is for our children on average to be achieving at least 60 minutes of physical activity per day throughout the whole week 18 percent so only 18 percent there was a slight gender difference with about 20 percent of boys meeting physical activity guidelines compared to about 14 percent of girls and we quite often see that gender difference with girls being less active than boys at every age through children through childhood and adolescence now one thing I do want to stress is that while we do see that a large percent of the school day in traditional schools about 70 percent of the school day is spent sitting we actually don't believe that that has changed over time so we don't believe that actually schools are less active or promoting more sitting than they were previously but what we do believe is there's been an erosion of lifestyle embedded physical activity outside of the classroom and I think you could probably all have experienced this yourselves or can probably reflect on maybe your own childhood versus maybe some of your students or maybe some of your children's childhood now so we have less opportunities for active commuting there's concerns around perceived safety of our children roaming further away there's the absolute kind of monopoly that we've had with screens in our children's house which means that it's actually much more acceptable and much more appealing for children to sit for very long periods of time outside of school I'm also aware of a piece of research where break and lunchtime is reduced in our English state schools over the last decade also absolutely and there has been some pressures on physical education which obviously although that's not the primary purpose is a good source of physical activity throughout the school day I'm going to bring John back in thank you Lauren. John can you based on all some of the information that Lauren's been sharing with us what does teachers and schools tell you about the kind of state of the nation with children's mental health and well-being and some of the things that are trying to do to resolve some of these issues well interestingly I think with regards to Covid when when schools and teachers began to return one of the questions that we asked them as what are you most worried about with children returning to school and of course there was probably a long list but the top three things were gaps in children's attainment gaps in learning which you can understand because obviously schools were closed for a long period of time but the second thing was lack of activity teachers really noticing that and that might be that they're noticing it physically because children are coming back and perhaps overweight or they've just noticed that in terms of talking to the children and knowing what they've perhaps got up to and then the third one was about anxiety and mental and emotional well-being of their children and of course that's again where we can think in terms of making the school day more active and getting away from this 70% of perhaps sedentary behaviour is can we address gaps in learning and have the children active and perhaps meet some of those emotional and mental kind of things that we need to by doing by doing something such as active learning but yeah certainly we know that the world in itself is is more sedentary and come back to teach active in a bit more detail but part of your resources that you provide teachers is to promote active learning in English and maths particularly isn't it yeah I think rather than asking teachers sometimes to do more more more you know sometimes as teachers we feel that the whole problems of the nation could be upon us whether that's whatever issues it may be and we know that schools have to try and help children to achieve at least 30 minutes of that 60 minutes a day so rather than asking them to do more which can sometimes be it can seem too much or unsustainable or there isn't time then actually just by embedding it into what they're already doing and say well actually take what you're already doing but introduce movement then perhaps that can be a real win for the teacher and a win for the children as well thank you John Lauren in part of your paper that you shared with me and we'll probably find some links to share when we circulate the resources with people watching but you talk some you mentioned something about the critical window those first 10 years could you elaborate and tell us what that means specifically yeah absolutely and there's certainly a lot of evidence a lot of rationale for focusing and I would say it's the first 10 years but actually I would say it's probably the first 18 years of life which are really important and one of the main reasons is that we know that physical inactivity so those children that are not meeting physical activity guidelines tracks really well into adulthood so if we have a child that's inactive they are very unlikely to become an active adult if you think about the amount of years we have in adulthood that will lead to increased cardiovascular disease and lots of other kind of problems for the physical health of the individual but also a burden on the NHS system what we do see is that those that are physically active are more likely they're not absolutely going to be we obviously know lots of children that were active as children and maybe aren't active as an adult but they're more likely to become active adults so if we can install those positive behaviours during childhood or under adolescence then they are more likely to be active adults the other thing regarding the critical window is that there's something called physical literacy so there's a lot of evidence to suggest that if there's a critical window by which we need to teach children certain skills and certain motor control activities and if we do that they have lots of tools in their toolbox by which they can then be active as adolescents but also active as adults so for example there are certain motor control skills that you need to be able to pick up a tennis racket as an adult and play tennis for example so it kind of increases your options the last thing about the critical window is in terms of health there are certain critical periods where physical activity is absolutely essential so if for example we're talking about active lessons and we're talking about vigorous activity where they're jumping up and down that can actually have benefits to bone health and we know that about 80 to 90 percent of all bone is laid at down during adolescence so if you miss that critical period in terms of physical activity that can actually have impacts for that individual for the long term Warren I know that teachers watching particularly school leaders and they will say policymakers will be waiting to hear where schools that are particularly promoting active learning get better outcomes and often we know outcomes is defined as test schools are you aware of any research or any people that you work with where when they do XYZ this you know I know John will bring John in because he does have evidence but have you got any academic references that you could talk about yeah I can talk a little bit about systematic reviews and systematic reviews are where someone has gone and reviewed all the literature and I can talk maybe about specific papers so to talk about one pioneer in the field his name is Charles or Chuck Hillman and he's from the United States and actually he was the one that really pioneered the kind of association generally between physical activity and cognition and this really does lend itself to active learning and cognition so what he showed is that if you run a child for example on a treadmill for a set period of time and then you get them to do some form of cognitive skill test afterwards they tend to perform better and the laypersons because I'm not a cognitive researcher kind of explanation about this is that there's an increased blood flow to the brain and that oxygenation of the brain actually leads to kind of very acute benefits in terms of of learning and particular in terms of attention on tasks so the time spent on task is enhanced straight after you've done particularly moderate to vigorous physical activity so you can absolutely see how this can relate to active lessons because if you have a short break and then even if you seat the child back down and get them to do for example a maths task they should be able to concentrate better he also did some other research which suggests that over a period of time so the kind of chronic influences is there might actually be prolonged benefits in terms of cognition and this relates predominantly to the increased blood flow but actually this can lead to changes in the structure of the brain so this can be the changes from the white and gray matters of the ratio but also between synapses in the brain so there is probably more limited evidence but some to suggest that they could actually be this kind of longed benefit I read an interesting research paper last week where they tested people having naps between six and 30 minutes and it helped that cognitive offloader suppose the expression and it supported their memory retention I found that a great excuse to have a nap after you've done a bit of exercise I was going to say I do think I need an excuse but not when we get a bit older it's pretty easy but for children perhaps it's challenges to build it into the rhythm of school life John could you have you got any examples of schools that you work with who are that question opposed to Lauren earlier you know when we brutally use that term outcomes and we want test scores evidence of schools I know we can maybe talk about Ben Levenson's school that we work talking about in the past but schools that are doing great things physically that are getting great outcomes define as attendance behavior exclusions not just test scores what have you got yeah I mean and that's exactly it because I think that a lot of the time you know it's teachers I love listening to Loven and I love looking at the research into these things as well but often equally I like to listen to teachers who will tell me okay I'm on the shop floor and this is the difference that I've seen on a day-to-day basis with my children and whether that be with behavior with attendance with attitudes with an enjoyment of learning and that's why we came into teaching isn't it and we know the attitudes are then strongly linked to attainment and we're going to be more open and accessible to those things we you know and so we work with over a thousand schools in the UK we're in 10 other international countries so if I was to look at a few I could tell you you know a holy family school in in Surrey the head teacher there Steve Tyndall fantastic you know and his staff there and their maths results went from national averages to the top 2% of maths results nationwide and if you asked him why he would say active learning of course his great staff his great policies is you know the many other things that go on but active learning and and the importance of physical activity that school is it has been a real key to that you mentioned Ben Levenson of course primary school of the year Ben was awarded the OBE as well and again once again someone who will talk about academic achievement Gladys Street in Liverpool I talk about them their maths results went up but 21% increase within 12 months Duckmont and primary school in Chesterfield where their grammar for children achieving there was went up from again national averages and up to 98% which again was probably inconceivable to them at the start but they've done it through this approach of either whole class active lessons or through doing it with interventions as well and you know if I talk about Steve Tyndall there I'll talk about a group of girls who and often we hear about boys but a group of girls who wouldn't weren't going to achieve who felt that they couldn't do it and actually by bringing their self-esteem and their confidence and then attainment followed as well so it's great to hear it as well as the research and as well as the background that we know with the links with cognition is that teachers reporting actually we do this in our school and it makes a difference and then committing to doing it for the long term as well which I think the proof is in the pudding now it falls off course yeah and we'll come back to some of your teach active solutions in a moment John and so just for a reminder for people watching we're in a webinar with Professor Lauren Shearer and John Smedley of Teach Active looking at how active learning supports cognition in primary peoples if you're watching on Facebook or Twitter you can leave a comment and we'll pose the question to our guests and we will share we've got one or two slides we're going to do a little demo of Teach Active later on in about 10 to 15 minutes or so and we'll circulate the recording with all participants and Lauren I want to come back to this question in terms of what what would be what the what are the recommendations from your research in academic circles of what schools can do to help break the cycle or to help shape a positive cycle yeah I think probably the biggest recommendation is to take a whole school approach if possible there's been quite a lot of work in the past for people to come in and do something that's very specific but I think if it can be a whole school approach which engages all people particularly senior leaders within within a school but also where possible I know it's hard parents as well so I think that if there can be a plan by which you can engage physical activity throughout the culture and the whole day I think that's more more sustainable and it has been shown to be more effective so examples of how that can be done I do think I know I'm on this webinar but I'm fully converted to that active lessons is a really really important strategy I think that it can be something that can just be embedded within the culture of learning and it's something that actually hopefully would then be translated through to when a person when a child gets to be an adult and is in the workplace that they will actually demand that they can't sit for eight hours per day but they actually can learn and perform in slightly different ways such as walking meetings other ways is things like the daily mile that's called a lot of daily mile he's a pro at it now and there were lots of different I mean the daily miles got a great name but there's lots of other providers and there's the kids run free which do marathon kids slightly different version to the daily mile but is actually promoted through the lunch time and break times rather than during the class time but again there's lots of developments in this area with goal setting rewards celebration assemblies which really helps to make these are really kind of fun and can be an absolutely embedded kind of part of the active day I think the other things that are really important is trying to promote active active transport to and from school and I think again that teaches a child that physical activity is not just physical education it's not just sport but it's how we live our lives and then also I think having teachers role model to model it so we've been in schools that have done the act the daily mile and it is much much more effective if the teachers are participating too so it's not something that the children are doing and to be honest physical activity levels are lower across the board our adults are less active than our children so if we can get the staff being more active throughout their working day then I think the whole school is better all those times in my career when I should have gone up at the front of assembly to do a press up or the hundred meters on sports day I should have been a true role model let me bring John back in John did you do the hundred meter sprint in front of your children at school I think I probably did probably against other teachers in particular a guy called Chris who yeah we get very competitive yeah without a doubt or we're certainly when we did the daily mile all the staff would do would do it and join in as well fantastic John I want to ask teach active for people watching for the first time and I'm not sure what teach active is could you just give us a general overview later on we're going to have a little play inside or look at the software later but can you just give a general over we've got our little slide I can put up here for people to see let me just put them yes of course as you're being that I'll just explain so probably when I was a p-advisor and a deputy head what I did do is devised a file of ideas to support the staff within my school and the schools that I was working in and it had such a positive response in terms of it was part of an off-stead sharing a good practice paper it was part of a dfv international project and what we decided to do is actually turn this from a file of 70 ideas into the online resource that we have today so there is three and a half thousand lesson plans written by maths and English experts consultants about how we deliver the maths in the English curriculum but through physical activity all areas of maths reading of writing and simply giving teachers lots of ideas all the lesson plans are there all the resources are there so yeah we're supporting the workload agenda and we're actually saying to teachers actually this is fun this is enjoyable this is going to help academic achievement and so many more benefits but also it's going to save you hours of planning time as well so it just really allows what we're talking about perhaps come to life and be sustainable within many schools now you um you were you were existing before the pandemic obviously you've had a huge spike in people accessing resources through natural having to work from home etc but obviously with the increased agenda of mental health and physical learning you've seen a real spike in how people are using your resources you've obviously created a lot more materials and are slowly branching out just tell us uh kind of generally you know where people are using this across the country uh overseas your your kind of upcoming plans and we'll look at the software a little bit later on okay we we do support schools all over the the UK um you did a map at the start of this and if we we did that you know we're in certainly every single county and about one just over a thousand schools now um how do they use it they use it whole class um but also they use it as an intervention program as well um certainly for for maths and then for the English yeah again whole class interventions guided reading um with regards to sessions like that as well um we have had more and more schools come on I think that um certainly the DFE of vast schools to prioritize physical activity um for many of the reasons that we're talking about today about those bigger and wider benefits um and I just think that with perhaps some schools and perhaps as all have realized over over the past 18 months the importance of physical activity to our emotional and our mental well-being um as well as many other things so uh yeah we've had lots of other schools come on board great now we'll we'll look at the software a little bit later I'm going to bring Lauren in just for a couple more questions um I'm thinking of um those teachers head teachers who think right I don't have resources I don't have the funding to buy software like yourself John teach active maybe you want to mention the sports funding things that are available to Lauren perhaps people that are saying they're busy league table pressure off-stead uh I don't have time to take kids out you know all that perception and myths about the benefits of physical learning versus the traditional maths English um lots of questions there and to you Lauren first of all um what would be your recommendations for people that are struggling to balance that accountability side um you know the external pressures to try and reap those benefits back in their schools for their young people yeah I think it's a really good uh question Ross I think we did um a study which looked at the implementation of um physically active learning over a whole school year and I think one of the biggest challenges for teachers was that kind of external the perception that externals would think they'd lost control of the class for example or they weren't taking the kind of teaching of their of their students seriously so I think there's a couple of things that could be done for that I think absolutely getting um senior leaders support and trying to increase the awareness for the benefits of the other teachers and students as well but so there's kind of a shared understanding of the benefits but also what the aims are of active lessons because they are absolutely to enhance um the kind of academic outcomes but also the experiences that the people's have while learning so as John mentioned there's really good evidence to suggest the enjoyment of learning increases but also there's less disruption amongst key um individuals and particularly those that are more at risk for not performing while in the classroom so I think that's one thing and I think the other one is communicating to parents so really showing them the benefits um I think there's um BBC Super Movers had a campaign which really kind of did quite a good job of raising awareness with parents about the kind of importance of of active learning it's in the media all the time about the sitting pandemic that we have so I think that we're actually is a good time to be saying to parents look if you actually hear that your children have been coming back with a new teacher perhaps um and have been having a lot of fun being active then that is actually a good thing we're still taking it seriously this is kind of just a slightly different way of delivering the same high quality teaching that we have always done so I think communication back to parents is really really important thank you and John in terms of I guess an English perspective because we know we've got people watching from other parts of the world but maybe there's a solution for them but um how could how could schools head teachers access some funding to purchase physical active learning in your case teach active and will show people what that looks like shortly but what's your what's your wisdom there um well I'd echo everything that Lawrence just said as well not just to not answer your question in terms of the whole school buying and you know teachers are brilliant and teachers often can do this with their own fantastic ideas they you know they know their their class they know their children and they're so so creative um but we do know that teachers are very very busy so that's the solution of teach active if schools want to look at it and if so um you know we are lucky at the moment that we do have p in sport funding um so every school in England and some of our international friends won't get this but they may have their own version but the p in sport funding allows every school in England to get 16 000 pounds per year plus 10 pounds for people there's a criteria of five things and the first thing is about getting children to achieve the 60 minutes of activity a day the second one is about raising whole school approve improvement and achievement through this as well so certainly we can do that and schools can use that money in order to fund teach active uh and a license that comes with free trading of free cpd so that we launch into your school because one thing that's really important to us is that we don't just buy a resource and it doesn't get used but actually that teachers exactly what we've referred to there that teachers understand the why um the better why would i want to do this what are the benefits what of all the schools seen this we know what teachers buy in for different reasons so we can look at enjoyment we can look at activity data we can look at academic success um and then we allow you know to put that in so the schools can get maximum impact as well so um hopefully good use of money because that's really important and of course they can or we'll talk about the teach active shortly but people can log in have a play for free can't they and play with around with your resources they can and they go to the website you know all i say is you can go on a free trial and you can get access to some games and and play and have some fun with them um but you can also on there just book a one-to-one demo with myself it's 15 minutes and it just allows teachers and school leaders to make a well informed decision because you know i'm not going to sell you anything i'm just going to show it you and see i'll put those links in in the chat box lauren i've got a question for you um uh you know research looking at patterns of things what what are your immediate concerns with physical learning i know you know we talked about the kind of uh initial kind of 10 years and things like that but you know with social media around us and content devices lack of exercise where do you see this going in the next two or three years post pandemic um so i i think there's a a lot of pressure i would say pressure is pressure on schools to be kind of part of the solution so for example the government released their childhood obesity strategy call for action um in that most of the kind of calls for action were based at schools and that's because it's they're the students for a captive audience they're very easy to access all children because the majority of children go to school so it has put the onus back on schools but i think this is a really exciting opportunity so i think schools are an important part of the solution but i think it can also enhance the kind of the learning the experiences that that the children have in school and i think in that way i think it's it's really important in terms of your screens i think is the biggest challenge that parents particularly have potentially education providers have is how they manage um how much time um children spend on screens and i think actually screens can be part of the solution as well as a large part of the problem so i think actually in terms of active lessons there are a lot of things that are online go noodle and as well as teach active resources a lot of free-to-access supermovers had for more of the younger children and there's a lot of um kind of resources that are available to us that would not have been available before the internet before screens before all of the kind of innovations that we've had so i think it's absolutely balancing kind of the pressures that we have with the kind of technology that we have available to us and i think it's supporting schools to be kind of part of the solution while making sure that they don't feel the pressures as John alluded to earlier a lot of um pressures are put on schools um and absolutely the academic achievement and outcomes and that side of it is their core business um but physical activity can be used to actually help them achieve their goals i think i've got one last question for you lauren because i know you're very busy um what resources does lefbra have um maybe it's a bit of a loose question but is there anything specifically that you have for parents for pupils or for skills that you're developing um we are working with lots of partners so we tend to work with providers and more than then kind of producing our own resources but we do have a number of resources we have some around nutrition some around physical activity we do have an evidence briefing that comes out around physical activity that's our national centre for sport and exercise medicine so if you go on to our website and anyone that's interested generally in physical activity some of it's around children and young people some of it's around adults and other populations but it does give you a really kind of a nice snippet not too much detail kind of overview of the evidence that's coming out it gives a little bit of a translation of some of the more heavy research that's come out more recently so i think they can be quite useful i think for any practitioner that's really kind of motivated to get children more active sure so i'm going to chase you lauren for that link and we'll circulate it with people that are watching who might want to sign up for that brief and it sounds very interesting but um professor lauren should i'm going to let you go i know you've got one or two things that you need to do but thank you for your time and thank you for all your wisdom and i look forward to working with you again um and we'll see you soon um thank you lauren great thanks for us thanks john and goodbye so any questions for lauren we'll send them over to her and answer them in when we circulate this video but i just thought i'll bring john in for the last 10 minutes just to talk about teach active in a little bit more detail do a little walkthrough potentially if we can get um john maybe i've got some slides john if you want to share those or if you want to log into your website we see but we also got a video that i know lauren wanted to share so i'm just going to play that first and i know lauren's still on the line just in case she wants to say anything she can let me know but um let me just put this video up and we'll see how we get on in terms of the technology but let's just give you a little background into physical active learning so here we go let's see how we get on our children's lives often involves a lot of sitting driving to and from school in the classroom so uh there you go folks um message is really clear you know my life as a classroom teacher design technology we are more times than not on our feet uh moving around but you've got uh the research from lauren that's been shared the pandemic devices we know that we need to try and build in these opportunities for our young people more explicitly in the classroom particularly if they're not getting those opportunities at home um john um teach active i'll put your slides up you let me know if you want me to navigate through them let's put these back up um or if we want to actually like log into the website live but let's just to give people a little gist of um you know what the what the resources are available for put those up for people to see full size do you want to just don't give us a little introduction john a little bit more depth yeah okay so as i mentioned before so teach active um an online resource that provides teachers teaching assistants with the lesson plans and resources on how to deliver the english in the maths curriculum but through physical activity through movement through getting children open about um three and a half thousand lesson plans it covers every single objective so it can really sit alongside and complement any scheme of work uh teach active isn't the scheme of work it's just a bank of ideas of resources so for those who are perhaps using your you know your maths no problem or your white rose or perhaps the power of reading it will sit alongside it and as a as i say compliment them really well but the benefits i think we've spoken about and and you know there's there's probably a list as long as my arm but certainly by doing this what we're finding is that schools are becoming more active is that we're not having that 70 percent sedentary fact um the fact that the children are achieving more physical activity but it's helping to really enjoy you know that enjoyment of learning helping with attainment and then all of those wider benefits of social skills teamwork resilience social skills all of those things and i think what's really important at the moment is how it can really support you know cognition and the learning journey as well um you know helping that that learning to be i suppose engaging from the teacher first of all to make sure that it goes into the short-term memory but then we know that from the short-term memory we hear this phrase of stickiness or let's get it into the long-term memory so that the children can master it and therefore let's do it in lots of different ways so teach active is ideal for that and then also uh you and i ross will have both taught that lesson where we think all that went well and two weeks later the the children have completely forgotten about it so again it's really good for retrieval uh and making sure that children have retained information sure i've stuck some of the resources on for people to see so tell us tell us what people can see on the screen yeah a typical example on the left hand side there is just you'll see that it's got the year group it's got the name of the game the area of maths and the objective and this is a game where actually the children go to one uh problem and the answer tells them which problem to go to next and the answer to next to next to next until they've completed all 20 problems um so many schools have done maths or the intering before and the children love it but it takes you all sunday afternoon to plan it so here it's all done for you um similar to here with matching analogs and analog and digital crops in in year two whether that's whole class or is in intervention and that flexibility that it allows i think teachers like because they can rather than thinking i need to make come up with the idea and make the resources it's all done for them and they can spend that time thinking how can i best use this for my class like the sound of this one treasure hunt punctuation yeah well something that actually we we don't tend to do a lot of is is is or or we do it but in a very closed way in terms of having to look at editing our writing proofreading our writing uh and checking for mistakes so we can do it like this and get children to master those key skills but again just doing it a bit of an active way and similar i think on the on the next few um if you flick on well you know this time can we you know reading is a big thing at the moment can we foster this love of reading and many schools are telling me at the moment this is a huge huge issue um and you know even with getting children to want to learn want to read at home so actually can we do that for physical activity well yes we can and you can see here that teach active not only provides the lesson plan and the resources but also the texts as well whether that stories whether it's poems whether it's information texts and again it's all pitched at the right level for the for the children that are going to be accessing it so there's a there's a good chance john that you've saved thousands of teachers an enormous amount of time by reducing their workload would that be a good thing to say but yeah well i'd like to think so you know that that that is the aim and of course i think that's what a lot of teachers feed back in in terms of this as we said saves them hours of planning time and is is something that they really enjoy using and i think what i'll do is i'll just bring up your website screen here so people can just see what it looks like and we'll put the links in the chat box but here is the teach active um home screen john if you just maybe tell um people what they can find and see we've obviously got the link to the free trial endeavor yeah i'd encourage you to sign up to a demo as i said 15 minutes and let me show you the website show you how easy to use is i did one today the well two today with different head teachers i can then talk about the training which we could include as part of that but on here you'll see what are what some of our customers say some of those case studies if you want to know the difference and the impact that it's making read some of those case studies that you'll see there you can see some of the quality assurance some of the things that we spoke about the multiple awards that we've won the parliamentary review that we were part of our schools that have been placed by off-stead we were published by the department of education um so we've had some you know real good um quality assurance and we've been working in supporting schools for six years so i think that also says something about um uh you know our ongoing support for our schools as well now i'm going to ask the question because i know one or two teachers you know they obviously can play around with a free trial independently and they'll be the odd teacher that needs to take this to their school leadership team and then to have that money conversation can i put you in a corner and could you um give us a ballpark figure for people if that is useful yeah of course and so to it's an annual subscription that schools pay to access teach active um if you want to you can buy maths and english separately so for one subject it's five hundred and seventy five pounds um for both actually and for both it's nine hundred and seventy five pounds um that gives you access to all of your teachers it gives you access to all of your parents as well because we have an active homework as part of this so rather than giving sedentary homework let's give fun games and activities to really uh yeah again engage children and not put them off learning um and yeah it gives you unlimited access for that including the free training as well which i mentioned we do have a three-year option which many schools are using and schools will know that peat and sport funding is due into their budget this month so um i think we can tell that as well because it's been a very busy start to the month already and obviously you know you've seen a big spike in people accessing these resources throughout the pandemic um i know it's a very hard thing to evaluate how we are living and working because we're still in the pandemic i suppose but um at least from a an english perspective how are you seeing people using your resources is there still a huge uptake given given what's happened to us all yeah i think even more so i think these there's a big movement at the moment for schools to become more physically active um there's an initiative by uh well set up it's the people's movement but set up by youth sport trust and booper called well schools so if you're interested in this agenda i'd certainly look at well schools and so free to sign up movement of schools who are all sharing the passion to sort of say well actually we care about emotional and mental well-being as much as we do about academic success um so we're seeing a big uptake and we're seeing schools you know it's it's not hard to introduce us that's what i'd say and for those head teachers thinking i really don't want to introduce another initiative actually the first thing i say to teachers is you're going to love this because i'm going to make your life easier not harder and and and there you go yeah so it's about making everyone's life easier and ultimately trying to make a difference to our kids uh our young people and people watching live you're very quiet this evening have you got any questions for lauren or for john uh in the session we can put some comments and links on the chat box otherwise we are going to start to wind things down um but i've you know i the power of teach active john's had me doing fit there press ups in my garden as part of promoting some of the brilliant resources that he has and i'm looking forward to visiting you next monday john actually come and visit your team in chester which is for people watching outside the uk northwest england beautiful chester if we've got any people joining us from ua e as well we are heading to the guest show in dubai next month um so if we do have anyone and they're interested in um it's having a meeting or us to come and see that school we're hoping to deliver a cpd workshop three for schools out there as well so if we do have any schools in in dubai or visiting the guest show please do get in touch as well fantastic so um there you've had it folks going to start to wrap things up we know that well-being mental health is important we need some practical tools for our parents for our younger people and for our teachers to start making a big difference and and and some respects changing that narrative about um what is active learning what's how can we manage our physical health and you'll have seen some great wisdom from john so john thank you for sharing your insights and your wonderful resource and you'll have heard lauren earlier sharing some of her research into cognition active learning and how we can all look after ourselves uh professor from luffbra university um so it's been great to have you all here again i'm just going to ask for any comments um i've still got john on the line and lauren actually still around but i've got a question fight from caron uh so if lauren are you happy to come back in you're still there and john i've got this question here from caron it's great to get some questions from people so i guess this is the informal bit now um but there's a question lauren let me start with you and thank you for still staying on the line and i guess from uh kind of some of the things that you heard us say is there anything you want to add before we finish uh no i think it's just to say that i think there's a will across the nation from our government uh all the way through to researchers to schools um to support this and yeah i just i'm really looking forward to working with lots of different providers including teach active um on how they can kind of enhance their provision constantly reflect on implementation so that it can kind of carry on evolving and be as best as it can moving forward fantastic and john there's the question um early years curriculum yeah i'm pleased to say caron the answer to that is yes um in the early days when we did years one to six uh foundation teachers weren't my biggest fan um but yes and we we wrote it all over the august so it's all mapped to the new yfs curriculum it's mapped to development matters which i know is not statutor but i think many schools use and then to the early learning goals as well so uh yes it is and there you go so last opportunity folks for any final questions otherwise i have been your host i didn't introduce myself at the start but i guess most of you know who i am through teacher talk it um lauren thanks once again for your expertise and for all your wisdom i'm becoming uh in my uh wiser years much more interested in the memory and the synapses side of things to find it very fascinating i think it's one thing i probably didn't have my teacher training yes child development child psychology but you know supporting that that growth of new neurons and things i think it's a really fascinating discourse that we need to have as teachers um and i don't know if you're you know obviously you'd be teaching these things with people around you but i don't know if you're aware of any teacher training courses that explicitly teach that type of stuff for teachers and if it's relevant or not i think it's a good point i think it could be absolutely included within the kind of general growth and development that the teachers will hopefully learn should learn as part of their teacher education i think there's a really um positive move and i'm not sure how far we are with it to actually increase um to include strategies like active lesson into teacher education um we are providers of teacher education particularly in the and maths here at loughborough university so we have actually got a good opportunity to kind of case study and try out some of that um here which makes sense being that we're at loughborough and we're very uh kind of motivated towards physical activity and sports so i always think that my um my teacher training went you know going through the clearing well i think i missed out on one a level point to get to loughborough so i ended up at gold smiths but uh such is life uh maybe would have been a lot more physically active than i perhaps would have been if i ended up at loughborough but i remember visiting uh in one of my football tours to loughborough and they were another level of fitness without a question so different different set of human beings and physical it's a phenomenal institution with that for sure um john any concluding remarks any questions you can see caron was very happy with your early years answer uh yeah i yeah and uh cabin hopefully we can do a one to one together now with regards to you know the cognition i always find it very interesting as well and again i've been doing some work on that today in terms of um you know one thing we're not taught as teachers is actually how children do learn and how the learning you know how the learning journey happens and what takes place so we think that if we're if we can do this fantastic lesson and it goes into the children's short-term memory then that's a tick and actually it's probably why we can't well we know we can't go into a lesson and judge a lesson on the 60 minutes that we're in there god forbid if if that happens uh because actually the learning it's whether it's still there two weeks later and whether it's in the long term memory um and i know that uh you know physically active learning can really support that as well so yeah really interesting and something that i enjoy uh reading and doing a bit more research about as well my alarm is telling us that it's time to switch off for a cognitive load apologies for that introduction but um yeah it's um it's been a really interesting discussion and and john thank you for your time and loren for your time and your wisdom um i'm gonna leave it there folks i'm gonna circulate this video uh to your inboxes with any resources some links to loren's research the left for a newsletter and to all the teach active resources john loren hope you have a lovely evening i'm going off for a nap to help develop my snapsits and uh i shall see you both soon thanks very much thanks all thanks bye everybody thank you very much