It has been eight long years since Scottish head teacher Elaine Wyllie was stunned to see a class of 10 and 11-year-olds doubled over in pain as they tried to complete a warm-up run across the school field.
It prompted the Daily Mile initiative to get schoolchildren to walk or run a mile every day at their own pace to improve their health.
Now a new Scottish study has found that children undergoing self-paced physical activity during a 15 minute classroom break similar to the Daily Mile is beneficial to their education - with improvements in attention, memory and well-being.
The study involved 5463 children from 332 school across who the UK were on average nine years old and concluded that 15 minutes of self-paced physical activity "should be considered a worthwhile activity by class teachers, school management and policy makers."
The team from Universities of Edinburgh, Stirling, and Highlands and Islands, had compared those carrying out self-paced activity like running or walking similar to those taking part in the initiative to those who carried out more intense work and those who did not exercise at all.
Elaine Wyllie
Immediately before and within 20 minutes after finishing each activity, children completed computer-based tasks to measure well-being and cognition, including memory and attention.
Scores for wellbeing and cognitive tasks, including working memory, improved most after self-paced exercise compared to intense physical activity or no exercise.
The effects of intense exercise and no exercise were similar, however children’s scores for alertness were lower after breaks involving no physical activity.
Children also reported more positive moods after self-paced exercise than intense physical activity or no exercise.
But the report concluded that more intense physical activity should not be considered to be detrimental.
Children who were more physically fit tended to have greater increases in alertness after self-paced exercise compared to less fit children.
Dr Colin Moran, one of the co-authors of the study said: “Schools, pupils, teachers and parents may worry that taking time out of lessons to do physical activity is not beneficial to classroom learning. However, the evidence shows that pupils are more alert, feel better, and pay better attention after self-paced physical activity when compared to just sitting”.
More than 3,600 schools in 30 countries around the world are said to have taken up the Daily Mile idea in the three years after it started to get publicity in 2015 but not all get pupils to complete a mile every single day.
It came after Ms Wyllie decided to take pupils outside for a run after one of the school's local volunteers, an 80-year-old local landowner who helped out with music, storytelling and teaching the children chess, warned her out of the blue: "the children at this school are not fit".
For the headteacher of St Ninians Primary in Stirling, it was a watershed moment and from that day on her pupils would leave the class for 15 minutes every day to walk, jog or run a mile by going around the playground several times.
As the weeks went on, other classes and eventually the entire school joined in and the Daily Mile was born Individual teachers decide when to fit the Daily Mile into the school day, and it is done in addition to existing PE lessons and does not replace the exercise children get while playing during intervals.
Ms Wylie had said she had seen for herself how 15 minutes of daily activity rapidly improved pupils' fitness, health and concentration in the classroom. The new report acknowledged that the results did not take into account other factors that can affect wellbeing and cognition such as diet and sleep or other exercise done by children during their leisure time or while travelling to school.
The study said further research should explore the influence of these factors on children’s well-being and cognition after physical activity breaks.
Report author Dr Josie Booth said: “Physical activity is believed to be beneficial to cognition and academic performance; however, the evidence for this in children is inconsistent.
"We aimed to examine the immediate impact of short physical activity breaks at school on children’s cognition and well-being and to determine whether any benefits from this activity were due to the intensity of physical activity or from just taking a break outside of the classroom. This activity was similar to the popular Daily Mile initiative."
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