Moving Well-Being Well: Getting Ireland's Children Moving - Dr. Stephen Behan

The Moving Well-Being Well project is one of the largest research projects of its kind in the world. The project is a collaboration between DCU’s School of Health and Human Performance, the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, the GAA, and Dublin GAA. The research team is made up of Dr Stephen Behan, Dr Johann Issartel, Dr Sarahjane Belton, Dr Cameron Peers, and Prof Noel O’Connor.

Over ten years, a key part of my role as a Games Promotion Officer for Dublin GAA was coaching in primary schools. Over time, I became increasingly concerned that many children had no interest in taking part in any form of physical activity whatsoever. I became curious as to why this could happen, how children could choose not to be active so early in life, and the seeds of Moving Well-Being Well were born.

While there have been many initiatives that have sought to increase physical activity, these have not been effective in the long term. We have seen this through Irish research, the Children’s Sport Participation and Physical Activity (CSPPA) survey showed that only 19% of primary school children attained the recommended 60 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous physical activity in 2008, and when they tested again in 2018, they found that this had dropped to just 17%. It is clear that a fresh approach was needed. MWBW sought to do that and looked at developing children's physical literacy.

Physical literacy is defined as "the motivation, confidence, physical competence, knowledge and understanding to value and take responsibility for engagement in physical activities for life" (International Physical Literacy Association).

This is a complex, multifaceted concept but I like to use the Canadian Sport for Life model to help explain it. The physical competence drives confidence, which drives motivation, which in turn drives physical competence and the cycle continues. To use kicking as a simple example, if a child knows they can kick a ball, they will be confident to kick, which can lead to being motivated to take part in activities that involve kicking, which means they kick more often and improve their competence - this is called a positive spiral of engagement. This had not been researched in Ireland before.

In order to do this, we first had to understand physical literacy in an Irish context. We undertook a large scale data collection across the country to get a ‘snapshot’ of Irish children and where things stood on a host of variables. We visited over 40 schools across 12 counties in four provinces, ranging from Junior Infants to 6th Class, and had over 2,100 participants. We assessed fundamental movement skills, their perception of these skills, health related fitness components, confidence, motivation, wellbeing and much more.

First, we looked at their fundamental movement skill (FMS) proficiency. These are the basic building blocks of movement and are an essential pathway to developing more sport specific skills.

It is widely believed that mastery of these basic movement skills at a young age will lead to increased physical activity in the teenage years. If we think about it, it is common sense. If children have a broad mastery of simple movement skills, then they are going to be more likely to take part in activities that require those skills, and hence be more active as a result. Our results showed that the mastery, or near mastery of these skills are low in Irish children.

Looking at the graph, you could be forgiven for thinking that 75% mastery is a good score for the run. But that means 25% of the children we assessed cannot run properly, so how many activities does that potentially preclude them from?