Action 3:30

The after-school period is a time in which children can be active but what schools currently provide is mainly team sports. Teaching assistants (TAs) are school staff members who could be trained to deliver physical activity clubs after-school, which would be a low-cost, sustainable public health intervention. We have developed a programme to help teaching assistants (TAs) deliver a fun physical activity programme, called Action 3:30.

In this study, we will conduct a school-based randomised controlled trial in 12 primary schools. We will recruit 30 Year Four/Five children from each school and assess how much physical activity they do using accelerometers. We will train the TAs to deliver the clubs in six of the schools. The other schools will continue as normal. We will then take the same measures during the last few weeks that the clubs running. We will talk to the children, TAs and school staff to report what they thought about the programme and ask what they would change. We will also see how much it costs to run Action 3:30. We will use of this information to assess if the Action 3:30 concept is a programme that should be pursued further.