What’s the best way to prepare a child for their Sats? There are plenty of options available: regular practice papers, individual question analyses and dedicated booster sessions, to name just a few.
But here’s an option you may not have considered: exercise.
That might sound like an unusual suggestion, but according to Dave Shurmer, teacher and apprenticeship manager at Plymouth Argyle Football Club, getting pupils to skip for two minutes before a lesson has the potential to increase Sats scores.
Last year, Shurmer conducted research looking at the impact increased physical activity has on pupils’ academic attainment in literacy and numeracy. And while the research was small-scale, conducted with just two primary schools, the findings have interesting implications, not only for Sats preparation, but for improving academic outcomes for pupils of all ages.
“I knew from my own experience, that sometimes when students were struggling to focus or were disruptive in class, that taking them to burn off some energy, doing a few laps around the field, really helped. They’d come in and be a lot more focused,” Shurmer explains. “That wasn’t really based on any research, but more of an old-fashioned teaching hunch. So when given the opportunity, I wanted to see if there was anything scientific in it.”
To test his hunch, Shurmer devised an experiment where students would skip for two minutes before English or maths lessons. At the end of the term, pupils sat a Sats practice paper.
In one of the schools that took part, pupils skipped before English lessons and sat an English paper, and in the other, they skipped before maths lessons and sat a maths paper.
Shurmer compared the data from before and after the term for a conditioned and unconditioned group. He found that when the students skipped before lessons once a week, they went on to gain an extra mark on their test papers. When they skipped twice a week, they gained an extra two marks.
While it might be tempting to dismiss Shurmer’s study because of its small scale, his findings that exercise can boost academic outcomes are actually echoed across a wealth of academic research.
Using sport to boost learning: the research
In 2021, the Youth Sport Trust developed an “active recovery curriculum”, to encourage schools to embed more physical activity into the school day. In an independent evaluation, 75 per cent of teachers noted an increase in pupils’ academic progress since implementing the curriculum, and 74 per cent of pupils agreed that doing exercise at school helps them to learn.
Other studies have found that physical activity can help to improve memory. In a paper published in 2014 by Professor Jennifer Etnier and colleagues at the University of Carolina, children were randomly assigned exercise, or not, before an auditory verbal learning task. Those who had completed the exercise demonstrated significantly better learning of word lists and significantly better recall of words after a brief delay.
And in 2020, Dr Emma Norris, a lecturer in public health at Brunel University, and colleagues completed a systematic review of 37 international studies that focused on the link between exercise and attainment. The review concluded that when physically active lessons were added to the curriculum, there was a positive impact on educational outcomes.
The connection between exercise and attainment is well-supported, then. But just how much physical activity is needed to make a difference?
According to official guidance from the UK chief medical officers, students should be doing 60 minutes of activity a day, and Kate Thornton-Bousfield, head of PE and achievement at the Youth Sports Trust, suggests that this is a good target to stick to.
That doesn’t necessarily mean doing 60 minutes of high-intensity activity each day, she says, but just ensuring that students are active.
“Don’t do too much too soon: instead, gradually build on it. Students need to understand what you’re doing, and why it’s a crucial part of learning, as well as the importance of refocusing and getting back on track once the physical activity is done,” she explains.
Of course, many schools already have physical activity embedded throughout the school day; some have implemented initiatives such as The Daily Mile, in which students run a mile a day, or Wake up, Shake up, which sees pupils start their day with a couple of minutes of physical exercise at their desks.
However, a report published by Sport England covering the 2019-20 academic year showed that 56.1 per cent of children and young people did not meet the 60 minutes a day target. And while coronavirus restrictions certainly contributed, that figure is actually only 1.9 per cent higher than it was a year earlier. So while the pandemic reduced levels of exercise, the issue was already there.
How to embed more sport into the curriculum
With research pointing towards the academic benefits of physical activity, and the percentage of children achieving an hour of activity per day less than 50 per cent, how can teachers change things?
St Breock Primary School in Cornwall offers one possibility. They dedicate every Friday to sports. Every child in the school learns to swim throughout the year and each term different year groups are taken to the local swimming pool in the morning. In the afternoon, the entire school takes part in a “Sport for All” programme, which sees students complete a range of sporting activities.
During the rest of the week, teachers try to incorporate active elements into their lessons as often as they can. As a result, teachers have seen pupils become more engaged in lessons, says head of school Sian Hall.
“[We believe] knowledge is much more likely to stick if it’s associated with an activity,” she explains. “We really try to get the children involved and as active as possible, wherever we can.”
Hall gives the example of getting children to jump as they are learning to count in maths, or having them take part in live re-enactments when learning about historical events in history lessons.
This amount of activity, and the levels of organisation that come with it, may seem daunting, particularly when you consider that there will be children - and indeed, even teachers - who are not predisposed to enjoy exercise, or who don’t feel particularly confident about taking part in sport.
But schools can also make a difference on a smaller scale, says Thornton-Bousfield. She suggests looking at how your classroom is set out: do you provide pupils with everything they need on their desk, for example? Could you, instead, put items around the room, so that they have to move in order to get a worksheet or collect their feedback?
Take a ‘brain break’
She also recommends using “brain breaks”: when you feel a dip in learning, get children to stand up and run on the spot, do high knees or put on a Just Dance video for a few minutes.
In theory, this sounds simple enough. As with so many other initiatives, though, it can feel that the responsibility for implementation falls solely on overworked teachers.
But Thornton-Bousfield has a solution for this too: get children involved in running activities.
“One in three young people told us that they would do more sport if it was led by someone their own age. Let’s utilise the students and empower them to lead physical activities at break or lunch. Upskill the lunchtime supervisors, so although they may not be leading that activity, they’re overseeing it and ensuring everyone is safe,” she says.
“In secondary schools, we have sports captains and leaders, why not give them the opportunity to take responsibility for their health and wellbeing, and others around them?”
Of course, for any of these approaches to work, schools will need teachers to fully buy into them. Thornton-Bousfield believes that this needs to start with a shift in ideas about what level of physical activity is needed for it to “count”.
“Teachers need to get away from the thinking that children have to get changed into PE kits for active learning. We’re not talking about them getting sweaty in the classroom. It [can be] about brain breaks to re-engage children and to get the bodies moving,” she says.
“We need to be creative around how the 60 minutes can actually be achieved: sometimes staff can be really worried that they’re going to be judged on what type of physical breaks they put in. If everyone is doing it in their classrooms, we should be able to move away from that.”
Shurmer believes that as well as raising teacher confidence to just try things out, working to increase awareness of the academic benefits of exercise could be the key to more widespread improvements.
“When I’ve been teaching, whenever a senior leader wants to roll out a great idea, staff often roll their eyes and ask when they’ll find time for it. But two minutes of physical activity is quite short and sharp,” he says. “And if staff are aware of the change it could make in engagement, and ultimately outcomes, they should see that it’s worth it.”
