Physical Exercise for Education ('Fit to Study')

Physical exercise has been shown to have positive effects on the brain and to improve cognitive performance, both immediately and in the long-term. This project is being conducted to understand better how the content of school PE, focusing on Year8 pupils during the academic year 2017/18, affects brain function and structure, and academic performance.

A programme of activities for PE lessons has been developed by Oxford Brookes University (in collaboration with Oxfordshire Sport and Physical Activity) to try to optimise the benefit of PE for brain function. Staff from Oxford Brookes University will train PE teachers to deliver this programme.

'Fit to Study' is aiming to recruit 100 state-funded secondary schools from within a radius of Oxford.

The National Foundation for Education Research will help with recruitment by sending materials to target schools, collating responses, collecting pupil information from schools that sign up, and passing information to the research teams and NatCen Social Research (who will be responsible for randomisation). Participating schools will be randomly assigned to either an Intervention Group (IG) and be asked to deliver the new PE programme, or to a Control Group (CG) and asked to continue with their normal PE lessons. Randomisation will be achieved using a random sequence generated using Stata12. Balance between treatment and control groups will be achieved across a range of covariates (i.e. to ensure not all girls schools are assigned to one condition).

For both Groups there will be a number of activities for schools to undertake, both at the start, during, and at the end of the study. The key tasks are listed, and then described, below: