As a local School Games Organiser, with many years of connections across our place, I have been seconded for 3 days a week to co-develop culture, approaches, and capabilities of schools to be more active through the school day. Our Middle Leaders programme is a professional development opportunity for schoolteachers who have aspirations of senior leadership. If we can change the behaviours, attitudes and priorities of the future head teachers we can start to change the system in which they operate. Middle Leaders hold a position in school, where they hold enough influence to be listened to by head teachers whilst still being firmly connected to whole school staff as a trusted person and therefore can influence and drive change across school. The program, over two years, provides investment in their personal and professional development and supports the identified member of teaching staff to drive and lead positive change across their own school. Middle Leaders learn and reflect together, receive strengths coaching and research coaches, provided by a university. Focusing on a strength-based approach to leadership, the Middle Leaders learn to know and understand their strengths and how these can be used to win the hearts and minds of all stakeholders across school. Our early evaluation shows middle leaders have created significant change across their schools including developing a ‘Grow Curriculum’ which places movement at the heart of all lessons, using pupil voice to re-design classrooms into active Learning spaces, to identifying movement behaviours across secondary age children. Middle Leaders have reported high value of the program for their future leadership development.

The Nova Scotia Active Smarter Kids Project is a pan-provincial, inter-sectoral initiative to support classroom teachers across the Canadian province of Nova Scotia with the implementation of physically active learning (PAL). Originally supported by colleagues at HVL in Sogndal, Norway, the NS ASK Project began in 2018 with a small pilot to test the feasibility of PAL in the NS education context. Now, 6 years on, "ASK" is being implemented in elementary and secondary classrooms across the province. PAL is recognized as both an effective pedagogical tool to increase student engagement and to increase student PA within the school day. Six years into leading this work in NS, we are beginning to see the systematic incorporation of PAL into educational policy and approaches across Nova Scotia. Since 2018, PAL has gone from being an unheard of pedagogical / health promotion approach, to becoming a household name in schools across this small Canadian province. The NS ASK Project has trained over 2500 teachers in that time and engaged over 75 professionals from the fields of education, public health and promotion, physical activity research, and outdoor recreation to bring this project to fruition. Inspired by Creating Active Schools Framework (Daly-Smith et al., 2020), in November 2023, the province of Nova Scotia published its first physical activity guidelines to increase physical activity across the school day for all students. Provincially, PAL is now conceptualized as a viable tool to incorporate movement into instructional time and is being used as a fertile starting point for advancing this framework by administrators across the province. A key take-away from the NS ASK Project is the importance of engaging a diverse stakeholder group to affect substantial change within the education sector. Furthermore, PAL can be a fruitful and sustainable place to begin advancing PA in schools. www.nsaskproject.ca

Using a multi-stakeholder approach, we developed and implemented a framework for various professional development pathways to support K-7 educators in delivering physical literacy and physical activity throughout the whole school day. We have so far reached an estimated 4000 educators in over 300 schools in BC. There was an evaluated increase in teacher's knowledge and confidence in delivery physical activity after participating in the program, with a reported overall increase in physical activity, physical literacy, classroom management, and mental wellbeing. Key learnings include: Importance of a collaborative approach; Getting School Districts onboard is key; In-person in classroom support was most appreciated and most highly rated.

What we did: We delivered a training and support programme across the North of England in different localities on how to improve learning whilst reducing sedentary time. We used the Creating Active Schools framework to underpin the development of our work with schools and built stakeholder capability in a number of ways:
· Working with a range of schools in a locality (usually through local delivery pilots) so they can provide support to each other both during and after the training.
· Working with middle leaders within a locality so that they can then return to their schools, and with our support (if necessary), deliver in-school staff training.
· Working with schools across different academic years, to ensure that momentum is not lost during this transition.
· Encouraging schools to send non-PE leaders to the training and network sessions, so our ideas can be integrated into teaching & learning.
· Providing remote support to delegates between face to face training sessions, through our book ("How to Move & Learn") and an online resource library.
What we learnt: Through the programmes we have seen that our approaches are needed more than ever in schools - largely due to rising neurodiversity & mental health needs. Teachers see not only how they can reduce sedentary time in lessons, but more importantly how they engage children’s attention and motivation for learning. We have also learnt that each locality needs a programme tailored to work for them, and for teaching & learning to be at the front and centre for it to be accepted.
What has been the impact so far: Whilst schools are slowly embedding Move & Learn approaches, we continue to support them with building stakeholder capability through the development of Move & Learn practitioners in each locality. These are school middle leaders who have successfully embedded approaches and are now able to showcase these at their own school whilst also providing peer training support to schools that request or need it.

Thinking While moving is an evidenced based University of Newcastle, Australia and NSW Department of Education initiative. Thinking while Moving was developed as part of the Department of Education’s response to the NSW Auditor General's report into physical activity in government primary schools. The aim is to invigorate the current primary school curriculum and attempt to maximise opportunities to incorporate movement-based learning into key learning areas. Thinking while moving embeds themes of the ‘What Works Best’ document to support teachers in delivering quality teaching and learning in a supportive environment through explicit teaching, effective feedback, effective classroom management, supporting wellbeing, teacher collaboration and differentiation to meet the needs of all learners. Whilst Teacher professional learning has seen over 1500 teachers complete face to face training and over 2000 a self-paced e-learning course this presentation will look at the barriers and facilitators that impact on Initial Teacher students (n=60) when resources are provided for Thinking While Moving English and Mathematics lessons and classroom energisers whilst on a 4- week practicum. Impact and Learning Results from post practicum surveys and interviews were positive with students reporting an increase in confidence, a range of benefits to students, very few barriers and a change to future teaching pedagogy regarding movement. This study provides a strong rationale and evidence for the delivery of movement-based learning in Initial teacher education courses.

With the increasing popularity of physically active learning in education, there is a need to support teachers' enactment in practice by addressing its real-world applicability. By drawing on a third-space methodology to bring together researchers and teachers who have sustained physically active learning in their practice, we aimed to explore fundamental aspects of enacting physically active learning in teaching. We propose the Core Aspects of Physically Active Learning Enactment (CAPAbLE) model. The CAPAbLE model includes 12 core aspects for teachers to reflect on their practice to consciously shape their outlook on PAL. The 12 aspects are curriculum, movement and subject content, environment, structuring teaching, frames and rules, communication, creating time and space, encountering the subject content, balance and intertwining, teacher and pupils, pedagogical responsibility, and assessment. The CAPAbLE model may serve as a departure point to resolve issues on sustainment in school as it can set the stage for future empirical investigations. The model needs further testing and evaluation to promote its applicability to other educational contexts.

We aimed to gain insight into the role of physical education (PE) teachers in integrating more physical activity (PA) during the school day (active school day). Besides, we assessed facilitating and impeding factors PE teachers experienced. We interviewed eleven PE teachers working at primary schools across the Netherlands. We transcribed and analyzed the interviews with MAXQDA. The majority of the PE teachers indicated that their foremost role is to prepare and provide regular PE lessons. In addition, they are mainly involved in activities outside the classroom, such as sports days and recess sports. Although almost all PE teachers consider implementation of an active school day highly relevant, only few have started doing so. The role of the PE teacher in implementing more PA during the school day seems to differ across the various settings and situations within schools. During regular lessons, and when the classroom teacher does not have a PE qualification, PE teachers take on a more advisory or initiating role. For PA activities during the time that children spend outside the classroom, PE teachers take both an operational and advisory role. Key motivating factors for PE teachers to promote PA during the school day are personal motivation/interest, variety in work, encouragement from school and external parties (eg a group of PE teachers from other schools), and perceived positive effects on the child (eg enjoyment and motor skills). Barriers PE teachers experience are: restraint motivation (classroom teachers) and lack of time and assertiveness (PE teacher). In general, PE teachers experience a lack of overall support within the school. Our findings indicate that PE teachers are motivated to expand their role towards other settings within school that provide opportunities to simulate PA throughout the school day. More insight is needed on how to increase support within schools for integrating PA.

This presentation showcases how a Well Schools Partnership and local university can collaborate to co-create an approach to promoting teacher-wellbeing and physical activity. From making sense of teacher-generated data, to collaborating with senior management in making sense of these data, contextualising this within the wider research understandings, to devising support for senior managers and teachers themselves. Impact: we showcase the value of collaboration and provide an exemplar of how such collaboration may work, some of the challenges and ways to address them. Learning: This is a dynamic process where those collaborating continue to learn from the process. We hope to demonstrate how involving diverse perspectives and going 'outside' of the immediate stakeholders can be beneficial.