1,300 children across South Durham join physical activity research project!

Go Well, a not-for-profit organisation based in Ferryhill, is seeking to understand what gets children active and what disengages them for physical activities. The insights from the research project will be used to help more children in South Durham develop healthy active lifestyles.

Thanks to £34,000 funding from Area Action Partnerships in Bishop Auckland and Shildon, Spennymoor, Great Aycliffe and Middridge, and East Durham Rural Corridor, and further funding from Sport England’s Tackling Inequalities Fund via County Durham Sport, Go Well is able to go live with its exciting new programme, the Go Well HEART Project!

The project will work with over 1,300 children at 42 primary and infant schools across South Durham. A group of children in each school will become part of a Research Team to try and test a series of activities over 12 weeks. They will receive a bag of equipment and a booklet to note their thoughts and findings. They will also be encouraged to create their own activities too.

The Go Well team will be out from Monday 12 April, delivering bags to the research teams as children head back to school. The project will officially start on Monday 19 April.

Sarah Price, Go Well manager, said: “In its recent report, Active Lives, Sport England found that the majority of young people failed to meet the recommended 60 minutes of daily exercise in the 2019/20 academic year. Almost a third of children, that’s 2.3 million children, are now classed as ‘inactive’. There is a real worry that the latest lockdown, which coincided with winter, will have caused activity levels to drop even further. With the help of the research teams, we will learn what works for children, and what helps them to be active and to stay active. The children will of course be active throughout the research project!”

Sarah said: “It is our mission to inspire and build healthy active futures across the whole of the country, particularly in the north-east. By 2025, we want to have had a positive impact on the wellness of 1 million people. We are very grateful to the Area Action Partnerships and to County Durham Sport, and Sport England, for the funding and to help us move closer to our goal.”