Ambition One: Children and Young People
We want every child facing barriers to activity to learn to swim, ride a bike and have 60 active minutes every day
What's the need?
- In Oxfordshire, only half of children are achieving recommended activity levels and there are stark inequalities playing out across the county
- While in our most affluent areas 80% of children are able to swim by the time they leave primary school, this falls to less than 10% in our most deprived areas
- Children in low income families are 30% more likely to have low activity than children in high income families. In Oxfordshire 40% children on free school meals enrolled with YouMove have low activity.
- Only 9% of children enrolled in Oxfordshire's YouMove programme who have a disability are achieving 60 active minutes, indicating that the combination of disability and low family income presents a real barrier to accessing activity.
- In Oxfordshire those areas which are in the 20% most deprived nationally have the worst outcomes in terms of childhood obesity and in terms of outcomes for physical and mental health for adults.
Our agreed priority areas
- Secondary school aged girls who are at higher risk of inactivity.
- Early Years (0-4) to ensure the very best chance at an active start in life and to improve school readiness
- Children and young people living in priority neighbourhoods and disabled children who don't have access to a bike
- Children living in priority neighbourhoods where we are seeing the greatest swimming inequalities, to help them learn to swim and be safe near water
Actions we are taking together
Over the next two years, we will take the following actions together:
We will close the swimming inequality gap by supporting an additional 3,000 children in priority neighbourhoods to learn to swim and be safe near water
We will engage at least 750 secondary school aged girls living in priority neighbourhoods to become more physically active, through improving access to green space and by providing new ways to be active such as skateboarding and boxing
We will provide Early Years providers and organisations working within Early Years with physical activity training so that they gain confidence in supporting children to be physically active
We will look to expand YouMove to include Early Years to give our youngest generations the best chance for an active start in life
We will set up ten more bike libraries benefiting children from priority neighbourhoods and adopt a new inclusive bike library policy to ensure that all bike libraries across Oxfordshire include adapted bikes
