Our story
Physical activity is crucial for a child’s physical, mental, social and emotional health. Less than 40% of Australian children currently get enough physical activity in their day.
Over half a million Aussie children go to OSHC each week, making OSHC integral in supporting the health and well-being of our children!
what actually happens at OSHC?
With over 500,000 Australian children attending OSHC each week, we wanted to understand what physical activity and screen time practices looked like in OSHC and what resources were available to support and guide OSHC coordinators.
Since 2015, we’ve worked with over 500 OSHC services from across Australia.
What did we find?
- Children’s physical activity levels varied greatly among OSHC services
- Screen time accounted for up to 41% of the after-school care session in some services, while others didn’t use screens at all
- Many OSHC services lack formal guidance (i.e., policy) on physical activity and screen time practices
Children should accumulate at least 60 minutes of physical activity per day and no more than 2 hours of recreation screen time.
Creating guidelines with OSHC, for OSHC
We worked with 67 experts and stakeholders to create world-first OSHC-specific Physical Activity and Screen Time Guidelines.
We used a methodology called a Delphi survey to figure out which items were critically important and should be included in the guidelines.
You can read more about how we did it and what we found here
Activated OSHC
To help OSHC services implement the new guidelines, the Activated OSHC program was created!
Since 2022, the Activated OSHC program has been rigorously evaluated in a randomised controlled research trial in around 200 OSHC services from across SA, NSW and WA.
OSHC services are followed for 12-months, half of the services receive the Activated OSHC program and the other half continue as normal. We collect data from all services at 3 time points to compare the effectiveness of the program on children’s physical activity and screen time behaviours.
Study results
The trial is in its very final stages and the results will be available very soon.
You can check back here to read what we found, or you can join our mailing list and we will keep you up to date with Activated OSHC news!
