Greenfields Community Primary School, England

We do The Daily Mile every day without exception and the children love it!

Headteacher Mr Andrews said: “When I came in to post I was shocked to find that children were more overweight leaving primary school than they were when they started, and I knew we had to do something about that. Sport was a key part of school for me as a child, and I wanted to share that experience with my pupils”.

Around the same time the Head of Sport & Wellbeing, Mrs Ball, watched as Elaine Wyllie, founder of The Daily Mile, received a Pride of Britain award for her ground-breaking initiative. Mrs Ball thought it would be a great idea that could be recreated back at school and so when she took the idea to Mr Andrews there was no hesitation!

Each class teacher takes their class out when they are ready and most do it in the mornings. We run The Daily Mile around the school field when we can, and use the playground when we can’t. We have a line marking the route around the playground, and the children know that 7 laps is a mile. We use number cubes to help them keep track of their laps-each child collects a cube when they have completed a lap, and they love showing us how many they have collected!

We run an inter-class competition with a different theme each term. Pupils know that each mile counts towards their class total and as a result we have seen real improvements in attendance as no one wants to miss their Daily Mile! We have even had pupils ask if they can make up their missed days at lunch because they don’t want to let their class down, so it builds a team ethic too.

One of our Year 4 pupils, Louie, has quite bad asthma. At a Cross Country event last year, he really struggled and only completed half the course due to his asthma flaring up. Doing The Daily Mile has transformed his health—he hardly uses his inhaler now and during a recent visit his respiratory specialist said this is highly likely due to the regular exercise which has helped to improve his lung and muscular function. At this year’s Cross Country, he not only managed to complete the course, but even went on to finish 6th!