Fit for Life

Park High students fit for life?

Do you think you‘re healthy? Now be honest, don’t lie to yourself! It could be time to join in the government’s “Change for life” campaign, by getting fit and healthy. Currently, Year 9s at Park High School are working on a cross-curricular project called “Staying Alive”. This is a project that enables students to learn about healthy life styles, while developing functional skills, which they can use across all subjects, from P.E. to Maths, to English. The project will end on 31st March with a Fundraising Fair. The fair will showcase students’ work from all their subject areas and aims to raise money for a new gym and for our link school in Malawi.

To build on this ‘Staying Alive” project students at Park High School have recently taken part in a survey, which aimed to discover just how healthy Park High Students are. 1We took a sample of students from each year group, as well as a handful of teachers. To find out how healthy they believed their lunches were, we asked for a rating out of 10. We discovered that most students only considered their lunches to rate as 4/10 in regards to being healthy.

We interviewed Jinisha, a Year 9 student at Park High. We asked her what changes could be made to make school meals healthier. She replied “Well, I don’t think that the school meals are completely unhealthy as they don’t use the microwave as much as they used to. Now they use the oven more. They should maybe have a greater variety of healthy foods.” Another question we asked her was how healthy eating affects our learning. She said “They will concentrate better because they are eating healthy food and will have better focus in lessons.” Also, we asked Mrs Grey, the food technology teacher, the same question and she replied “If you eat too many sugary foods you won’t settle down quickly and you might be unable to concentrate. If you eat the right amount of food you will have the right quantity of energy to focus.”

A recent study by Leeds University dieticians revealed that only 1% of Britain’s lunchboxes are healthy and only 1 in 10 lunchboxes have salad in the sandwiches inside them. In Jamie Oliver’s show about school dinners, there were many Primary School pupils who didn’t know what a tomato was. Jamie Oliver thinks that young people in schools should have the knowledge to be able to look after themselves when they leave school, including a way that makes them able to feed themselves without having a negative effect on their health. The UK has the lowest vegetable and fruit consumption in Europe. We found out that only 50% of lunches at Park High contain fruit. As a result, Britain has one of the highest rates of heart disease in the world.

1In addition to healthy eating, fitness, exercise and sport also play a huge role in keeping people healthy. The government requires schools to teach at least 2 hours of P.E a week to 5-16 year olds. Only 25% of school children fulfil this requirement. Are students at Park High also this unfit?

Many schools are blamed for unhealthy children as they sell off playing fields and do not have proper sport equipment or halls. But who do you think is to blame for the change?

Obesity is a huge problem which is growing rapidly and we have to act quickly before it is too late. Over 5 million children today are obese. Jamie Oliver told us his view that “We need to look after ourselves in a way that doesn’t affect our health, doesn’t make us obese, and doesn’t put us in a risk of diabetes and heart disease. A good school meal is included in this”.

1Obesity is caused by lots of things, some of these causes are; skipping breakfast, not exercising, having too many unhealthy fatty foods and eating too much food. Only 25% of us eat breakfast in the morning. Shockingly, from our own survey of Park High School, 80% of teachers don’t exercise enough, is this a good influence on students? Park High School, along with 75% of Britain’s schools, is becoming unhealthier by the day.

Park High isn’t as healthy as it should be. We investigated the situation and interviewed dinner ladies, staff and students to find out what they thought. 37% of the children in Britain said they would select healthier foods if they had more of a variety. So why aren’t why listening to them, the generation of the future?

By Zameena, Sakina, Hrishika, Elwira and Zainab