Childhood Obesity in the United Kingdom 87activity which assesses how a child is feeling at each session, so the effect
activity has on mood can be monitored.
The parents also provide feedback on home-life before and after the
programme. Currently the programme has helped over 200 families by
working with 20 different schools across Walsall. Two groups of programmes
have been evaluated so far, and a further one in the evaluation stage. The
results so far have been very positive with the evaluation of the pilot
programmes showing that 42 children were involved across four schools. 93%
of the participants in the first group reduced or maintained their BMI. The
second group of programmes showed that 85% of parents reported that they
had made at least one healthier lifestyle change [40].
Snack Right
The Snack Right campaign was started to encourage parents and carers of
pre-school children in deprived areas of Cheshire and Merseyside. The
families were taught to replace at least one unhealthy snack in their child’s
daily diet with a healthy one.
The campaign targeted interventions for parents of pre-school aged
children and involved social marketing techniques. Interactive events were
organised for children and parents to try fruit and veg, create healthy snacks,
sign up for Healthy Start vouchers, engage with life size banana characters,
and play games. A range of resources including a story book, sticker book,
branded stationary, plastic snack bowl and leaflets were developed and used.
Partnership with ‘good competitors’ to help promote the campaign and avoid
mixed messages were used. The partners included parenting groups, SureStart
and breastfeeding groups [41].
Summary
The Public Health England obesity, knowledge and intelligence group are
aware of the need to improve the evidence base for the effectiveness of
interventions to prevent obesity. This requires pragmatic evaluations of on-
going prevention programmes in addition to formal academic research.
To improve the quality and consistency of evaluations, the Obesity
Knowledge and Intelligence team in Public Health England (formally National
Obesity Observatory) developed a Standard Evaluation Framework (SEF) for