Local Exercise Action Pilot (LEAP)

21 February 2007

This page is part of the sports development archive section. The funding for this project has finished.

Ten Primary Care Trusts in neighbourhood renewal areas across England have been selected to run pilot schemes- Local Exercise Action Pilots (LEAP) - to encourage people to be more physically active.

LEAP is a £2.6 million programme jointly funded by the Department of Health, the Countryside Agency and Sport England. It is designed to test the best ways of encouraging people to be more active, especially those who do little exercise or who are at risk from health problems. The project is run locally by Plymouth City Council's Sports Development Unit in partnership with Plymouth Primary Care Trust.

Plymouth's pilot project aims to:

• investigate, support and promote a range of measures for increasing levels of physical activity in young people to the recommended level of one hours moderate intensity activity a day, with swimming being central to the overall project.
• identify young people, between 13 and 14 years old, whose health will significantly benefit from increasing their levels of physical activity through a free-swimming programme.
• develop a multi-agency referral process and selection toolkit to identify those young people who are in most need of support. Reducing inequality by working with the most vulnerable and hard-to-reach young people.

Referral partners include; GP's, Health Visitors, School Nurses, Practice Nurses, Schools, Education Welfare Officers, Youth and Community Workers, Refugee and Asylum seeker organisations.

The multi-agency selection criteria includes indicators from the following themes:

• health
• deprived priority neighbourhoods/wards
• economic
• education
• family
• black and ethnic minority groups
• refugee and asylum seekers

The free swimming programme will provide a mixture of structured and unstructured swimming pool related sessions. All young people are issued with a 'swimming pass' which enables them to access any public swimming sessions free of charge at Council run pools and Plymouth Pavilions.