Competency C3
Physical Wellbeing & Self-Care
Physical Wellbeing and Self-Care builds students' knowledge of how bodily needs, health habits, and self-care routines support overall functioning, alongside the capacity to access reliable health information, maintain protective practices under stress, and construct a personalised resilience framework. It sequences from naming basic bodily needs and practising simple routines at Band A to designing sustainable habits that account for structural and social constraints at Band F.
The 2 learning targets
- LT 3.1Health Literacy & Habits
Identify bodily needs, design and adjust health habits, and evaluate information quality and structural conditions shaping what is possible.
BandsA–FCompound LTT2Horizontal understanding
Conceptual understanding that integrates across contexts — how students reason and apply ideas. Assessed by the quality of the reasoning, not just recall.Open → - LT 3.2Self-Care & Resilience
Notice early warning signs, apply self-care responses, maintain them under pressure, and build a personal resilience framework over time.
BandsA–FT3Practised disposition
Orientations students grow into — practised over time, observed across contexts. Assessed by what they consistently do, not what they say.Open →
Evidence base
Where the evidence stands
Moderate evidenceThe evidence here is genuinely mixed in a specific way: the science behind sleep and physical activity is robust, but school-based programmes that try to change student behaviour in these areas are far less effective than the mechanisms alone would suggest. This competency spans three domains — sleep, physical activity, and nutrition and body awareness — and they carry meaningfully different evidence bases.
The strongest ground is mechanistic. Crowley, Acebo and Carskadon (2007) established that puberty triggers a genuine biological phase delay in the circadian system, meaning early school start times conflict with real physiological need, not adolescent laziness. Donnelly and colleagues' 2016 ACSM position stand confirms that acute exercise reliably improves attention and on-task behaviour; chronic effects on academic achievement are more modest and mixed. These findings are well-replicated and form the competency's strongest anchor.
School sleep education consistently raises knowledge but rarely changes actual sleep duration (Marx et al., 2024; Cortese et al., 2024). Nutrition education in schools produces small and inconsistent behaviour change. Interoception teaching is theoretically interesting but has very thin RCT evidence in mainstream school settings. REAL School's approach anchors in the mechanistic evidence — movement in the school day, honest teaching about sleep biology — rather than promising behaviour change from didactic instruction alone.
What the evidence supports
Brief classroom exercise breaks before cognitively demanding work produce dose-response attention gains — FUNtervals (Ma, Mare and Gurd, 2014) and Howie et al.'s TAKE 10! demonstrate this reliably. The Daily Mile (Chesham et al., 2018) produces fitness gains across the school week without disrupting teaching time. Teach sleep biology honestly: the circadian phase delay is biological, not behavioural — knowing this changes how students interpret their own tiredness. Treat later start times as a system-level lever, not a student responsibility problem.
Caveats
Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep (2017) contains documented errors — use it as an introduction but verify claims against primary sources. School sleep education reliably produces knowledge gains, not behaviour change; don't conflate the two in programme aims. Interoception teaching is enthusiastically adopted in SEL circles but lacks the RCT evidence base its profile implies.
References
- Crowley, S. J., Acebo, C., & Carskadon, M. A. (2007). Sleep, circadian rhythms, and delayed phase in adolescence.
- Donnelly, J. E., et al. (2016). Physical activity, fitness, cognitive function, and academic achievement in children: ACSM position stand.
- Chesham, R. A., et al. (2018). The Daily Mile makes primary school children more active, less sedentary and improves their fitness and body composition.
- Ma, J. K., Mare, L., & Gurd, B. J. (2014). Classroom-based high-intensity interval activity (FUNtervals) and selective attention.
- Howie, E. K., Schatz, J., & Pate, R. R. (2015). Acute classroom exercise breaks and mathematics performance: A dose-response study.
- Marx, R., et al. (2024). School-based sleep interventions: Systematic review.
- Cortese, S., et al. (2024). Umbrella review of nonpharmacological sleep interventions in youth.
- Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep.