WGI contributes to “CEREPS Consensus Statement on COVID-19 recovery”
Roland Naul, project partner at the Willibald Gebhardt Institute and CEREPS Director for Management and Administration, was heavily involved in a recently publshed CEREPS “Consensus Statement on COVID-19 Recovery”.
At the CEREPS Summit 2021 in Bratislava the executive board of CEREPS decided to elaborate recommendations and actions under hygiene standards to maintain with school-based physical education and school sport during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, in fall 2021, school closures and other lockdowns across Europe already effected the physical and psychosocial health of children and adolescents, as many national studies on COVID-19 impact have shown.
The Bratislava Summit was the starting point to launch a collection and analysis of COVID-19 studies on children and adolescents, their parents and PE teachers, and assess how pre-COVID-19 developments of physical activity, active lifetime behaviour and quality of wellbeing changed due to the consequences of national lock down policies for schools and other institutions in Europe. Furthermore, the task was to detect important items and steps for recovery of physical education and school sport after the COVID-19 pandemic.
A working group was established on behalf of CEREPS. An intermediate report of project results was a part of the CEREPS Summit 2022 at Cork University College in May 2022. Only recently in August, the project finished with a CEREPS “Consensus Statement on recovery of PE and school sport from COVID-19 lockdowns”. The Consensus Statement includes two parts:
– a list of recommendations and proposed actions to take during and after the Corona lockdowns CEREPS_Consensus-Statement_Recommendations-for-actions.pdf, and
– an extended Corona review study on different pre-Corona developments compared with results after one or more lockdowns during the years of 2020 and 2021 CEREPS_Consensus-Statement_Scientific-background.pdf.