Increasing uptake of the NSW Government’s Active Kids Voucher

None listed

The NSW Government’s Active Kids Voucher is a program designed to help families meet the cost of getting their kids into sport and active fitness and recreation activities. The initiative aims to reduce barriers to participation and help change the physical activity behaviours of children and young people in NSW. The NSW Government will provide a $100 voucher to parents/guardians of school enrolled children aged 4.5 to 18 years’ old. The $100 voucher can be used for registration and participation costs for sport and fitness activities and will not be means tested. One voucher will be available for every child in the family annually over the next four years and there will be no limits on the number of applications per family, as long as every child is enrolled in school. From 31 January 2018, parents/guardians/carers with legal responsibility of an eligible child resident in NSW will be able to download a voucher from an online platform, run by Service NSW. Vouchers are valid for redemption in the current calendar year and will expire at the end of each calendar year. The Active Kids Voucher is an opportunity to increase physical activity of children and will therefore be promoted to all schools within the HNE region during usual interaction with schools as part of health service delivery. The identification of strategies to increase the uptake and advantages of the program, are also warranted. The primary aim of this study is to assess the effectiveness of promoting the Active Kids Voucher program to parents using a school based mobile communication platform on voucher redemption. The study will employ a cluster randomised controlled trial (RCT) design including six intervetnion and six control schools. The intervention involves partnering with a third party school app provider - Skoolbag. Skoolbag is an app commonly used by schools to provide a communication platform between school administration and parents. Parents can download the app for free and the school can communicate school events, documentation and messages in a simple, easy to use way. The Skoolbag app will be used to send notifications to parents aimed at increasing uptake of the Active Kids Voucher. The effectiveness of the intervention will be determined by comparing post intervention differences between uptake and redemption of the Active Kids Voucher. The proposed research will be one of the first RCTs of its kind and addresses questions of particular policy relevance.