Ms Aidine O'Reilly:

I thank the Chairman and the joint committee for this opportunity to discuss tackling childhood obesity. I am a former teacher and Real Nation is a company of former teachers, project managers, event managers and designers. We design and run educational programmes.

We apply psychological principles and learning constructs in these programmes to effect behavioural change. We developed Super Troopers in response to reports that only one in five Irish children met the World Health Organization recommended daily guideline of 60 minutes of activity per day. As former teachers, we inherently knew that a simple premise was being overlooked in schools, namely, that physical education was not being used as homework. We considered this to be a missed opportunity and devised an holistic healthy homework programme which was designed to be easy for teachers to implement and children to follow and in which the whole family could get involved. The programme is underpinned by prompting or nudge theory and the content is centred on the three pillars that are important in obesity prevention, namely, physical activity, well-being and nutrition. We knew Laya Healthcare would be the perfect partner for this initiative. From the outset, the company has demonstrated considerable commitment and passion and been instrumental in helping us to evolve and grow the programme in the past four years.