As part of Walsall Council Creative Development Team’s annual SLA with NHS Walsall Healthy Lifestyle Team; a priority focus for 2009/2010 was to commission a project to undertake consultation and evaluation of Walsall’s ‘Family Fun’ scheme as part of NHS Walsall’s physical activity programme.

‘Family Fun’ sessions are funded through NHS Walsall and are one hour sessions that support children aged 4-7yrs and their families to take part in a range of physical activity based games lead by a trained facilitator. Sessions are advertised through ‘Make it Count’ Programme for families living within Walsall.

The aim of the commission was to use creative activities delivered within Walsall’s ‘Family Fun’ activity timetable to consult with existing service users around the sessions currently provided gathering participant feedback to inform the future developments of the service.

Additionally building on the processes and activities delivered within the consultation a further outcome of the project was to develop and produce a creative consultation ‘Family Fun’ toolkit for staff to use to gather anonymous feedback at future sessions alongside self satisfaction survey and comments box etc which were currently used as methods of gathering evaluation responses and feedback. A proto-type was developed through activities delivered within the project with the final toolkit produced for Spring 2010

Walsall Council Creative Development Team worked with Urban Voice Theatre Company Ltd to design and facilitate a programme of interactive creative consultation activities to engage participants in conversation and provide an opportunity to gather their thoughts and comments on ‘Family Fun’.

Through planning meetings with the Physical Activity leads it was agreed that the consultation activities should be game/ physical activity based and promote the ‘Family Fun’ ethos of being fun, enjoyable, accessible and utilise  family focused games.

The request from the Physical Activity staff was that the consultation activities needed to be approximately 15 minutes in length and planned so that they could be facilitated within the one hour timeframe of the regular weekly sessions at each of the programmed venues.

Each 15 minute session focused on gathering participants responses to a series of given questions as agreed with the physical activity leads. :

• What interested participants to come along and how many sessions have you been to?
• What they liked at the sessions? And why?
• How has participating in the sessions made them feel?
• Was there anything they didn’t like about the sessions? And why?
• Anything they would change?
• What would make the session better?
• Is there anything else they would like to do as part of the Family Fit sessions?
• Have they carried on doing any of the activities away from Family Fit?

Consultation activities were facilitated at sessions at arrange of school and community based venues throughout November/December 2010.

All feedback was gathered anonymously unless people requested that they wanted there feedback credited within quotes. Findings were collated and presented to the NHS Community Healthy Physical Activity Team in a report which highlighted feedback and recommendations from service users.

Following the consultation process Urban Voice and Creative Development Team worked with arts worker Pete Chaplin to develop the ‘Family Fun’ toolkit. The concept being a large eye catching and interactive game that can be facilitated as a participatory group activity that by the roll of a dice participants answer a selection of evaluation questions which are combined with physical activity games.

The creative project helped capture the impact that the ‘Family Fun’ sessions are having on participants:

“I have really enjoyed all of it. This is the first physical activity I have ever done and since this I have started going swimming. My son, James, has autism and this is the only activity he does and that he enjoys. He asks everyday when the next Family Fit is going to be. As a family we have joined, the ‘Make it Count’ programme” Parent Participant

The NHS Community Health Physical Activity Team have been left with a bespoke, interactive toolkit that fits well with the ethos of the Family Fun programme and is designed to help capture families views, experiences and feedback on the sessions they access in a fun and active way.

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