School Schedules: Active Breaks to Rethink School Days and Combat Sedentary Lifestyles
The report by the Citizens’ Convention on Children’s Time, published at the end of 2025, points out that current school schedules are not well aligned with children’s needs. Wouldn’t regularly offering children active breaks be a promising way to reinvent the school day?
Sylvain Wagnon, University of Montpellier; Rémi Richard, University of Montpellier and Sihame Chkair, University of Montpellier
Released on November 22, 2025, the report by the Citizens’ Convention on Children’s Schedules noted that the structure of the French school day remains ill-suited to students’ biological and cognitive rhythms.
He calls for a major overhaul of school schedules, urging a rethinking not only of the timetable but also of how attention, rest, physical activity, and learning are balanced. From this perspective, wouldn’t offering students active breaks—that is, short periods of physical exercise, warm-ups, or relaxation throughout the day—be a particularly promising approach?
Increasing physical activity among children: a public health emergency
In 2024 in France, only 33% of girls and 51% of boys aged 6 to 17 meet the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations: at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each day. At the same time, between school, commuting, meals, and screen time, they spend long hours being sedentary.
This reality poses particular challenges for schools: how can they keep students engaged when they are forced to sit still for long hours? How can they prevent attention problems, fatigue, or anxiety? These questions are all the more urgent given that the French school system is among those with the highest number of classroom hours for children throughout their schooling,
One clarification before we continue: be careful not to confuse a sedentary lifestyle with a lack of physical activity.
A sedentary lifestyle refers to the time spent sitting or lying down while awake, with very low energy expenditure. It is therefore possible to be physically active according to WHO recommendations (for example, running three times a week) while still being very sedentary if one remains seated for more than eight hours a day. Conversely, physical inactivity means not meeting the recommended physical activity thresholds (at least 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity activity).
These two aspects interact but are not the same, as noted in the Knowledge Guide on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior published by the French National Authority for Health in 2022.
A relatively recent concept in public health, this distinction only gained widespread acceptance in the 2000s, when large-scale studies showed that the risks associated with a sedentary lifestyle (diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers) existed independently of a lack of physical activity.
Active breaks: moving around together for a few minutes
An active break refers to a short period of 5 to 15 minutes of physical activity that is incorporated directly into study or work time. It consists of four phases: warm-up, cardio or motor exercises, coordination or balance activities, and a cool-down involving stretching or breathing exercises.
It requires neither a dedicated room nor any special equipment. Its effectiveness depends on consistency: several times a day, between work or learning sessions. While the activities may vary depending on the context and age group, they should not be confused with recess, motor skills activities, or physical education. https://www.youtube.com/embed/fLAlm8qT4Lw?wmode=transparent&start=0 Example of an active break (Faculty of Sports Sciences, Marseille).
Since then, numerous studies have confirmed that physical activity stimulates brain plasticity and memory. Studies in cognitive psychology show that just a few minutes of movement are enough to boost sustained attention and concentration. Public health experts have established that breaking up sedentary periods reduces stress and prevents musculoskeletal disorders.
At school: learning better through movement
For the past decade, studies and experiments conducted in Quebec as part of the “À mon école, on s’active” project have highlighted the importance of this type of activity. In France, the Ministry of National Education has adopted a policy of daily physical activity (APQ) to ensure that every elementary school student engages in at least 30 minutes of physical activity each day. This measure, launched by the government at the start of the 2022 school year, is implemented by only 42% of elementary schools, according to a Senate report from September 2024. https://www.youtube.com/embed/p6vSGOnYlvw?wmode=transparent&start=0 Thirty Minutes of Daily Physical Activity (Ministry of National Education, 2024)
This initiative helps mitigate the lack of physical activity, but does not necessarily reduce sedentary behavior. The French guidelines, updated in 2016, clearly distinguish between these two aspects: the benefits of regular physical activity do not always offset the harmful effects of time spent sitting. To be effective, educational policies must therefore address both increasing the amount of physical activity and reducing prolonged periods of inactivity. The April 2025 flash report on physical and sports activity and obesity prevention in schools reaffirmed the urgent need for a comprehensive educational policy.
In this context, active breaks are presented as a complementary approach: they are intended to improve concentration and memory, reduce restlessness , and help manage student behavior and the school environment.
Active breaks cannot be activities isolated from the rest of the learning process; they are an integral part of a holistic education that takes into account not only the mind (the intellect), but also the body (movement, coordination) and the heart (emotional regulation). This vision was theorized by the libertarian educator Paul Robin in themid-19thcentury and could be adopted by the secular public school system.
A revolution in our relationship with time
As stated in the November 2025 report by the Citizens’ Convention on Children’s Time, students’ school days must be completely reimagined, striking a better balance between intellectual demands, physical needs, and rest periods.
Incorporating active breaks into daily routines is not just a fad, but a profound transformation of the way we work and learn. They reintroduce rhythm, breathing, and movement as essential elements of any intellectual activity. This is a topic that has already been extensively studied in academia and in the professional world, where active breaks are becoming increasingly common.
With pauses set aside for silence, daydreaming, or rest, they create a true ecology of time that is more attuned to human needs.
These active breaks at school are just the first step. Taking it a step further would involve integrating movement into the very heart of the learning process, for example through the use of active furniture or teaching approaches that combine walking with learning.
The fight against a sedentary lifestyle could then provide an opportunity to rethink our educational methods more broadly, by promoting an approach in which attention, the body, and knowledge evolve throughout all school settings. Promoting these practices means choosing a society that focuses on prevention rather than one that tries to fix problems, and that nurtures attention rather than exhausting it.
Sylvain Wagnon, Professor of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Montpellier; Rémi Richard, Associate Professor of Sociology of Sport and Disability, University of Montpellier and Sihame Chkair, PhD and Researcher in Health Economics and Educational Sciences, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.