'Active Break Ever Day' challenge launched

Minister for Education and Youth, Hildegarde Naughton, and Minister of State for Public Health and Well-being, Jennifer Murnane O’Connor, today launched the ‘Active Break Every Day’ challenge and called on primary, post-primary and special schools to sign up to take part.

The initiative, a collaboration between the Active School Flag programme, Healthy Ireland and the GAA, will take place from 19 January to 13 February 2026 and will support teachers to build short movement breaks into their daily routine.

As one of a series of Active School Flag initiatives run throughout the academic year, this challenge provides schools with a suite of short, classroom-based movement break videos in English and Irish. A different set of videos is released each week across the four weeks of the challenge, with all filmed around Croke Park.

Recognising the role of this challenge in the context of the ‘More Schools, More Active, More Often’ motto of the Active School Flag programme, Minister Naughton was keen to encourage broad participation.

Minister Naughton said: “The Active Schools Flag programme has been a key initiative for over 15 years in supporting school communities to become more physically active. Initiatives such as the ‘Active Break Every Day’ challenge are fun and inclusive and can help us to develop positive habits around moving more and sitting less.

“It is fantastic that the GAA have joined with ourselves and the Department of Health to help develop a challenge that will capture the imagination of our pupilsstudents and teachers and create lots of opportunities for activity, joy and friendship in our classrooms at this time of year. The movement break videos include lots of interesting facts, supporting the integration of physical activity with teaching and learning.”

This call for broad participation was echoed by Jennifer Murnane O’Connor, T.D., Minister of State at the Department of Health with special responsibility for Public Health, Wellbeing and the National Drugs Strategy.

Minister Murnane O’Connor said: “One of my key priorities as Minister is the promotion of physical activity for children and young people. My department has worked closely with the Department of Education and Youth for some time now to develop the Active School Flag programme. Through supporting school communities with more opportunities to bring physical activity into the classroom, the ‘Active Break Every Day’ challenge echoes our National Physical Activity Guidelines. Developing these healthy behaviours at a young age helps lay the foundations for a more active and healthy population in the future.”

Uachtarán Chumann Lúthchleas Gael Jarlath Burns said: “The GAA’s collaboration with education goes back to our very foundation when we were established by a teacher in Michael Cusack, and for the last 141 years we have worked successfully together to enrich the lives of generations of Irish people. These Croke Park Activity Breaks provide today’s teachers with an opportunity to nurture children in their physical and mental wellbeing and also culturally, in terms of passing on an interest in our national games and in using the iconic setting of Croke Park to do so. I wish to commend the Ministers and Departments of Education and Health on this partnership with our Games Development Department and on the novel approach to bringing sport and exercise into the classroom.”

Schools that wish to find out more or register to take part in the challenge can do so at the links below.

• Find Out More HERE
• Register for the Challenge HERE