Yes. I think, from a post-pandemic situation, one of the things it's really interesting to hear the team from the Urdd reference is the girls' engagement. I think it was really telling that, through the pandemic, girls were able to find and got used to adapting to activities online and found different activities, whereas, typically, boys, who are more inclined to be involved in team sports, which stopped over the pandemic, found it much harder to find an alternative. So, I think there's a big call to action, and there has been, to educators to ensure that whatever it was girls were experiencing more positively through the online environment, potentially different activities, different environments, they've been able to sustain that. And the narrative from teachers is they took lots of lessons from it.
But I think the return to participation has been positive, because young people articulated in lots of the research that they'd recognised, potentially based on the messaging that was coming out nationally, how, 'The only thing you can do is exercise for an hour a day' demonstrates its importance. But we've potentially lost that narrative that was coming centrally—like that was the only thing you could do, it was important, and young people recognised it.
But we have the fastest growing crisis in young people with the obesity levels. So, we've got low-hanging fruit that have got back in, but I think the—. We've just recently done a YouGov poll, and only one in five parents understand and recognise that young people should be exercising for 60 active minutes a day. And that's to avoid disease, not the optimal amount of exercise. So, I think the work being done for us collectively is about educating parents and families on the significant importance of 60 active minutes a day as a minimum. I think 9 per cent of children and young people met that in Wales throughout the pandemic period. These are really, really big issues for us and potentially a ticking time bomb.
And the other one was about 83 per cent of parents feeling that their children are spending too much time online. So, again, our responsibility to consider how, for those of you that are interested in the world of employment, sport can be a place where human skills are developed that are going to be really critical for the world of employment later on. So, part of our work is about helping educators present the message of the importance of physical activity on your cardiovascular part—your physical health—and the role of sport in creating well-rounded young people when lots of life is being spent online. So, that's the work that we're doing in terms of messaging around PE, sports post pandemic, given lots of young people were not active through that period.
And there are some great examples. There's one Welsh example that we—. Basically, the Youth Sport Trust didn't do anything; we just sought schools that took an approach to an active-recovery curriculum in supporting young people's recovery. They built in active pedagogy. So, their lessons were taught though physical activity—their numeracy and literacy lessons. They increased physical activity, potentially, at the start of the day, using things like the daily mile, which many schools utilise. They built in longer breaks at lunch and break time, recognising that the young people weren't necessarily well coming back to school and needed that time to recover. So, we've got some great case studies of schools that used different approaches that put physical activity at the heart of their recovery curriculum to support young people's return.