Childcare is a critical target for promoting children’s physical activity (PA) and physical literacy (PL). With emerging evidence about the efficacy of policy and capacity-building strategies, more information about how to bring these strategies to scale is needed. This paper describes implementation at scale of Appetite to Play (ATP), a capacity-building intervention for childcare providers, and examines the implementation and impact on early years providers’ capacity to address PA. The ATP implementation evaluation was a natural experiment that utilized a mixed methods concurrent parallel design framed within the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance framework (RE-AIM). Workshop and website tracking assessed reach and adoption. Surveys and interviews with workshop participants and stakeholders assessed satisfaction, implementation, and maintenance. Training reached 60% of British Columbia municipalities and 2700 early years providers. Significant changes in participants’ knowledge and confidence to promote PA and PL were achieved (p > 0.01–0.001). Childcare level implementation facilitators as reported by early years providers included appropriate resources, planning, indoor space, and equipment, whereas weather and space were reported barriers. The stakeholder advisory group viewed the stakeholder network and Active Play policy as facilitators and adjustments to recent shifts in childcare funding and previous initiatives as barriers to implementation. ATP was scalable and impacted provider knowledge, confidence, and intentions. The impact on actual policies and practices, and children’s PA needs to be assessed along with sustainability.

Background: The aim of this study was to determine the feasibility of an intergenerational-physical-activity leadership intervention. Intergenerational programs offer benefits to both the young and the old and physical activity (PA) is a novel approach. Findings: Both groups had high levels of satisfaction, leadership confidence, and intention to use what they learned; there was significantly more equipment and organized activities on the playground; and both age groups displayed positive affect during interactions. Conclusions: An intergenerational-physical-activity leadership intervention is feasible and has potential for encouraging PA and intergenerational interaction but needs further study.

Physical activity (PA) is critical to early childhood health and development, and childcare is a key setting for establishing physically active play. In British Columbia (BC), a provincial standard for active play in childcare was enacted, identified here as the Active Play (AP) standard. Pragmatic constraints limit real-world data collection for evaluating policy impact. We explored whether information about policies, practices, and the environment varied when it was collected from managers or staff. Surveys were distributed to BC childcare centers before AP standard enactment to ascertain current PA and fundamental movement skill policies and practices. The full sample (n = 1037 from 625 facilities) and a subsample of paired managers and staff (n = 261 centers) were used to explore agreement across managers and staff in reported prevalence and relationships among indicators. The policy prevalence and relationships for active play and outdoor play variables were relatively similar for manager and staff data, although the matched data had modest agreement and less than optimal intraclass correlations. The prevalence of manager-reported PA policies ranged from 47% for screen-time limits to 77% for fundamental movement skill activities. The manager and staff data highlighted indoor and outdoor space as a primary factor in AP standard adherence. With reliance on sampling staff unfeasible, it appears that the manager data may adequately describe the policies and practices of childcare providers with some notable issues.