Peer Leadership in Physical Activity

Date: 20 Aug 2026

Peer-led Physical Activity

Peer-led PA isn't a new idea – plenty of NZ schools have tried some version of it over the years, formally or informally. It's also not a straightforward one to get right. PA programmes in schools are genuinely hard to implement well, and peer leadership adds another layer of complexity: training, support, consistency, and buy-in from staff and students alike all have to line up.

Two recent studies have looked directly at what happens when young people are trained to lead physical activity for their peers – one small and local, one large and international. Neither presents peer leadership as a silver bullet, and both come with real limitations worth sitting with. But together, they give us a clearer, more evidence-grounded picture of what this approach can look like in practice, and what tends to make the difference between it working and not.

Two studies, two scales

The first is close to home. A 2024 study by Lockyer, Le Fevre and Vickers (published in Education 3-13) looked at the Born to Move (BTM) programme, in which student leaders run fitness classes for their peers. The researchers surveyed 38 student leaders aged 9–13 across four New Zealand schools about their experience taking on the role. It's a modest sample, and the authors are upfront about that – but as an exploratory study into how young leaders themselves experience the process, it offers a genuinely useful window into what makes peer leadership work, or fall flat, from the inside.

One detail worth noting: BTM isn't left entirely to students to figure out. External facilitators run training days for both the student leaders and their teacher, and the teacher then drives day-to-day delivery in the classroom. 

The second study is a different order of scale entirely. Learning to Lead (L2L), led by Professor David Lubans at the University of Newcastle and published in Contemporary Educational Psychology (Wade et al., 2026), is a cluster randomised controlled trial involving more than 1,800 students across 20 NSW primary schools. Leaders aged 10–12 completed six lessons covering key leadership behaviours, then delivered 12 physical activity sessions to younger peers aged 8–10, grounded in transformational leadership theory. This is about as rigorous as school-based intervention research gets – randomised, controlled, and large enough to detect real effects with confidence.

Different countries, different scales, different methodologies. But the pattern that emerges is strikingly consistent.

Three things both studies tell us

1. The leaders show real gains too – not just the students they teach.
In BTM, student leaders reported gains in confidence and enjoyment, alongside improvements in their own physical activity and fitness levels. In L2L, teachers rated leaders as showing significant improvements in leadership effectiveness, and leaders themselves showed better wellbeing – notably bucking the decline in mental health typically seen as children move toward adolescence – plus a measurable increase in time spent on-task in the classroom. Both research teams are careful to note these are associations observed within their specific programmes and samples, not guarantees that any peer-leadership initiative will produce the same result.

2. The benefit doesn't stop with the leaders.
This is where L2L's scale really pays off – with a sample large enough to detect peer-level effects with confidence. Younger students taught by peer leaders showed higher perceived motor competence, more minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity during the school day, and improved cardiorespiratory fitness. Peer leadership, done well, seems to create a genuine ripple effect rather than simply transferring the same programme from an adult deliverer to a younger one.

3. Structure and scaffolding matter – a lot.
Neither programme treats "peer leadership" as a matter of simply handing students a task and stepping back. BTM leaders identified school-based support – practice time, a teacher-facilitator, dedicated teaching resources, and the external facilitator training days – as far more valuable than home practice or parental input. L2L built an explicit six-lesson leadership curriculum into the programme before any delivery began. The message from both is the same: leadership skill isn't assumed to be innate or self-taught. It's built through deliberate instruction, ideally supported by both a trained adult in the room and a clear framework for what "leading well" actually looks like.

The BTM study's authors flag its small sample (38 leaders, four schools) as a real limit on how far the findings can be generalised, and note the research only captured the leaders' own perspectives – not those of the teachers, principals, or the younger students being led, which they identify as an important gap for future work. L2L is a far larger and more rigorously controlled trial, but it was also resource-intensive to run: it required dedicated training workshops for school champions, a structured six-lesson leadership curriculum, and close implementation support across 20 schools – conditions that took considerable planning and funding to put in place. 

What both studies suggest is that the conditions matter more than the specific programme brand: explicit training for the leaders, a supported role for the classroom teacher, and a clear structure rather than an unscaffolded "just have a go." Beyond that, there's plenty of room for schools to shape something that fits their own context, their own tamariki, and their own staffing realities.

References

Lockyer, P. A., Le Fevre, D. M., & Vickers, M. H. (2024). Peer-to-peer leadership of physical activity in the New Zealand school-based setting: an exploration of student leader perspectives. Education 3-13.

Wade, L., Beauchamp, M. R., Nathan, N., Smith, J. J., Leahy, A. A., Bao, R., Kennedy, S. G., Boyer, J., Diallo, T. M. O., Beacroft, S., & Lubans, D. R. (2026). Effects of a school-based leadership program on student leaders and their peers: The Learning to Lead cluster randomized controlled trial. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 84.