Secondary School Staff Engagement With a School-Based Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior Initiative Website: Implementation Trial During National Scale-Up

Online platforms are increasingly used to deliver training and implementation resources for large-scale, school-based physical activity initiatives, and understanding behavioral engagement with these platforms is important because it provides an early indicator of initiative uptake; yet, few studies have examined engagement during real-world scale-up.

This study examined school staff engagement with the TransformUs website and its associated factors during the first 22 months of national scale-up in secondary schools.

As part of an implementation trial, engagement metrics were obtained from the TransformUs website (October 2023 through August 2025) using Google Analytics, and user and school characteristics were derived from registration data on the TransformUs website and the My School Australia database. Engagement metrics were summarized descriptively (eg, number and frequency of pages accessed, time spent on pages, and content-specific metrics), and associations between staff- and school-level characteristics and engagement outcomes were examined using multivariable linear and logistic regression models.

A total of 200 secondary school staff from 6 Australian states and 2 territories registered for the TransformUs website, of whom 110 were tracked by Google Analytics. Users included school leaders, physical education (PE) teachers, and non-PE teaching staff, with most users being female and working in government schools. Overall engagement was predominantly characterized by single-visit use, with a median of 1 (IQR 1-2) session, and approximately one-third of users accessed only the registration page. Across the study period, users viewed a median of 5 (IQR 2-9) pages and spent a median of 8.4 (IQR 5.2-13.1) minutes on the website. Page reach was highest for general information and teaching resources pages. Compared with schools in Victoria, engagement duration was longer in the Northern Territory (β=2.98 min; P=.01) and South Australia (β=4.05 min; P=.01), while schools with high student-teacher ratios had shorter engagement than those with low student-teacher ratios (β=-3.11 min; P=.01). Compared with low-achieving schools, schools with medium academic achievement had greater odds of accessing implementation resources (odds ratio 4.74, 95% CI 1.26-17.85; P=.02).

Engagement with the TransformUs website during secondary school national scale-up reflected the opportunistic and self-directed nature of engagement with online initiatives in real-world settings. Dissemination during scale-up should not end when users receive the materials but should also ensure meaningful engagement with web-based resources. Future research should measure more meaningful dimensions of engagement and examine school- and user-level factors to better understand determinants of engagement and inform scale-up strategies.