Table 2.

Verbatim quotes from Phase Two focus group participants corresponding with higher order and sub-themes identified within Phase One interviews.

Higher Order Theme	Sub-Theme	Example Quote
Understanding of physical literacy	Lack of consensus/awareness	“It’s not something I’ve come across. Physical development, you hear constantly, but physical literacy, I’ve not really heard.” (Particpant1_CentreA)
	Importance of physical literacy for children	“You need all of those things [outlined in definition of physical literacy]. You need to be motivated, don’t you, and be confident, and actually competent as well [to be physically active].” (Particpant2_CentreA)
	Physical competency	“There is a delay in gross motor skills in our children in this area.” (Partcipant1_CentreB)
	Assessment of physical literacy	“We don’t, do we?” (Particpant1_CentreA) “I think we’re not great at measuring things, and we need to get better at that, and that’s something we’re working on at the moment.” (Participant2_CentreB)
Preschool environment and environmental changes	Barriers to implementation	“[A lack of] accessibility, and space, and resources, and money.” (Participant1_CentreD)
	Barriers within preschool environment	“We’ve only got a very small outdoor space in the children’s centre. It’s like a postage stamp. So there’s not much you can do.” (Participant2_CentreD)
	Changes in national policy	“Because with the pressures of the National Curriculum, and the testing children, this has put pressures on schoolteachers to reduce the number of hours that children are spending in physical activity, and I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I think that the more physical activity children have, then the better able they are to be able to do the academic side of their schooling.” (Participant1_CentreC)
	Changes to preschool environment	“We’d like a big outside area, and we’d like a big room. A hall would be nice.” (Participant2_CentreD) “[We’d like] a nice big outdoor space.” (Particpant1_CentreB)
	Greater child focused learning through play	“That’s their [children’s] way of learning anyway, especially in the early years.” (Partcipant4_CentreC)
	Limited seating time for children	“That should be mandatory.” (Participant3_Centre D) “I’d say no more than fifteen [minutes of sitting]. After twenty minutes, you can see the agitation generally, yes.” (Participant2_CentreC)
	Mandatory outdoor play	“Yes, but I do think that the message needs to go across that while the children are doing outdoor play, there is actually something intellectual going on, because otherwise people won’t buy it. Schools wouldn’t buy it, and parents wouldn’t buy it.” (Particpant1_CentreA) “They [parents] don’t take to it [bad weather] very well at all.” (Participant3_CentreA)
	Mobile play equipment	“So I think when they can move things around and make stuff out of it, the concentration and the confidence is there, isn’t it, and they’ll stay for longer, and they’ll work co-operatively as well.” (Particpant2_CentreA)
Programme design and implementation	Collaboration between experts and practitioners	“I mean, you couldn’t just have academics... I mean, that just doesn’t work, so you’d have to have people who were trying to design a programme going and watching groups as well initially, and then discussing and talking, and discussing what would work, saying what your aims and objectives are, and how to reach them, yes.” (Participant3_CentreC)
	Buy in from centre staff	“Staff need to be confident, and believe in what they are delivering, because if you go to a group, and the teacher or whoever it is, is sort of half-hearted and doesn’t believe it themselves, then it’s not going to be successful. So you need to be sort of confident, and believe in what you’re doing as well.” (Participant1_CentreD)
	Primary goal(s) for intervention	“I think a primary goal would be as well, making the parents and the kids, making them educated, making parents the educators. They’re ultimately responsible for their children’s physical development.” (Participant2_CentreD)
	Intervention delivery	“Centre staff, I think are going to be capable of doing it [delivering an intervention], as long as they’ve had the training and everything behind it, yes. I think staff’d be more confident to do it if they’ve got the training and the package and everything behind it.” (Particpant1_CentreA) “I would like it to be so many weeks of say, ourselves doing it, and then a guest coming in to do it, you know, somebody come in.” (Particpant3_CentreA)
	Duration and dosage of intervention	“I think it should just be ongoing.” (Participant4_CentreD)
	Activities and experiences	“Maybe making games and stuff out of everyday materials, or something like that, so it’s affordable for parents as well.” (Participant4_CentreC)
	Outside of the preschool	“And they [children] learn through parents as role models as well, so it’s actually engaging. There’s no point doing loads of activities just for children, if the parents aren’t actually doing the activity as well, and the children don’t follow.” (Particpant3_CentreA)
	Unlimited budget	“If we had an unlimited budget, well, we’d have a fabulous outdoor play area.” (Particpant2_CentreA)
Training for practitioners	Early Years Teacher Training	“It all comes down to training and education, because if you’ve got staff who don’t realise, if they’ve never had the early education, the pre-school learning, then they’ll go, ‘Oh yes, just give them a ball’, and that’s it.” (Participant1_CentreD)
	Understanding of physical literacy	“If we’re professionals, and we don’t understand [physical literacy], and if a parent said, ‘Oh, I don’t know what that is.’ Well, neither do we, sorry. We’ve had no training on it.” (Particpant2_CentreB) “I think there’d have to be a really big push on it [physical literacy], because, I mean, wording’s so important, and language is so important.” (Particpant1_CentreB)
	Understanding of physical activity	“Because it’s always numeracy, and whenever we go on courses, the first thing is communication and language, and maths, or literacy. It never is about being physical.” (Particpant3_CentreA)
	Child development and motor skill competence	“Because people have expectations that are unrealistic of some children, and if the children are, the difference between a child who’s maybe just two, and a child who’s nearly three, in that same room, it’s massive. So they need to be aware of child development, which a lot of them are.” (Particpant2_CentreA) “I think it’d be a good idea, but I think you’d need to look at what the skilled staff already have. We would have a good knowledge as nursery nurses, of a lot of that.” (Participant2_CentreB)“Maybe educate them [centre staff] also about certain kind of activities, what it does to children, what it does to them, because every activity’s different again, and there’s so many.” (Participant4_CentreC) “Yes. Well, you need to know what a child should be doing at a certain age. That’s it, isn’t it? You need to know where they should be.” (Participant5_CentreC)
	Training delivery	“I think you need a variety of approaches. Sometimes it’s good to have in-house training, but it’s also good to go out and see what happens in other areas, and other settings, and pick your best. Teachers are very good at that, taking all the good ideas from other places.” (Participant2_CentreC)