As the schools are settling back into the new term and holidays become a distant memory, it’s interesting to reflect on what an amazing summer it’s been for women and girls in sport, and consider that success in the wider context of how we are (or aren’t) enabling girls, and children more generally, to be more physically active.

England’s women’s hockey team took gold at the 2022 Commonwealth Games for the first time ever, part of a wider Birmingham 2022 competition that for the first time saw more medal events for women than men. And who can forget how the Lionesses did what their men’s equivalent have been unable to achieve and secured the European title back on the last day of July. A stunning achievement given that we must remember that in 1921, English football’s governing body passed a resolution declaring the sport “quite unsuitable for females”, and football in stadiums was banned for women until as recently as the 1970s!  Access to facilities, coaching, pathways and professional set-ups for women are only very, very recent constructs when looking at the timeline of football in this country more broadly. 

But away from marvelling at the on-the-pitch achievements of Earps, Daly, Stanway, Toone and Russo et al, it’s an interesting time to focus on girls’ participation in sport and physical activity more generally. 

The figures from Sport England’s latest Active Lives CYP survey (for the academic year 2020/2021), show that 44.6% of children and young people, that’s 3.2m individuals, are meeting the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines of taking part in sport and physical activity for an average of 60 minutes or more every day. However, worryingly, 2.3m children and young people (32.4%) do less than an average of 30 minutes a day (therefore being classed as “less active”). Whilst the gap between girls’ and boys’ physical activity levels is decreasing, this is only because there has been a drop in activity levels for boys that brings them in line with girls’ activity levels, with girls having already traditionally been less likely to take part. Neither of those trends is a good one. 

Shortly after their famous victory, the Lionesses penned an open letter to the two Conservative party leadership candidates, calling out the fact that only 63% of girls can play football in their PE lessons. And let’s not forget that in terms of PE lessons, we’re talking about many schools not even providing 2 hours/week of PE, so when you do the maths, even the 63% aren’t getting a significant amount of access to football, or indeed other sports and activities, through PE each year.  

Whilst here at Rise we wholeheartedly support the need to increase both the quantity of PE available, and the number of appropriately qualified PE teachers to deliver it, we also want to ensure that other opportunities for physical activity within the school day and beyond, for boys and non-binary pupils, as well as for girls, are maximised. Otherwise, the already worrying 32.4% “less active” statistic mentioned above will likely only go in an unfavourable direction. 

In addition to at least 2 hours of high quality, engaging PE lessons per week, and in addition to PE becoming a core national curriculum subject in schools (as recommended by the House of Lords Sport and Recreation Committee last year), it’s imperative that all our children and young people are encouraged to move more by the systems within which they find themselves. 

One of those key systems is of course the education system, and so the widespread adoption of approaches such as the Creating Active Schools (CAS) Framework are essential to ensuring that physical activity can be embedded throughout a school, and not just in those (2 hours of) PE lessons. But we must also collectively consider the other systems within which our children grow up. 

As a society, how are we facilitating their ability to actively travel to school, for example? Do we encourage and support School Streets (the closure of streets around schools at the start and end of the day) or do we just look for the problems that it might cause for onward commutes to jobs after the school run, or the removal of a cut-through that means minutes might be added to a journey? 

As adults, do we frown upon young people gathering in parks and assume they must be engaging in some form of anti-social behaviour, yet never question that as adults we might choose to ‘gather’ with our friends or family for a picnic but never equate the two things as being the same? 

As ‘grown ups’, do we also assume we know how we should design parks to make them inviting spaces for young people to be active? Or, like the charity Make Space for Girls, do we listen to the voice of young people and acknowledge that actually, a MUGA (multi-use games area) could actually be viewed as a turn off from activity, for both boys and girls (see the Make Space for Us Insight Report)? 

If you’re interested in how moving more can support children and young people’s health and wellbeing, check out some of the case studies we’ve been involved with at the Rise website here.