Like many, I’ve just watched the Lionesses dominate Sweden to win their European Cup Semi-Final.

It was a thrilling exhibition of where opportunity, coaching, practice and effort combined will take you. A team that had earned the right to rank amongst the best in the world.

Yet I was also reminded of the contradictions which exist – here in 2022 – when it comes to girls playing sport.

Now, as a middle aged male headteacher, I am painfully aware that I have no lived experience when it comes to being a girl and their perceptions (and more importantly role-models) when it comes to sport and physical activity. But I have made some observations over the years…

Not long ago (and by that I mean probably nearly 10 years), the DfE (under Michael Gove) published a report which basically said that girls didn’t like sports very much and maybe schools should teach things like Cheerleading in PE classes to ‘up’ participation. This report also suggested running as a punishment for poor behaviour…

Around the same time (2011), Blackhorse was deliberately trying to get good at something (having not been good at very much previously). We happened upon sport because the 2012 Olympics were coming up and both myself and the new DHT had been PE leaders as NQTs. I started a running group, which I called ‘Track Team’ to sound a bit cooler. 12 children turned up – mostly girls.

In the intervening 11 years, the school has won over 100 trophies in over 30 different sports. The girls’ trophies outweigh the boys’ 2:1.

A couple of years ago, the government began a campaign to get more women into sport called ‘This Girl Can’.

It was a good campaign and was well received. However, if you were a girl at Blackhorse, then I reckon you’d have found it pretty patronising.

Our girls know they can.

At least as well as the boys – sometimes better.

And this is my first observation. The problem isn’t the girls – it never was. The problem is how girls’ and women’s sport is presented in media (or more often how it is simply airbrushed out of history). If you have few visible role models then other, very real, narratives fill the void. Many reports over the years (including the DfE one which argued for a dumbed down girls’ PE curriculum) identified girls’ perceptions of sport and exercise as a key barrier. Only last week a report showed that years of negative (or even just absent) stories about exercise influence outcomes into adulthood.

But it need not be this way.

You see, if you’re a Blackhorse girl, from the age of four, you will have watched older girls walking up to the front of Friday’s Celebration assembly and having shiny things put around their necks. You will have heard stories of daring and pluck. Of coming from behind. Of effort and practice – never of talent (it’s not a thing at Blackhorse) – you get good by trying really hard week after week! You will have seen certificates from dozens of local sports clubs awarded to girls showing you that this is something you too could get involved in.

As a Blackhorse girl in Track Team, you will have had an 18 year old Alumnus, who runs and swims for the county, turn up and help train you every week. At competitions, you will have had Year 11 girls (also ex-pupils – and previous Track Team champions) turn up to cheer you on (and run the last 1/2 mile with you as pacers).

In short, you will have grown up knowing this is something you can do. You will see sport as just something you get involved in. It is a strong narrative which leads many of our girls to continue participating in sport throughout Secondary School – supported by a strong local Sports Partnership and local sports clubs who actively promote and invest in girl’s participation.

That said, we have plenty to work on. We have seen what can happen when this constant narrative is broken. Two years of Covid and no positive messaging reduced the number of girls attending sports clubs significantly – particularly in Years 5 and 6, when those crucial ‘is this something for me?’ opinions are being formed. As a result, we and we are struggling to get our oldest girls reengaged at the same level and for the first time in a decade couldn’t put out a Year 6 girls’ Cross-country team (although other sports were better supported).

We also haven’t cracked universal participation. Disadvantaged girls (although given priority places at all clubs) who have less access to out of school clubs still don’t access sport in the same numbers as other groups which are over represented.

Which is why the Women’s National Football team finally breaking through in the media and getting record viewing figures is something everyone working in education should seek to exploit as it offers a chance to change the narrative and with it the messages girls are internalising about sport.

If we choose to complicity endorse a narrative where girls’ are side-lined in sports (even at a Primary school level), then we do our girls a huge disservice.

So my question for us school leaders is this…

If I’m a young girl, am I constantly bombarded with positive stories about sport and physical activity? And not just competitive activity – but something which is part of everyone’s life? Is this the most compelling narrative? Is it strong enough to counter a whole culture which is constructed to tell girls that this is ‘for the boys’ and ‘not what cool girls do?’

My hope, and fear, is that twenty years from now, society lambasts schools’ (and government’s) current efforts to encourage girls’ into sport as woefully patronising and inept. Of trying to tell girls that it is their fault that too few positive narratives within the media exist for them to follow, and that it is therefore their fault that they don’t chose to engage in physical activity.

Because ‘If you can’t see it; you can’t be it.’