Boys and girls doing different sports in PE

[Notemma]

DD is in Y7 at a small Independent school, 80 kids per year. The whole year does PE at the same time and it’s split into boys/girls then a top set boys and top set girls, bottom set boys and bottom set girls.
DD is quite sporty, does lots of athletics outside of school. At school they do 6 sports over the year Cross Country, Swimming & Athletics every year. Then on the school website it says they will rotate through “Rugby, netball, volleyball, tennis, badminton, basketball, hockey and football”. DD has been looking forward to trying rugby, so decided to ask her teacher when they would be doing it and she was told girls don’t do rugby. DD was quite upset when she got home as she had been looking forward to it.
I decided to call the school and clarify, I was told that boys don’t do netball or hockey and the girls don’t do rugby.

AIBU to think it’s unacceptable to not offer all sports to all children? I don’t mind the classes being separated by sex and ability but I think every class should do the same sports. Should I complain?

My dd plays rugby but yabu to insist that a school has it in school time as many parents would not be happy with their DD's playing rugby, I think it should be elective and in a small school setting there is unlikely to be enough girls playing. I refused to sign the consent forms until she was 16 and understood the dangers

@Dotjones

What the?????

My 6ft 1 dh plays hockey. His dad played hockey for England! It's not a "girls sport"

My 5'1 dd plays rugby internationally

This was the case at my school more than 20 years ago. A large enough group of us were furious and insisted that if we weren’t treated equally we would protest the lesson by sitting in silence.

We were then given a terms worth (6) lessons of rugby. To be honest rugby for teen girls who don’t have any experience in the sport, it was more about throwing, catching and learning the rules. There was nothing at all dangerous but we did get incredibly muddy and took ages getting changed.

Unlikely they will change the status quo if one person complains but if enough do there’s really no reason girls shouldn’t have an intro to rugby.

Hockey is still a core boy's team sport at most of the major private and public schools in the UK- tends to be rugby/hockey/ cricket on termly rotation - and at most universities. Girls rotation is hockey/netball/ cricket . A few now offering football instead of hockey but that gives you the risk of being mediocre at both vs schools with a single focus as it splits the sporty kids.

As an ex rugby player myself, with a DD who now plays seriously at U14, IMO touch can be fun but it's not really rugby - netball is a lot more fun as a "passing" sport although gets an underserved bad rap - plus does "boys play contact, girls play touch" really address the problem of boys and girls doing different sports?

Re. contact for girls in school, the problem is that you are likely to have little to no experience base at all in terms of girls who play out of school vs the boys where I'd put money on the fact that most of the first team play outside school as well. Grassroots girls rugby is really in its infancy although some new initiatives are supporting the growth of the girls game at U12/14/16 now. This makes introducing contact rugby in a "carousel" system like the OP's DD's school really challenging because most new players will take at least a full season to get comfortable with tackling/ rucking, and it's a complicated sport in terms of the roles of each of the positions (albeit I suppose they could play 7's which is easier). I'm just not sure they'd get much out of it doing half a term from total scratch and then not playing again for a year. Schools that offer girls rugby seriously are often large and have major overlap/ties between club and school, and it's the club that comes first in terms of how they learn, not the school- often the clubs are using the schools to grow the game through coaching partnerships etc.

However, I'd encourage your DD to join a club - they almost always accept new players mid season and are generally v friendly and inclusive. Most will let you do a few trial sessions without paying to see if you like it. There is a "pitch up and play" format that means smaller clubs can get games even if they don't have a full squad so don't be put off by smaller clubs.

6 weeks of rugby in PE in year 7 lit a fire in my DD that has been incredible to watch. Having never played it before, she now absolutely loves the sport, plays for a local team, trains twice a week, coaches once a week, and has gained so much confidence. Rugby was also relatively quick to come out in support of keeping teams single sex which was reassuring for us that she would only ever be playing against other girls.

There is extremely limited contact in PE rugby in our experience - there’s so much training involved in teaching them proper contact that it would likely be unsafe to do anything else. In the same way they’re not generally lunging in with two-footed tackles in football during lessons either. It was a brilliant way to have a taster of the sport though and I hope more girls get the opportunity.

But no, it’s not risk free. In two years of playing we’ve luckily not suffered any head injuries at all, but plenty of bruises along the way. Earlier I saw a premiership player has just been released due to post-concussion syndrome following a pre-season injury. So there is always that to be mindful of. Having said that, DH had weeks off work following a concussion suffered in a cricket match and has suffered more serious injuries from hockey and (bizarrely) running than he has playing rugby. It’s a balance between costs and benefits for us and as long as we maintain confidence in the coaches, clubs, referees and first aiders, we’re comfortable for her to continue playing.

Our local field hockey club has just as large a men's section as women's. The primary aged kids play together and it's very mixed boys and girls.

As for rugby, yes the school could definitely offer touch rugby for the girls and it is a shame they don't. If your DD was so minded she could get a group of interested female friends together and lobby the HT to at least have one block of it. I hated netball at school and was so so on hockey and only when I went to Uni and got to try out a wider range of sports did I realise how athletic I actually was.

My daughter loves rugby. Competitive rugby is mixed sex in primary here in Scotland. The girls in the team were no worse than the boys at scrums and tackling, and the best player in my girls primary team was a girl. Gets a lot tougher for girls to keep playing in secondary due to it being hard to get enough girls for a team. Shame. It’s a great sport - just so much better than netball which is one of the most boring and pointless sports ever!

Sort of. Boys don’t play field hockey they play ice hockey. We divide American football for boys and field hockey for girls. Netball
isnt A NA thing - we play basketball.

There's absolutely no physical reason why snooker can't be played by women. It's a hangover from the days when it was a 'pub' sport, and women weren't frequenters of pubs.

Ditto darts, although my grandmother was in a darts league for decades.

The reason some sports are 'men's' sports IS primarily because women historically weren't given the option to play them. Football is a prime example of how much that narrative can be changed when we stop telling women what sorts are and aren't 'theirs'.

As a girl, I hated netball. If I'd been offered football, I'd have taken it over netball any day of the week. I'd have loved to try cricket. Sadly, attitudes like yours meant I never got the chance.

Oh, god, so with you on netball. Dull as ditchwater.

If your super athletic daughter is desperate to try rugby then take her to a rugby club. But I can guarantee you that next to none of the girls would have any interest in doing that for PE.

I think there is a lot of internalised misogyny towards netball since it's one of few sports played almost exclusively by girls and women. There's a sad undertone of "well if men dont play it it cant be a good sport or they'd want to". Ultimately, it's a fast paced, high scoring game that requires a very high level of fitness. There's nothing boring about it. It's also growing a lot in the UK and I imagine the new super league will help that further by increasing interest as a spectator sport. It doesn't need to be either/or anyway - most of DD's rugby friends play netball too. It works well as netball league is Saturday/ rugby is Sunday.

When I was at school many girls simply hated sports that were done outside in the rain/cold. I don't think it mattered what it was, if it needed boots it was rubbish. It's really deflating for those who do excel at it, because you need teammates and opponents. You can stretch someone in maths with extra questions but you can't at team sport so easily, especially if the teacher is not a high level specialist in that sport. I think there's generally more interested/enthusiastic boys so you can stretch the high performers. When I was at school it was the teams/clubs in lunchtime and after school that really enabled you to enjoy and improve as these were mixed age group so you had older kids and also generally enthusiastic participants. For PE boys played cricket and girls played rounders. Not sure why as cricket is non-contact. We weren't allowed to play rugby nor basketball, but there were school teams for girls in both (no cricket team). Boys didn't do hockey or netball and there weren't school teams for them either, despite one of the mens teachers captaining a local 1st XI hockey team. Girls did football indoors (like 5-aside and skills) but never on the big pitch. We also did dance and gymnastics. Everyone did (and mostly loathed) cross country, and athletics in the summer.

I think traditional 'girls' sports lack a bit of grunt and physicality. I found netball frustrating because the rules made it seem so delicate. If you watch high level netball it's actually much better, much faster and a lot of the work is off the ball which is probably why school netball is dullAF because if you don't have a sporting brain you won't grasp that, so playing is crap if your team is one other decent person and 4 more concerned about their hair/makeup/how they appear to the boys/not getting sweaty, and you can't pass the ball to them because of the limitations of the positions.

Source is obviously my own school and not much else. I was sportswoman of the year twice in 5 years, played in the y10/11 hockey team in y7, 5 sports to county level and one to national, so have the opinion of a 'frustrated by girls PE, despite the best efforts of the teachers (they were genuinely good, and coached sports outside of school too/still play sports for local teams)'

OP school PE is rubbish if your kid is good at it, because they have to set lessons for the lowest common denominator. Get into clubs in and out of school.

@JarvisIsland I agree with your observations but I think that a lot of the difference in attitude between girls and boys comes down to socialisation. Boys get a lot more social capital from sport than girls so even boys who don't like it feel pressurised to pretend they do, whereas for girls often the opposite is often true - basically both boys and girls are impressed by sporty boys, girls are sometimes impressed by other sporty girls and boys don't really care much whether a girl is sporty or not. Back when I was at school this was more pronounced so the coolest girls were avidly anti sport.

I agree with you re netball that one of the problems was (not so much now to be fair because YouTube) that you didn't ever see what it was supposed to look like- I remember my mum somehow got us tickets to an international friendly at our local sports centre and I was like "omg" because I felt like I'd totally misunderstood the game for all 5 years I'd been playing it- we were so static compared to them. It was also so much more physical in terms of the marking/ blocking etc. I really enjoy watching the top teams in the U16/18 league in our town because it's so fast. They're barely landing before they pass (unlike at school where someone would get blown up for holding every 10 seconds ).

Can't disagree. School netball was ponderously slow and tedious. I thought for years only schoolgirls played it because I saw and heated nothing of adult netball.
School netball was a massive turnoff for me. It felt like we were fobbed off with this crap, boring game because we were girls.

Is it not more the 'you can't do this' that's annoying for girls? I appreciate the head injury problem. Do helmets help at all for Rugby?

At school level, PE might be driven by what will fit into the curriculum/timetable, and around staff availability. I went to an all girls school, so we were never offered rugby or football, but we did play cricket, and all the usual stuff like hockey, netball, athletics, tennis, rounders. It was a very old school, so we only had a tiny little gym and no sports hall, but we did have a whacking great big Leisure Centre next door, so we had an afternoon access to try all sorts of more unusual things like Trampolining, Archery, Fencing. I actually took up my favourite team game when I went to Teacher Training College, Lacrosse! And boy was that rough. (I once got sent off in an Inter Uni match at Trentbridge😈)

Girls/Women’s Rugby is very popular round here, as is Hockey for both sexes.

They can’t do everything. If she wants to play rugby could she try an out of school club?

I agree with this.
The point of rotating different games and sports in (at least) KS3 is that everyone gets to try out different sports. Some people will hate some of them and others will find a new love in something they never would have thought to try. Saying "I would have hated doing rugby" rather misses the point. My ds hated French, but he still had to do it.

All of this. I did play rugby for a club (the only girl) till I had to move to the ladies team & at the time that meant moving from full contact to touch - so I stopped.

At school I kicked up such a stink about not being able to play rugby or football that the teacher got so sick of me she let me take a group off by myself to play during PE.

I did play netball too fwiw.

Out of curiosity, when the kids are split into their pink and blue sports, do the girls still have to wear gym-shorts (hot pants) & sports skirt (mini skirt)?

Scrum caps are traditionally more about protecting players’ ears in the scrum, and generally protecting heads from cuts and scrapes. I think evidence of efficacy against concussion is more mixed.

What's stopping you sending her to rugby lessons outside of school, if she's so 'sporty'?

I have 2 DC at a big independent school. It’s a huge rugby school. DS is Y11 and has played rugby in school and at a club since U6’s. DD is Y8 and also played rugby for a couple of years at DS’s club. School have tried several times to get girls rugby up and running, but there is so little demand they couldn’t pull a squad together nor find any fixtures.

In the end DD got fed up with rolling about in the mud and never doing anything other than training. She plays netball now, for school, club and county and much prefers it. It’s an absolutely vicious game at club and county level, requiring incredible fitness, speed and agility and not at all boring - the scores can easily be nudging up to 80-100 in a match and actually a much faster paced game than rugby. I’m all for girls playing rugby and thought it was a shame DD stopped, but if you want to find like minded girls for your DD to have a go, you’ll have far better luck at a local club.

Find a girls rugby club to go to at weekends. Let the school do what they do without complaining.

Lots of boys wanted to play Netball in my school (in place of rugby) at Y6. The first few to ask were accommodated (and played with the girls) but then the school put a stop to further "transfers" because more than half wanted to switch and they didn't have the staff to accommodate.