DD is starting a petition at the school with her friends

[EmmaMackenzie42]

Hi, this is my first time posting but I've been on Mumsnet for a while, and I've found lots of things useful on this website :)

So this all started when my eldest daughter (14 years old) didn't get into the netball team (there are only 15 places in each year, including subs, out of the hundreds of girls in the school). I've realised that the boys in her school have plenty of sports teams (football, rugby, basketball, cricket, tennis, even table tennis etc.). The only other technical girls sport is X-country (that is unisex, but it only happens once a year).

She wanted to start a petition along some of her other friends to make more girls sports teams and it has got quite a few signatures so far from several girls and even a few boys. They are also holding an additional petition to have an end-of-year school prom following exam season; thst has garnered a similar number of signatures.

The school has claimed it will consider the prom (but no actions have been done so far), and they also said they wouldn't create more girls sports teams because "not enough girls would sign up/ want to play for the sports teams".

I am in full support of my DD and her friends, and I love her very much. I came on here hoping for online support to put pressure on the school to create more girls' sports teams (and the EOY prom of course! :) ).

There is so much to this.. girls need to overcome so many social and structural barriers before they can regularly play and not drop out of team sport whereas boys can just take a ball out of their rucksack and find other people to have a kick about with.

In order to change this, we have to provide significantly more support for lower results for a long time before change is evident. We can see this happening with women's football but not before women had to fight for space on pitches, for coaching times, for changing rooms and some of the truly exceptional players pit themselves against the odds and against the boys but this does not give the same results as craving out protected spaces for girls, supporting them, giving them female focussed training, that is where change really happens for more girls than just the truly exceptional driven ones.

They deserve better... we should take resources from the privileged classes (in this case the boys) to allow equal access to all (in this case, the girls).

There are plenty of opportunities for boys outside of school.... they will not suffer if the school redistributes it's efforts towards the girls.

Find some research.. there is some good stuff out there..

Better than doing a petition would be getting together a group of girls who go and say "we want to form a <particular sport> team".

Problem is that many of the girls will sign it without really thinking they are wanting to join a sports' team. If there were enough girls interested, would they form a "B" netball team, for example?

It won't work if 4 girls want to be on a football team, 6 on a netball team, 3 on a tennis team, 5 on a hockey team etc and none of them are interested in a different sport because the teachers then say they'll do a rugby team and say "see not enough interest".

I played on the boys' tennis team because there weren't enough girls through my club. They would happily have had a girls' team if they could have got 6 girls, but there were only 3 of us in the club willing to play. They had three boys' teams.

If there's an issue with staffing perhaps some of the mums could leave work early to help out couple of days a week.

Woww this is shocking from the school. What evidence do they have that girls won't sign up? The basketball team was oversubscribed.. Well done to your daughter for pushing this. Next steps could be sending a letter to the governors with the petition and asking them what steps they are taking to ensure equality in the school. Could also contact local paper etc depending on how public you want to make it. The school could at least try and if undersubscribed then review but there is a clear imbalance here. Good luck to your daughter!

Perhaps they've tried before?

They could make it more even by cancelling all the boys sports other than basketball.

Even if they tried before this is a new school year so can try again . It would be very petty to cancel all the boys sports as their answer to make things equal.

'If there's an issue with staffing perhaps some of the mums could leave work early to help out couple of days a week'...... why should only women support the girls teams.. they have been brought up in a society where women's sport has not been equally supported and for the most part, do not have the social and structural support to do this.

We don't ask men to give birth, take care of, teach, clean up after the boys and leave the women to manage the finances, businesses, design products for the girls (though all of those areas would benefit from greater inclusion of both sexes!!).. we are a society, we should all support all areas of it.

If there are limited resources, they should be shared. If girls participate in sport to a lesser degree than boys and it is deemed a positive activity that would benefit them / us / society in the longer term, we have to ask the questions why is this the case and work on changing it, not shrugging.. saying the girls are not interested.. too bad for them... back to the boys then.

If they lack interested staff to run it, they can apply to outside sporting agencies to provide coaching and even funding.

You can make deals with local teams that they use your facilities for all their training and home games, and provide in school coaching in return.

👏

Absolutely

Ideally there would be provision for the girls already so the boys prioritised and protected at all costs activities aren't affected.

Unfortunately it sounds like this has been at the cost of equal and as deserving provision for the girls.

Our girls are so often shafted from all angles now when it comes to their sporting opportunities.

It's not right

Just because someone is taking the club doesn't mean that it wasn't difficult to find someone to do so.
It could be the same members of staff taking all of the sports clubs.

I'm a bit taken aback by the idea that a petition is "a tad militant" - I've never seen a petition as a militant campaign method, but a way of raising the issue.

Well done to the op's DD.

Good on her! You must be very proud.

Has she considering joining up with a group like This Girl Can? Or even getting in touch with some professional women’s sports players? It depends what she wants to achieve but I think it’s a big deal how much disparity there is between girls & boys sports. If she wanted to raise awareness of the issue as well as making change within the school you could suggest she writes to your MP.

Update: around 20 girls appeared at football training and were allowed to play alongside the boys. A few girls also apparently came to rugby training and were put through a few drills. Also the parents of DDs friends had connections with a local private school to arrange a fixture with their U-15 girls football team.

I went to a disadvantaged all girl school. There was no opportunity to play sports. We complained and fought for it and organised a team of girls who wanted to play rounders. The rounders group grew and we attended lots of tournaments which was fun for us all. Well worth it.

Wow.. well done to those girls. It is better for the girls to have their own training but great that they have shown they are interested.

Imagine if the boys just had netball and the girls had all the other sports teams and how that wouldn’t need a petition to make equal. It’s actually a disgrace that the kids have to do a petition to get things changed.

It will almost certainly be because of a lack of female staff/staff in general to run them. PE isn't currently a shortage subject, but it is struggling to recruit in some areas.

Really good for your DD and all the children at the school. It's mad that in this day and age sports provision is so uneven.

That is fantastic news OP.

I was particularly pleased on "the few girls turning up to rugby practice as well " on a personal bias of being an enthusiastic supporter of girls and women's rugby😀.

I also see the petition exercise itself as a massive win for these young girls and in the spirit of "This girl can" that these young women have shown the strength of character to get up and do something about the inequality.

Well done girls and you should be very proud of your DD - she will go far in life.

May not be a shortage subject during the school day, may be a bit more of an issue getting the teachers to volunteer to stay after hours. Some of the PE teachers may have their own children to go collect.

Doesn't sound like the teachers doing football or soccer have an issue with the girls.

Absolutely brilliant. This is so important. Why on earth should young girls accept that boys deserve more?

Apart from the general boys get more opportunities than girls it may be on this occasion she's seen a problem that wasn't there. Wanted to play soccer or rugby so turned up for practice and what happens...they get to practice. Why not do this in the first place seems the teachers are OK with it.

@BigFatLiar

I am slightly baffled but nonetheless unsurprised by your response.

The op says there are 5 sports for boys, one unisex and one for girls.

You admit that in general boys get more sporting opportunities than girls but insist on diluting, deflecting and diminishing the argument by suggesting it wasn't a problem because it was 'solved' by the girls turning up at the boys training.

The evidence is EVERYWHERE... boys participate more in sport .. they have greater access, more training time, better facilities, ..

Allowing girls to join in with boys does not solve the problem of low levels of participation and high drop out rates.. providing them with their own protected access to sport goes some way to redressing the imbalance .. it is a start... but not the full story.

I met the author of 'Get your tits out for the lads'.. a book about misogyny in sport and even there... when Sally talked about access to women's toilets at a men's stadium a woman in the audience wondered whether at women's stadium would the men have access to toilets. It's a ridiculous question from anyone who lives on planet earth. Deflects from the point she was making and questions the validity or truth of the statement and undermines the argument despite there not being the tiniest chance that such a situation would exist for men.

Why should the boys get more opportunities at school and not the girls. What they could do is offer less for the boys and more for girls! How dare a school not give the girls equal opportunities. We aren’t in the 1920s