By Elliott West
“By making girls’ football more accessible, we have opened a crucial door for the growth of women’s football as a whole. And if we want to look at our Lionesses and see a team that represent the whole nation, this is one among many key steps to ensuring our national team become more diverse, stronger, and more successful many years into the future”.
Lotte Wubben-May
Introduction
Sport for far too long has had an association with being a man’s world. In football, this especially rings true in the women’s game where at the grassroots level, girls have often been barred from playing football at school. Although not a universal practice, certain schools divided their subjects by gender and forced pupils to have to pay for lessons outside class hours at great expense. No more so was this apparent in PE lessons where boys and girls were offered different sports, football given to boys whilst girls were offered netball instead.
This is in stark contrast to what the public health and sports governing bodies were doing in public. They promoted sports such as football and rugby to women and girls, turning a blind eye to the severe problems that were occurring within the educational system. There have been so many cases where girls have literally had to go to the powers to be at school and beg them to be able to play. There was even a case where a school had a poster of a boy in a football kit on the door of their changing room and a poster of a girl in a netball kit in the female changing room. These practices have for long been the norm in some schools and blatantly breached the Equality Act. Yes the FA launched a campaign in 2018, Game of Our Own, rolled out in 86 schools encouraging girls to play football.
The Breakthrough
Thankfully, I was delighted to hear the government’s announcement on International World Women’s Day to pledge two guaranteed hours of PE per week in schools and a generous amount of funding, £600 million to be precise. A pledge that has primarily been the result of the England Ladies’ impressive Euro victory last Summer and one that is now being called ‘The Legacy’. A letter was sent to the Truss government and open dialogue on the issue began. This a gigantic step forward and will allow girls for the first time to play football during break times, PE and after school. Building on this announcement, England Ladies and the FA hope that this will strengthen the grassroots of the sport and encourage more girls to aspire to play football at an international level. A far cry from the 40% that was offered previously with an appalling figure of 63% in PE.
