To pulsating music, 20 teenage girls follow the dance moves of two trim young women leading them. There is some laughter, but mostly concentration. As the sequence of moves becomes complex, a group of pupils breaks down in giggles, but the two young women shout out encouragement and carry on unfazed. The giggling girls pull themselves together and begin following again, clearly intent on learning. The dance class I am watching in a Midlands comprehensive carries on to an exuberant but ordered conclusion.
The two leaders aren't, in fact, teachers, but sixth-formers who act as junior sports leaders in the school. This makes sense - it is street dancing that is being taught, something that the pupils probably know better than the teachers anyway. The Manor school in Nottinghamshire is a specialist sports college and is trying to increase opportunities in games and physical exercise for all its pupils. Specifically, however, it is taking action, like many schools, to tackle the problem of girls disliking PE. Using pupils to lead sessions is one effective strategy. There are many others, most worked out with the charity the Youth Sport Trust. The Girls in Sport project has been running for five years now and is transforming PE departments across the country.
Horrible kit
Many girls hate PE. They start hating it towards the end of primary school when they begin to get self-conscious about their bodies, and this hate intensifies as they get older. Negative attitudes towards physical exercise developed at this point are likely to stay with them long term - hence the need to change hearts and minds. Recent research at Loughborough University has shown that there are specific things that arouse their resistance to traditional school PE lessons. The first culprit is the horrible kit - most girls loathe having to reveal their bodies in skimpy games skirts and embarrassing PE knickers. The second is the cold weather. The third is the super-hearty, if not bullying, attitude of the archetypal games teacher. And the fourth is the nature of the activities traditionally on offer - many girls dislike the competitive nature of team sports and the requirement to perform in front of others in athletics.
Underlying these negative feelings, there is, as Dr Tess Kay of Loughborough University explains in her research, "a mismatch between girls' view of their bodies as passive and decorative and the use of the body as active and functional in sport". For any strategy to succeed in persuading girls into sport it has to take account of their complex and often hugely unconfident feelings about their own developing femininity.
The Manor school serves a small ex-mining town, Mansfield Woodhouse, north of Nottingham. Its intake is mixed but the most deprived ward in Nottinghamshire is part of its catchment area. Barbara Bakewell, director of PE, claims that past investigations as part of the Girls in Sport project revealed that her girls came out bottom of the national scale in terms of self-esteem. Hence the drive to use sport to boost confidence. To get girls participating willingly in the first place, however, she had to find out from them what would change their attitude. "We devised a questionnaire which we still give the kids every year. Things like the need to change the kit and stay inside in cold weather emerged straight away."
The day I visit is warm but drizzly, and the girls are indoors, the majority of them safely swathed in track-suit bottoms. A complaint to a teacher about the heat is met by the observation that shorts might be an option. "But I hate showing my legs, miss." Relations between staff and pupils seem quietly humorous. The school has a policy of using female staff to teach girls and has sent its PE teachers on training courses exploring different ways of engaging girls as part of the Girls in Sport programme.
One surprising finding from the audit was that the girls liked the prospect of doing PE in ability groups. "That way the less able ones didn't have to feel so bad about performing in front of their peers," says Bakewell. The school now divides the first three years into sets for PE, relaxing this in years 10 and 11 and even abandoning single-sex teaching in some groups at this stage. As the kids get older, a wider range of activities is offered: yoga, fitness, street dance, martial arts, golf, badminton, aerobics, football, tag-rugby, as well as the traditional fare of hockey, netball, rounders and athletics. The last, in fact, has become so unpopular that the school has dropped it for the over-14s.
Trampolining, however, which also involves individual performance, has a huge following. "The girls like it because it's aesthetically pleasing," says Bakewell, "and of course we do put great emphasis on peer support." The trampolining session I watch involves two girls learning to jump and fall on their backs. As they leap, the teacher, Ann Parkin, slips a mat on to the trampoline to soften their fall. I remark that you have to learn to trust both yourself and the teacher a lot. "Well, of course you do," says Heather, one of the several pupils grouped around the trampoline, offering supportive criticism while she waits with only a hint of impatience for her turn, "Otherwise you wouldn't do it, would you?"
It is this use of sport to boost its pupils' psychological wellbeing that really impresses me. At lunchtime, a quiet huddle of girls, the "Friday Fun Group", comes with their teacher to play badminton. Chosen to join the group for various reasons, generally social vulnerability, they opt most of the time to do different sorts of sport together.
Sam is 15 and finds school difficult at times, but badminton has been her life-saver. Noticing her talent for the game, a teacher encouraged her to join an after-school club and now she is playing for the county. Within the self-governed Friday Fun Group, however, she and the other girls have opted to keep the ethos supportive even when playing games. "We were thinking of involving lads," says Sam, "but we decided against it because they get so competitive."
Leadership for life
Steph and Abi, the confident young women I watched leading the street dance class, talk to me about their roles as young sports leaders. This scheme gives interested teenagers training in and opportunities to help and direct children in PE and has been so successful that the school is introducing young leadership schemes for literacy and foreign languages. But Steph feels that sport is one of the best ways to learn how to manage others. "It annoys me when people say PE isn't as important as other subjects, when really the leadership it can teach you relates to everything you do in life," she says.
Using pupils themselves to help run sports lessons - as coaches, umpires, referees - is an important aspect of the Girls in Sport initiative. But this is not a matter of creating a sporting elite amongst the pupils. "It's often the poorer performers who make the best leaders," says Judith Carr, head of PE at the Sacred Heart Girls School in Newcastle. Ann Hanley, head of girls' PE at Abram Guest Specialist Sports College in Wigan, feels that the whole emphasis should be on encouragement: "It's about feeling that what they can offer isn't going to be sneered at - no one should feel embarrassed, the emphasis isn't on superb performance." And starting in areas the girls themselves are interested in is therefore key. At Bordesley Green high school in Birmingham, for example, an all-girls' school with 97% Muslim intake, Asian dance and cricket - the team sport most popular in the local community - are hugely popular options.
Asked to articulate one way in which schools should change PE to attract more girls, Abi, at The Manor school, thinks carefully. "'Modernise," she says finally. "Most lasses don't want to approach PE as a discipline. If they can think of it as recreation, they'll get involved."
