Activities aligned to the This Girl Can campaign have included more young female participants in physical activity than ever before in the SPAR Lancashire School Games.
Seven hundred girls from primary and secondary schools across Lancashire have participated in a range of Girls Active events in the 2024-25 SPAR Lancashire School Games this academic year, in what marks the 10th year of the This Girl Can campaign since its development by Sport England in 2015.
This Girl Can is designed to tackle the gender gap in activity, promoting a change in how females of all ages, abilities and backgrounds think and feel about exercise, empowering them to exercise with increased confidence to develop regular exercise habits that build resilience.
Within the SPAR Lancashire School Games, Girls Active events are designed to improve engagement physical activity and have included dance, glow dodgeball, rollerblading, climbing and bouldering, orienteering, padel, volleyball, fitness tennis, and spinning.
Run by Active Lancashire and the School Games Organiser Network, the Lancashire School Games have been sponsored by SPAR through its association with James Hall & Co. Ltd since 2006.
Andy Clark, Schools Partnership and Skills Officer at Active Lancashire, said: “We have enjoyed another fantastic year of Girls Active events within the SPAR Lancashire School Games, and our biggest yet, having first integrated This Girl Can’s aims and ambitions into our calendar through a series of events several years ago.
“What we tend to find with school age girls here in Lancashire is a lack of participation in sport and we have been working hard to improve that. We work with a lot of underprivileged children and the low participation could be due to inequality and the cost of accessing sport, but there is also a huge problem of confidence, and particularly female body image when exercising.
“With the Girls Active programme, we have specifically targeted those hard-to-reach young females in Lancashire across our three delivery areas with a broad programme of activities to great effect and we look forward to building on that in the years ahead.”
Nic Greaves, Head of Division for Physical Education at Parklands High School in Chorley, said: “Girls Active has been a fabulous opportunity for our pupils. It has allowed them to experience atypical sports and activities that they do not often get exposed to in the education environment.
“It was fantastic as their PE teacher to see pupils being successful, building their confidence and resilience, and most importantly, being active. The girls really enjoyed themselves, and what I liked the most was seeing them outside of PE lessons building important relationships and working with new people.
“I also had feedback from many parents about their children enjoying themselves and they think it is wonderful. One that really stuck out was a parent whose daughter had sent them photos of her from a Girls Active event happy, confident and with some new friends at a time when she had been struggling with her mental health.”
The SPAR Lancashire School Games are delivered in three distinct clusters in Lancashire – Coastal, Central, and Pennine – aligned to local needs. In 2023-24, the Games engaged 26,000 children in sport and activities across the county through 27 feature events and competitions.
James Hall & Co. Ltd is a fifth-generation family business which serves a network of independent SPAR retailers and company-owned SPAR stores across Northern England six days a week from its base at Bowland View in Preston.
