In this Civic blog post Tom Hughes, Development Manager at the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine describes the This Girl Can events and the positive impact it has on the girls who take part.

Every June during the city’s annual Move More Month a three-day community sport event takes place at the Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park, delivered by the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine. The event offers Sheffield schools and communities an opportunity to take part in a wide range of sports and activities, focusing on mass participation and school sport - as a legacy of the London 2012 Olympics. We work with our four School Sport Partnerships in Sheffield: Links, Forge, Arches and Points each year to deliver two events that run simultaneously: the This Girl Can event and a Colour Smash.

In 2015, Sport England launched the This Girl Can campaign to celebrate a realistic vision of women and exercise in England and to tackle the gender activity gap. The aim is to change how women and girls think and feel about exercise - and encourage women to be active in ways that work for them, regardless of age, background or ability.

This year we invited 200 secondary school girls to take part in a day packed full of activities with delivery partners doing work within the city. The activities included rugby, boxing, clubbercise, fitness technology, ice-skating and yoga with relaxation. The activities were delivered by our local partners, including Sheffield Hallam’s Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) and Sports Engineering Research Group, at the English Institute of Sport Sheffield.

"This was genuinely the highlight of some of the student’s year it is a really good event, the girls loved it and get a lot from it!" School partner

The day isn’t about giving those students already engaged in curriculum PE and extracurricular activities a chance to do more activities, we ask schools to specifically target students that would benefit from the experience of trying new activities.

The day gives all the girls an opportunity to be introduced to each activity and the event makes a conscious effort to have women leading and coaching the activities. The day is about participation but also about inspiring the next generation and show them what is possible!

The day then culminates in a colour smash, with 200 students from 20 of Sheffield’s secondary schools running, jogging or walking around Don Valley Bowl while they get covered and cover each other in powdered paint.

We try to give the students an opportunity to try activities that they may not get chance to experience as part of their PE lessons or in their local community, with the aim of making the day as fun as we can.

"Having female leaders made the difference, they knew how to engage the girls which made a massive difference". School participant  

The hope is that the girls try an activity that they can see themselves doing more of. It may not be something they try immediately, but it could be that we have planted the seed that actually they can go boxing, or that Rugby League is a sport they could consider playing. But the real success is seeing the students enjoying themselves.

Special thanks to all the providers mentioned who gave up their time and expertise to engage with the students but also to Sheffield City Trust for allowing us access to all of their facilities.