Making the legacy count for all!

Like many of us, (50 million viewers from 195 territories are expected to tune into live broadcasts of the tournament), I’ve absolutely loved watching the Lionesses go from strength to strength in the Women's EURO 2022. Hopefully, we’ll see England lift the trophy tonight. On TV, we are very rarely exposed to such a display of female camaraderie, athleticism, dogged strength, competitiveness, and relentless desire to win! 

 I would consider myself relatively sporty however when I look back, football wasn’t on offer to me in school and I certainly didn’t have access to local girls’ teams in London.  

As a new trustee for Bloomsbury Football Foundation (BFF), I have seen first hand the great work BFF are doing to provide quality coaching, fun and a safe environment for girls of all standards to play football – with a priority being access and enjoyment of to game. The project was developed in response to an acute need for affordable, girl-specific football provision.

Bloomsbury Football’s Girls’ programme aims to increase access to and participation in football for a notoriously ‘hard-to-reach' group: lower-income girls aged 7 to 16. By removing major barriers to sporting participation – notably cost, cultural barriers, lack of facilities, lack of confidence, perceived safety risks – the project will work to reduce the gendered inequality in the footballing landscape, providing girls with a safe and nurturing introduction to a sport which stands to benefit their long-term mental and physical health.

Importantly, the sessions will reach particularly ‘hard-to-reach' populations: 50% of the girls we support are from ethnic minority backgrounds, and 55% receive free school meals. 

In 2016/17, only 11.9% of UK girls aged 5-15 played competitive sports outside of school — a meagre figure, particularly compared with the 29.4% of boys who did the same. Girls are also more likely to face inactivity-related illness: 44% of girls aged 13-15 are overweight (a proportion which is 8% lower among boys). Importantly, these dynamics are replicated in the communities which Bloomsbury supports: in the London Borough of Camden, where most of our beneficiaries reside, 36% of Year 6s are overweight. This imbalance is due in part to the widespread perception of football as an unsafe and male-dominated space. When asked by Women in Sport, 80% of girls expressed a sense that they did not belong in sport. 

The Bloomsbury girl’s model works to reverse these damaging phenomena.

 It does so via the following four steps:

1. Offering an introduction to football for girls in local schools

The Schools Programme engages over 2,500 young people per week. Importantly, a sub-section of these sessions are girls-only sessions intended to provide a safe, nurturing and free-to-play introduction to football (both curricular and extra-curricular) for girls in schools.

2. Providing lower-income girls from the Schools Programme with year-long bursaries to our extra-curricular Girls Foundation programme.  

After igniting their passion for the sport during school sessions, all interested lower-income beneficiaries with year-long full bursaries to the club football (or ‘Foundation’) programme.

3. Providing longer-term bursary places for participants in the Girls Foundation programme 

After this first year bursary has elapsed, Bloomsbury provides all interested beneficiaries will ongoing places in the Girls Foundation. These will continue for as long as participants wish to play, ensuring that improvements in mental and physical health continue and compound over time.

4. Monitoring the progress of our beneficiaries 

The team at BFF monitor and evaluate the progress of beneficiaries using a fusion of two frameworks:

- Sport England’s ‘Sporting Futures’ model

- CASEL’s mechanism for the tracking of social and emotional learning competencies

This hybrid framework – which involves pre- and post-delivery participant surveys, parental surveys, case studies and participant tests - allows the team to measure a wide range of outcomes. Most notably, it seeks to track changes in physical fitness; attitudes to sport; psychological well-being; emotional awareness; off-pitch behaviour; social outlook, and nutritional understanding. 

I really hope that we can use the legacy of Women's EURO 2022 to drive programmes like this across the country, and encourage more girls and young people to engage with football – what ever their background.

To celebrate, Bloomsbury Football are offering holiday camps free-to-access for all girls for the duration of the summer!

If you have any questions about the great work happening at Bloomsbury Football , or if you'd like to get involved, please get in touch.

Big shout out to Charlie Hyman and the team at Bloomsbury Football

Come on England!!