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Day Three: Girls’ teams, boys’ teams

Morning session: Girls, boys and playtime
Key focus
How long have girls and women been playing football? How do we use our recreation time at school? What kinds of problems occur during school playtimes?

Afternoon session: A fair competition?
Key focus
The focus for this afternoon’s activities is on teamwork.

> Background information for teachers

Morning   Afternoon

Three activities: Two activities: > Girls on the ball (30 mins) (2.21MB pdf) Pupils read a history of women’s football and discuss it. > Download photo of Eritrean girls with ball (284KB pdf) > Presentation of country research (1 hour) (88KB pdf) Pupils present posters displaying the results of their research. > My ideal school playtime (30 mins) (90KB pdf) A writing activity to help pupils think about their leisure time at school. > Practice for 5-a-side football competition (1 hour) (102KB pdf) Developing football and teamwork skills for the competition on Friday afternoon. > Recreation at school (1 hour, 30 mins) (132KB pdf) What problems can occur during playtime at school? This thinking-skills activity helps pupils to determine issues and identify possible solutions.   Download a pdf of all morning activities with worksheets and information (4.4MB pdf)   Download a pdf of all afternoon activities with worksheets and information (127KB pdf)

Background information for teachers

Morning

Pupils will start by thinking about gender and football. Is football only for boys and men? For most football lovers, the ‘beautiful game’ is a leisure activity rather than a profession. This morning's other activities give pupils the opportunity to consider how recreation time at their own school is used, and to solve a playground problem. Pupils are encouraged to make links and connections to see how competition can be both a good thing (fun when your team is winning and when it is fair, etc.) and a bad thing (when the game is unfair, if one side loses too much or if there is competition for resources or for a chance to join in).

> Background information on women's football

Afternoon
This afternoon’s activities focus on the importance of good teamwork and provide opportunities for pupils to develop these valuable social skills. During the afternoon, every opportunity should be taken to emphasise the importance of the different elements of good teamwork, such as:

• Good communication (especially listening)
• Making sure each member is able to use their strengths
• Each player pulling their weight
• Encouraging one another with praise, not discouraging one another with criticism
• Being forgiving of one another’s mistakes.

It will also be useful to point out how a good team can be stronger and more effective than an individual, and that there are many examples historically of large groups of people coming together as a team to effect change (for example, workers’ unions in Victorian times).

Here are some quotations to inform your plenary at the end of the afternoon about the wider value of teamwork:

Quotations

‘In sport, team success depends on communication, practice and clear objectives. There are other areas of life where teamwork is also crucial, such as campaigns.’ ‘In 1998 70,000 people formed a human chain around the world leaders’ meeting (G8) in Birmingham to demand that they discuss [developing country] debt. In response governments announced the cancellation of some [developing country] debt.’ [Kickstart: Global issues for youth leaders and teachers, CAFOD 2000, p7] ‘Last year a staggering five million children in over a hundred countries took part in Send My Friend to School, asking world leaders to make sure that every child in the world gets to school by 2015. It was probably the largest children’s challenge ever.   ‘1 million ‘buddies’ [cardboard cut-outs of children] were presented to G8 leaders and others have been presented to ministers and heads of state around the world and at the United Nations Summit. In the UK alone over 1.5 million ‘buddies’ were made by over 7000 schools.   ‘Send My Friend to School highlighted the importance of education to the G8 leaders, and helped secure more aid for education.’ [Global Campaign for Education, www.sendmyfriend.org]

Background information on women's football
‘Football gives girls the ability to be leaders and improves their self-esteem. They learn that they can be leaders, be powerful and strong and that those are perfectly fine qualities for a woman. They learn to explore themselves through football.’
(Brandi Chastain, US Women’s professional football player)

Women's football has been played for a long time, with records of matches in Scotland in 1892 and England in 1895. However, the women's game was frowned upon by the British Football Associations at first. It continued without their support, becoming more popular during the First World War. In 1921 the Football Association in England decided that the women’s game was ‘distasteful’ and banned it from Association pitches.

The English Women's FA was formed in 1969 as a result of the increased interest generated by the 1966 World Cup, and the FA's ban on matches being played on members' grounds was finally lifted in 1971. In the 1970s, Italy became the first country with part-time professional women's football players. The USA formed a full-time national squad in 1984, and in 1992 Japan was the first country to have a professional women's football league. The strongest women's teams in the world today are the USA, Germany, Norway, China and Sweden.

At the beginning of the 21st century, women's football, like men's football, has become professionalised and is growing in both popularity and participation – hundreds of thousands of tickets were sold for the 2003 Women's World Cup and the 2005 Women’s Euro tournament. However, as in other sports, women players earn far less than their male counterparts and women's football gets far less media coverage than the men's game.

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