Girls Active Survey and Insight Report

The Youth Sport Trust’s Girls Active Survey supports schools to gain student insight through an online survey to understand the participation levels, attitudes, motivations and barriers to participation.

We are pleased to be able to provide this opportunity for schools in England to participate in the survey. Each school will receive a School Insight Report based on the collated responses of students in your school. A example of the report schools will receive is provided in the downloads below.

The registrations for the survey have now closed for this academic year. Please revisit this page in the new academic year when details on future opportunities will be provided here and registration will be open. In the meantime, you may wish to read the information below and download attachments to enable you to consider further the opportunity and help you prepare for participating.

About the survey

The survey is available for female students in key stages 2, 3, 4 and 5 (and male students if you wish to receive a separate report). There are short and long survey options. The short survey is age-appropriate for primary students and is the survey that all primary students will complete. Secondary schools can choose for students to complete the short or long survey. If you are an all-through school, it is possible for primary students to complete short and secondary students to complete the long survey. You will be asked to confirm your preference in the registration process.

You will then receive a survey link which will reflect the responses you give in this registration process. This link can be used for girls as well as boys (if you wish to receive a separate report for boys in your school). Responses to the survey using this link will also be attributed to your school only, therefore, please do not share the survey link with any other school.

Please see the long and short survey questions available in the downloads on the right hand side to help you decide which option is appropriate for your students if you are a secondary or all-through school.

Please note:

In the long version of the survey secondary aged girls will also be able to choose whether they complete an additional 4 short questions about taking part in PE or school sport when they are on their period, as well as how comfortable they are talking to their teacher about periods. They do not have to answer these 4 questions if they don’t want to.

The survey also asks students for some personal data such as their gender, year group, ethnicity, disability and free school meal status. In addition, for secondary age students we would like to ask a question in the survey about their faith/religion and their sexual identity. These questions are detailed in the long survey and help us to understand the responses of young people from different characteristic groups. The question on sexual identity helps us to understand the activity levels, views and perceptions of LGBT+ young people towards PE and sport. We have received advice from experts that this is an appropriate question to ask secondary aged children. However, we appreciate your school may not want to ask this question so provide an opt-out of this question in the registration process.

Together, this personal data helps us to understand the diversity of the people that respond to the questions in the survey. It will help us improve our work in the future and enable us to understand the activity levels, views and perspectives of young people from different characteristic groups. We will not ask for their name.

What happens to information collected?
All student responses are confidential. All responses will be compiled to produce a ‘School Insight Report’ for your school. Your school responses will also contribute to a county and national picture but no individuals or schools will be identified.

Data protection, consent, research purpose and ethics

Please read the research information sheet for full information about the research process for the long and/or short survey for the Girls Active Survey. This includes information on data protection, research purposes, ethics and informing parents/guardians about the research.

NEXT STEPS

Please revisit this page early in the new academic year when further details on the next survey window will be available and schools will be able to register.

If you have any further questions please get in touch with us: [email protected].

It allowed us to see the true view of the students. Quite often some students will just say I don't like PE - it gave them a voice and they liked that it was anonymous. It has been great to use as feedback as how we are going to close the gap between male and female participation and increased ability. They are much more likely to become better if they enjoy taking part.

Teacher