Girls Active National Reports 2025

New data from the Youth Sport Trust’s annual Girls Active Survey has found that girls with multiple characteristics of inequality are being left behind in PE and school sport.

The survey reveals that girls with two or more characteristics of inequality, such as being from a low-income family, a non-majority ethnicity, or having Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), are significantly more likely to not be active every day, not feel confident doing physical activity and less likely to like PE than those without further characteristics of inequality.

For the last 7 years the Sport England Active Lives survey for Children and Young People, has consistently found that girls ages between 5- 18 are less active than boys.

Sport England Active Lives data shows that the activity gap currently stands at 6.4%, with only 45% of 5 -18-year-old girls meeting recommended activity levels versus 51% of boys.

In total, there were 17,971 responses to the Girls Active Survey, from a total of 137 schools in England. The survey was conducted across two windows – one in Autumn 2024 and one in Summer 2025. Data is unweighted.

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Key Findings:

Girls are over three times (3.8) more likely than boys to not like taking part in PE
Girls with 2 or more characteristics of inequality are significantly and 1.6 times more likely to not like taking part in physical activity compared to girls with 0 further characteristics of inequality
Girls are over three times (3.4) more likely than boys to not feel confident when taking part in physical activity
Girls with 2 or more characteristics of inequality are significantly and 1.3 times more likely to not feel confident when doing physical activity compared with girls with 0 further characteristics of inequality
Girls are twice as likely as boys to not do 60 minutes of physical activity every day
Girls are nearly twice (1.9 times) as likely as boys to feel that they don’t belong to their school
Girls with 2 or more characteristics of inequality are significantly and 1.3 times more likely to feel they don’t belong to their school compared with girls with 0 further characteristics of inequality.