Girls in Sport Action Research Project

The research project will involve 24 schools, 12 of which will be involved in the intervention and 12 as comparison schools. The agreement of the 12 comparison schools will be secured through a letter to each school. Four clusters of schools will be utilised in the Sydney, Illawarra, Hunter/New England and North Coast regions. This would allow a breadth of coverage across diverse socio-economic, rural, regional and urban schools. To address the geographical scope and the number of schools, we have a consortium of researchers as Chief Investigators, including academics with local knowledge and more immediate access to schools. The Chief Investigators will act as critical friends to schools within their region to provide ongoing support and assistance to these schools over the course of the project. The participants of the Girls in Sport intervention are only those Year 8 students (in 2009) who have consented to participate. The Girls in Sport program will look different in each school. The intervention schools will receive the Girls in Sport intervention which is individualised for each school and each school develops themselves based on information that was collected in the formative stage of the project. This stage identified needs and interests of girls and teachers. For most schools, the Girls in Sport intervention will take place in the school sport period each week (approximately two hours), however, for others it will focus on lunchtime activities, physical education, before, and/or after school periods. It will take place on a weekly basis, however, the duration and frequency will differ from school to school depending on their intervention. Mostly the strategies will be implemented by the PDHPE staff, however, schools are encouraged to establish a Girls in Sport committee which includes PDHPE teachers, teachers from different faculties and girls from different year groups.