Replacing gym skirts with leggings helps get girls into sport

St George’s School in Edinburgh found that giving pupils more options improved body confidence and made it more likely they would stay active
Published in The Times by Marc Horne , 4th Oct 2025

Ditching skimpy and uncomfortable kits in favour of more practical clothing has caused participation in sport to soar at Scotland’s largest all girls school, its head teacher has said.

Only 12 per cent of girls in Scotland regularly participate in sport at the age of 15. However, the number of pupils at St George’s School in Edinburgh still playing sport by the time they are 17 or 18 has risen to 90 per cent.

Carol Chandler-Thompson, head of the independent school, said that modernising the uniforms girls were required to wear and replacing gym skirts with leggings had boosted confidence and participation.

“Girls are very conscious about their physical appearance,” she said. “Body confidence among teenagers is quite fragile. I believe it is linked to the kind of kit that girls are being allowed to wear, do they feel comfortable?”

Chandler-Thompson recently oversaw sweeping changes in uniform requirements for PE lessons. “We really involved the girls and asked what was important to them,” she said “Rather than a skirt, which they wore previously, they opted for a skort, which is a skirt and shorts combined.”

The girls have been issued with outdoor sports coats for cold and rainy days and can wear leggings as an alternative to shorts.

“They now have clothes that they actually like wearing and feel good in while playing sports,” Chandler-Thompson said. “It makes them more keen to be active and involved. The feedback we have received has been incredible. The fact that 90 per cent of our girls are still playing right through to the end of the time at the school speaks for itself.”

Chandler-Thompson cited her six-year-old daughter as an example. “If she is in a skirt and playing football she takes the skin on her knees off if she falls” she said. “But if she is wearing tracksuit bottoms or trousers she gets straight up again and carries on. All sorts of these tiny marginal factors make a real difference.”

The issue has been raised in the past by Maureen McGonigle, founder and chief executive of the campaign group Scottish Women in Sport, who said: “Instead of skimpy shorts or skirts let our girls wear leggings and T-shirts.”

Chandler-Thompson said the school, whose alumni include the broadcaster Kaye Adams and the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, was also benefiting from having exclusively single-sex spaces and a growing number of positive role models.

“The recent Womens’ Rugby World Cup has been fantastic,” she said. “You saw all different body types there. The women were confident, proud, sporty and active. That’s hugely important because girls have got to be able to see themselves before they can say: ‘Yes, that’s for me.’

“In an environment like ours the girls have the run of the entire campus, all the play equipment and the sports pitches. They can literally take up space without fear of judgment or having to think what is, or isn’t, for them.

“I have worked in co-ed schools and what I observed was that If you platform the boys sport more positively than the girls sport it gets more exposure and the girls end up going off to support the boys. The unspoken message, when it came to sport, was ‘Girls watch it, boys play it’.”

A study by Women in Sport, which surveyed 4,000 teenagers across the UK three years ago, found that half disliked being watched and felt self-conscious in sports wear. Many felt they did not “have the right body shape” for sport.

“It’s an absolute travesty that teenage girls are being pushed out of sport at such a scale,” Stephanie Hilborne, its chief executive, said, after the findings were released. “Teenage girls are not voluntarily leaving sport, they are being pushed out as a consequence of deep-rooted gender stereotypes.”