Extra-curricular sport: A figurational analysis of gendered activity provision, behavioural expectations, and peer group dynamics in one secondary school in England

Abstract

This article provides a figurational analysis of extra-curricular sport within one secondary school in England. Viewing physical education (PE) as involving gendered and age-based networks of interdependencies, we examine how extra-curricular sport was provided, how pupils’ behaviour was enabled and constrained, and how teacher–pupil relations became closer and more informal with age. Generated through participant observations, pupil focus groups and teacher interviews, ethnographic data is thematically analysed and interpreted through Elias’s ( 1978) concepts of figuration, power and habitus. Despite no differences in boys’ and girls’ rates of engagement, the provision of extra-curricular sport reflected PE's long-standing traditions concerning gender appropriateness. Whilst attendance at lunchtime sport clubs and afterschool sport practices reduced with age, opportunities for and engagement in inter-school sport fixtures became more frequent with age. Particularly evident within minibus journeys, such opportunities heightened pupils’ expressions of their sporting and gendered habitus, and degrees of informality within teacher–pupil relations. Such relations were partly enabled by the temporary removal of constraining PE policy and teachers’ coaching pedagogy. However, one unintended consequence of more informal teacher–pupil relations was some pupils’ perceptions of teacher favouritism, heightening power imbalances between sporty and less sporty pupils. As such, we recommend that the Department for Education’s (2024) vision of extra-curricular sport being tailored towards a culture of participation, targeting less active pupils, is at the forefront of PE teachers’ planning and delivery of extra-curricular sport.