• Schools' focus on competition 'puts Olympic legacy at risk'
• 'Over half of girls still aren't happy with school sport'
Campaigners have called on the government to do more to reduce the "gender gap" between boys and girls when it comes to taking exercise, voicing fears that the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics will be squandered if schools continue to prioritise competition over health.
The success of female athletes at the London 2012 Games catalysed a debate over a lack of media coverage for women's sport and the alarming dropout rate among teenage girls.
The Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation has argued that the problem is being exacerbated by a confused message from the Department for Education over school sport policy and a lack of measurement by Ofsted.
"The overarching point we want to make is that at a time when the nation's kids are inexorably getting fatter and fatter and the obesity crisis is getting more acute, and girls are half as active as boys when they leave school, over half of girls still aren't happy with school sport," said its chief executive, Sue Tibballs.
Research by the WSFF found that 51% of girls are put off physical activity by their experiences of school sport and PE, that 45% of girls say "sport is too competitive" and that more than half think boys enjoy competitive sport more than girls.
On Wednesday Tibballs told the All Party Parliamentary Group on Women's Sport and Fitness, chaired by the Paralympic champion turned peer Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, that the government needs to make it clear that the priority for school sport and PE should be health, focusing on getting every child active rather than elite achievement.
The WSFF will also call on Ofsted to clarify its measurement methods and begin to track how active children are in school. The lack of proper figures is a "major impediment to proper policy development and measurement".
A huge political row erupted after the education secretary, Michael Gove, axed £162m in ringfenced funding for a national network of school sport partnerships in December 2010, before the Games.
The money was later partially reinstated, until a new £150m scheme targeted at primary schools was announced earlier this year that will give each a pot of money to spend on sport.
"There needs to be more clarity about what school sport is for. There is still a clash between exercise for all and the old fashioned idea of competitive sport," said Tibballs.
The argument came to a head during the Olympics when the prime minister referred disparagingly to "Indian dance" and said the curriculum should concentrate on competitive sport.
"That's really unhelpful and it's exacerbated by party political competition. They are all decoys. Girls are very clear about what is currently not being got right," said Tibballs.
"Within the main organisations working in school sport, there has been a real shift to thinking that getting kids active should be the priority. Very high numbers of girls still say their experience of school sport is too geared towards the sporty, the talented and the able."
Tibballs said that while some schools were delivering both wider health outcomes and talented athletes, it was too much of a "postcode lottery".
"Schools hold the keys to engage every child. I don't think schools feel that is one of the roles they're meant to play," she said. "Children being active and healthy should be a core objective of every single school. Everyone knows that if you're physically active then it contributes in all sorts of other ways."
The WSFF will call for a new cross-departmental strategy to target the decline in girls playing sport during secondary school, which increases rapidly once they enter their teenage years. Sport England, the grassroots sport quango, has been charged with targeting two-thirds of its spend at 14- to 25-year-olds.
Despite Gove's insistence that schools should be given more leeway to decide how they allocate their resources and deliver their lessons, Tibballs said there needed to be leadership from the centre on the strategy and purpose of school sport.
"The biggest issue here isn't money. It's about clarity about what you're trying to do, the will to do it and doing it well," she said.