Sport for everyone: Women's football

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Sport for everyone mini-series, episode 65) is a short documentary about the Dick, Kerr Ladies. On Boxing Day 1920, fifty-three thousand people came to Goodison Park, in Liverpool, to watch this women's team. It began in 1917, during the First World War, at the Dick, Kerr factory in Preston, where women made shells while many men were away at the war: they played football at break time, beat a team of men from the factory, and played matches to raise money for soldiers hurt in the war. Their star player, Lily Parr, joined at fourteen and is said to have scored nearly one thousand goals. In December 1921, the Football Association said that football was "quite unsuitable for females", and women's teams could no longer play on the big clubs' grounds. The team played on, in smaller grounds and even in the USA, but women's football stayed small for fifty years, until the ban ended in 1971. Today, the England women's team is called the Lionesses: eighty-seven thousand people watched them win the European Championship at Wembley in 2022, and they won it again in 2025. The narration is in the past simple, with the present simple for today; no grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 8 on facts and 2 on vocabulary (Boxing Day and unsuitable). The study topic is sport for everyone: who gets to play, then and now.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three pictures (a photo of the team in striped shirts and striped woolly hats, a drawing of the players outside locked stadium gates, a photo of the Lionesses on their bus with the trophy in 2025), the key words and the 10 questions; a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key come with them. The text ends with an open question (Think about it: Why do you think so many people came to watch them in 1920?). Learners should know the past simple of common verbs and be able to read dates and large numbers. The pack's key words explain the new words (stadium, war, factory, shell, break, raise money, join, score, goal, unsuitable, ban, championship).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-encountering-others ("Rencontre avec l'autre"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.