Another day, another report concluding that girls are not engaging with PE and physical activity compared to their male peers. The difference this time is that two leading sports governing bodies believe they have found a solution – one that works.

Over the past year there has been a proliferation of gendered schemes using pink or princess motifs to entice girls into doing sport or PE, they are “superficial”, according to Ruth Holdaway, the CEO of Women in Sport.

“I despair a little bit,” she says. “Don’t assume that because you make something pink that’s all you need to do. It’s just very superficial when it’s actually very complex.

“There’s a lot of well-meaning stuff going on, any individual or organisation recognising that there is a gender gap in sport and we need to engage girls – that’s a really positive thing and I would never be critical of someone trying to make a difference. But don’t damage that by reinforcing some of the very problems that are forcing girls to disengage in the first place. Certainly the one size fits all approach is not right. Just layering pink over things isn’t right. It’s almost like those initiatives are trying to turn sport and physical activity into something else.”

New research from the organisation that was released on Tuesday, in partnership with the Youth Sport Trust, shows that while girls are getting the message about needing to be more physically active, they still turn away from school sport in their droves. The data surveyed 25,000 girls and boys from 138 secondary schools across England and Northern Ireland and found a gulf in attitudes towards physical activity.

While girls recognised that being physically active is important, only 56% enjoyed taking part compared to 71% of boys. And only 45% of girls saw the relevance of PE to their lives, against 60% of boys, despite evidence demonstrating that a sporty background helps girls up the career ladder.

The new data is an offshoot of a wider project from a partnership between organisations – including This Girl Can – called Girls Active, which has reached 50,000 girls over the past five years. It began in response to a series of initiatives that had tried to engage girls in sport, but ultimately failed to make headway, with 51% of less active girls saying that PE and school sport actually put them off being physically active.

Wendy Taylor, girls’ development manager at the YST, reflected on the lessons learned. “As an organisation we’ve been involved in girls’ programmes over the last 20 years and we’ve made lots of interventions, but the statistics are saying we still have this disparity between girls and boys. So at that point we made a decision as an organisation to take a refreshed and really deep look at why that was.

“Historically we’ve seen girls as part of the problem, and this is about seeing girls as the solution. It’s important to ask girls what they want.”

Early feedback suggests this approach is highly effective. Monitoring between 2013-14 found the number of girls who looked forward to PE doubled on the Girls Active programme, 50% more girls wanted to be physically active, and more than 73% said they “liked the way they feel” after doing physical activity, while the number of girls who felt happy with the way their body looked doubled. The scheme was hailed as the most inspiring national initiative at the Women’s Sport Trust awards this year.

In the past students who were already sporty were used to identify and lead changes at schools, but with Girls Active the programme targets girls who are less active and enables them to find solutions, and then “market” these to others. “We’ve recognised how influential girls are with their peers,” says Taylor, “I’ve got an eight-year-old and she already opts in and out of things depending on if her friends are doing it, so we’ve used peers in a positive way to be influencers with their peer group.”

Boys and men have been integral to the programme, and Taylor says that for many schools it has prompted a closer look at gender equality across their organisation. “It’s really sparked those wider debates, one school did an inset with their staff, we’ve had male PE teachers attending the training and realising they have an important role to play in the encouragement they give to girls. We’ve also had schools where boys started coming forward to say there is a cohort of boys who don’t enjoy the traditional experience of PE and so then they’ve followed that same process with boys.”

So far the programme is being delivered in secondary schools, but Holdaway says the ambition is to reach girls from Key Stage 2 and help to ease the transition into secondary education.

Holdaway says that previously an emphasis had been placed on puberty as a drop off point for girls, but with the minister for sport, Tracey Crouch, having recently rewritten the national sport strategy to start from five year olds there is new impetus to work with a younger age group. “We know from the Tipping Point research [2015] that we start to lose girls as young as seven. We would love to be able to take Girls Active into primary schools.”