After the end of the war in 1918, women’s football as a spectator sport became ever more popular, until in 1920 the boxing Day match between Kerr Ladies FC Preston and St Helen’s Lancashire was watched by 50,000 people at Goodison Park, Liverpool, with thousands more waiting outside.
 

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​There were 150 women’s club at this time playing in front of capacity crowds with gate receipts raising money for charities across the country.
 
The following year, the Football Association decided to ban women’s football from being played on their grounds or officiated by their referees citing the reason that football was injurious to their health and that money raised at the matches was being misused.
 
Finally in 1971 the ban was lifted, but the game struggled to take off until the FA formally took control of the financial management in 1993, and then necessary investment was forthcoming.
 
Now, 100 years on, history has come full-circle and women’s football is once again hugely popular and successful. People who hesitate to attend many of the men’s matches for fear of getting caught up in off-pitch violence, enjoy the family friendly atmosphere at their games. Most schools now have girls football teams which is empowering for them, as they excel in an arena once so closely guarded as a male domain.
 
Although even today there is still some negative dialogue around the women’s game, the effects of the ban are starting to be overturned. Mutual respect between men and women goes a long way to providing a culture of peaceful relationships in our day to day lives, and women’s football is another step towards creating that level playing field for all.

● Update 2/4/26 - Peace Partners is hosting a virtual 10 week PEP workshops for participants new to the programme, and the planned virtual course for long term supporters has been rescheduled to start on April 30th. 

​● Peace Partners recently hosted two virtual 10 week PEP workshops, one for long-term supporters of the programme and one for participants new to the programme, both of which have just been completed.

● Further PEP facilitator training and refresher workshops are being supported.

● The outreach promotion strategy currently relies on word-of-mouth sharing; it is important to keep group sizes small for effective interaction during the course; a graphic designer has recently been invited to join the PEP outreach team to create posters.

● Peace Partners is also providing support to the team in the UK delivering the educational version of PEP, which is now called the TPRF Peace Education Programme for Higher Education.

● The team has been working in partnership with TPRF to refresh the PEP pages on our website pages, and this has now been completed successfully. The new pages are now live on the website and can be viewed here.

● Peace Partners September 21st International Peace Day promotions included a special newsflash in which the global success of the programme was celebrated. The review of our local efforts said “The team has supported and promoted efforts of TPRF volunteers to deliver the programme in the UK over a number of years, through financial support by donors, through the provision of equipment and facilities for in person and virtual versions of the workshop based course, and through outreach efforts to engage with partner organisations and individuals who may be interested.”

● Anyone can individually contact TPRF directly for information about both in person and virtual PEP courses which are available in communities in their countries, and they will be advised on the most appropriate courses. Peace Partners works closely with TPRF to present courses which are registered for in this way. The inquiry email address is [email protected]. Further information can be found here.

Peace Partners has been able to provide a number of grants to the TPRF PEP initiative in Leeds, Yorkshire. One of the participants at the Leeds programme, Billa Nanra, returned to become an active facilitator himself, and has recently spoken to a leading probation and parole association about his transformative experience. Read his article about this on the TPRF website: