Southfield Junior School under-11 girls have made it to the national finals of the Premier League Primary Stars competition.

Following their great success across the year, which included missing out on the Pokemon Primary Schools’ Cup national finals by just one point, Southfield were selected to represent Swindon Town at the tournament hosted at Wolverhampton Wanderers and finished second to see them move on to the national finals in the summer term.

Cathy Talmage helps to organise the school team and has been so impressed with how they have worked together.

She said: “We are so proud of them, they have just worked really hard.

“We have only had the girls’ team for the last two years and as a school we haven’t had a football team for at least ten years, mixed and girls.

“It has been a really exciting couple of years for us and they are just so determined and work so well together, it has been pretty much the same girls last year and this year, they are really encouraging of each other.

“They are all different abilities, we have some who have never played football before and some that do play for a team, my own daughter is in the team as she plays for Reading, so there is a real mixture of abilities, and they just work really well together.”

At the event at the Wolves academy training ground, the girls got to experience match analysis and a virtual reality goalkeeper workshop alongside their matches and have even more exciting experiences to come.

She said: “It was just a brilliant day, just to go to this facility and they had a brilliant day set-up as they played six matches and won their group to get to the final.

“Then they had a day of doing VR workshops and a whole workshop where they looked at the game they just played with the analyst who would do the women’s and academy teams and they were going through all the different elements of the game.

“I don’t think we ever expected to get through to the Wolves one and then to think we are at the final in a Premier League stadium is just incredible.

“It looks like you get to walk out of the tunnel like you would as a Premier League team and play on the pitch, so I think that experience itself is just incredible and anything that comes on top of that is just a bonus.

“Ideally we would love to be able to take as many of the children as we can to the final if we are allowed to, just to show them what can be achieved if you work together.”

With the team having only been going for two years, Talmage said that the school were doing everything they could to celebrate these achievements to help inspire other children.

She said: “[The Lionesses] were a massive inspiration, I think to see on the telly that these ladies can win the Euros and have these girls that are so passionate about football.

“You can see that in the school, as the girls are achieving more then more girls join the club.

“I take my hat off to our head teacher [Kimberley O’Sullivan] and Mrs [Abby] Spencer as they have really made a big deal out of it for the girls.

“They make sure to do celebrations in assemblies to show what the girls are achieving so the girls and the boys can see the strength of character because these haven’t been easy rounds to get to the final.”