Background According to the Swedish law "skollagen" the school shall encourage all children’s development and strive to mitigate differences in pupils individual conditions to utilize their education. The role of the school nurse is to proactively prevent illness amongst the pupils. With some girls, absence is high in physical exercises and their presence in other activities that aim for increased health is limited. This absence affects these pupils’ ratings and limits their chances of having physical activities, but it also reduces their possibilities to interact in social activities within and outside school.

Aim The aim of this study was to describe school nurses’ approach to strengthen girls who are in a situation where their guardians restrict their participation in health promotive activities.

Method This is a qualitative, descriptive study based on individual semi-structured interviews with nine school nurses. The transcribed interviews were subjected to qualitative content analysis.

Results The school nurses had an active approach to create a mutual understanding between the girls, their guardians and the school. This was conducted by strengthening of democratic appraisals, finding new ways to reach girls and their guardians and finally building and widening the school nurses’ own competence in the situation.

Conclusions: The studie shows that school nurses make use of the steering documents that exists within the school system in order to strengthen girls’ equality rights. A prerequisite for the school nurse to influence guardians and girls was to create a good relation for all of them. The school nurses were interested in understanding the family’s situation and their life experiences as well as inform about the core values of the school in order to create mutual understanding and build a foundation for further work based on each family’s situation. In the role of a school nurse it was not found viable to reach results only by informing the guardians and girls. Instead the school nurses tried to reach an open discussion with respect for both parties.

Only through such a dialogue the school nurses argued that they could reach out and create the right conditions for a positive change to support the girls’ equality rights.