British Children 'bad losers', claims survey by people who want to sell you something.

'Leave me! Save yourself!'

An article on today's BBC Education portal highlights the no doubt vertiginous decline in the average school child's ability to lose gracefully or, indeed, to win gracefully. I wonder how they came up with a sufficiently large data set to arrive at this conclusion, given that school sports days appear to have gone the way of the Daily Sport and vanished from most school's year planner, on the basis that the very rumour of competition will have less physically able children curled up in a foetal ball of misery and self-loathing akin to a diabetic fit.

But given that they actually found enough children who were allowed to actually compete with one another, the findings seem, on the surface, to be a cause for concern.

'Two-thirds of parents of eight to 16-year-olds said their children reacted badly when they lost, the poll found.
A further two-thirds of respondents said parents behaved badly when watching children's matches.
Some 1,008 parents and 1,007 children aged eight to 16 were questioned for the survey by Opinion Matters.'

How awful. And, I'm sure, quite true, quite true. Still, it always gets my whiskers twitching when I see survey findings being posted slavishly as headlines, despite the cowardy-custard get-out of putting it in between two lazy apostrophes to indicate a possible lack of veracity. Try ''David Cameron wears tights,' an unnamed source claimed last night.' The writer gets the neon headline, the reader gets mauled by a grisly, unforgettable image, and all is well, except for the reader's orientation to any actual truth claims. So, how firm is this piece of educational news?

'After you.' 'No, after you.'

Well, it's been conducted by Opinion Matters. Who they? Well, if you're Marks and Spencers, or Vitabiotics ('where nature meets science!') you'll know all about them. They're an 'independent' market research company (what does independent even mean in this kind of context? It seems to mean, 'will work for money') who, as their website proudly says, 'make it our priority to aid our clients to generate headlines and create coverage that highlights and reinforces their branding and key messages in media.' In other words, they conduct research that will get their clients into the press. You'll have seen this kind of thing many, many times before- have a look at the Vitabiotic link above, where they advise the client that a survey or two- a bit of science- will get lazy journalists writing about the product, even though the survey in question relies on 'perceptions' and subjective opinions. So they're used to dealing with sensitive subjects with impartiality and rigour. So far, so good.  Have a look at the website. How do they sleep? (As Don Draper would say: 'On a bed of money.')

And who commissioned the research from these paragons of objective investigation and veracity? Surely not the Marylebone Cricket Club and the Cricket Foundation? It certainly was. One might reasonably ask why such caryatid columns of sportsmanship and integrity are interested in finding out how badly Britain's youth react to winning and losing. Perhaps they're just curious.
 Or perhaps not. As we discover buried away in the legendary bowels of the article (which you get a chocolate biscuit if you're still reading by that point) is the golden nugget that these august bodies have recently started 'offering sportsmanship lessons to state schools'. So, no financial or commercial interest in this research at all. Still, at least the researchers were independent. Somehow.

The data says ______.

So there we have it: a story based on research commissioned by bodies who have a vested interest in the findings, conducted by people who are delighted to make sure that the findings are found, and published uncritically as fact by a public body funded by the license fee. The sad thing is that I probably have a lot of love for the Cricket Foundation. (I mean, it's the Cricket Foundation, for God's sake.) And the idea that children should be more sporting. And the idea that engaging kids with good role models in sport might be a good idea. It's just as charmless as Liberace to see it all stirred into the same cauldron, sold as fact, and served up as news. I think we all deserve a bit better than that.