Parents: friends or enemies of school sport?
What do parents want school sport to provide for their children? Opportunities to improve through coaching, play regularly and win? These are obvious success criteria for sport. Every day the newspapers and dedicated sports channels carry endless scores, results, league tables and stories based on the mechanisms of high performance. Where the best players are, how the best teams are performing, and how the best coaches can seek to win more often. Winning is never far from the surface of the very visible public face of high performance, adult sport.
It is not surprising, therefore, that parents apply the same criteria to school sport. Unless they are educated to consider a wider interpretation of what constitutes success. Schools are quick to bemoan parents' obsession with winning, but much slower to explain to them what they see as the benefits for children of the sports programmes that they provide.
Competition is only part of the purpose of school sport. Inevitably, the principal aim of a school is education, and that is measured in learning. Schools might aspire that their pupils learn a range of outcomes through physical activity. These could include skills and strategies, though also attitudes, teamwork, personal qualities (courage, persistence, delayed gratification) and, above all, of love of being physically active. The latter depends on inspiring intrinsic motivation in children, valuing sports for the positive feelings that they induce. An atmosphere of performance orientation and pressure to win do not support this aim. Parents can contribute to this pressure, or they can focus on learning, effort and enjoyment. It is a choice. However, it is not a choice that all parents are equipped to make: schools may need to embark on a programme of parent education - not merely to discourage them from embarrassing themselves and the school through touchline behaviour imported from professional football, but to explain what they are trying to achieve for children through sport.
This is not to undervalue competition, but to position it. Commitment to practice, selfless dedication to team goals, the striving for improvement and the joy of sharing it with friends are all part of competitive sport. Dealing with disappointment and the satisfaction of triumph are all outcomes best delivered through competition. And these are benefits for parents as well as children. Schools must educate parents of the value of commitment. Being available to play every week, even when this requires selflessness and sacrifice. Not just because it is a school rule, or an organisational expedient, but because it is a positive human quality. One that can be developed through sport. Doing everything possible to be the best player and team, but recognising that sometimes the opposition is better, or luckier, and being able to accept this without seeking to blame the referee, or the coach.
It is important to understand that error is an essential part of improvement. Error is inevitable in sport: the reaction of parents and coaches to error is, however, a matter of choice. It can be a chance to express frustration and berate children - or it can be a teachable moment. A way of supporting endeavour and confirming that trying as hard as possible to do the right thing is enough.
Schools that believe this may have to be proactive in educating parents to do the same.
By focussing on effort, application and striving, parents can help establish an atmosphere in which players can enjoy trying to do their best. Seeking to be the best player, and best person, that they can be. Secure in the knowledge that this will be enough, regardless of which team has more goals when the final whistle goes.
Parents have an important role in determining whether their children come to love sport. The education that schools provide for parents, and the personal example that teachers set them on the touchline, will determine whether this is achieved or not.
Teachers shape what children value and enjoy in their experience of sport: they can have the same influence on parents. The latter is harder to achieve, but arguably more important.