Parents helping children to skip PE

A poll of more than 1,000 parents and 500 children published today showed that parents who spent their own schooldays dreaming up ways to skip PE lessons are five times more likely to help their own children bunk off.

The old excuse of a stomach ache is as popular with today's youngsters as it was with their parents – half of all parents said they had used this as an excuse while they were at school, along with four in 10 of today's schoolchildren.

Complaints of headaches and forgetting kit were the next most popular excuses.

The Cricket Foundation poll, commissioned to mark Brit Insurance national cricket day, found that three in four parents admitted trying to avoid games at least once while they were at school, with one in five (21 per cent) of these admitting to skipping the lessons "many times".

Of those parents who owned up to avoiding games as youngsters, almost one in three (31 per cent) said they often send sick notes to school to excuse their children from PE lessons despite knowing, or suspecting, that the reasons were not genuine.

Among parents who enjoyed games at school, this figure was only 6 per cent.

It appears that parents have painful memories of the times they spent cross country running – nearly half (47 per cent) voted it their most disliked sport, followed by hockey (32 per cent) and athletics (29 per cent).

The survey also asked children why they wanted to miss the lesson.

Almost half (44 per cent) cited the British weather, while nearly one in five (18 per cent) said it was due to their lack of sporting prowess. Nearly one in three girls (28 per cent) admitted to being embarrassed about the way they looked in their sports kit.

Four in 10 (39 per cent) of the eight to 16-year-olds questioned said they had asked their parents to lie for them, with nearly one in four (22 per cent) resorting to faking a problem or illness to trick their parents into writing sick notes. Some 15 per cent admit to forging notes themselves.