Sport England Funding

[Big Jon]

From the Guardian today:
"Sport England has warned sports their grass roots funding will be cut in the next 12 months if participation rates don't improve, after new figures showed 19 had suffered a decline since 2007-08 despite tens of millions of pounds of new investment.

Only four sports – cycling, netball, mountaineering and athletics – have showed a statistically significant increase in people playing at least once a week since Sport England's Active People Survey began measuring participation rates in 2007, according to damning figures released today."

Anyone seen this report and how does orienteering figure in it (if at all)?

[Monte]

This gives the Press Release overview:
http://www.sportengland.org/media_centre/press_releases/active_people_4.aspx
and reference to the various parts of the Active People Surveys is here:
http://www.sportengland.org/research/active_people_survey/active_people_survey_4.aspx

Orienteering has too small a sample size to appear in the 'Once a week' figures but shows as No change in the 'Once a month'.

There's reams of stuff to wade through. Of the sports showing an increase, cycling includes non-competitive recreational cycling and mountaineering includes mountain (and hill?) walking.

[ifititches]

browsing the 2 pages of downloadable spreadsheets from this report on Sport England website, I think that orienteering was included in the figures, but the number of people involved in orienteering was too small to give a big enough sample for individual sport analysis.
In most of the tables in which orienteering is mentioned it gets a * symbol to denote insufficient data
edit- Monte just got a post in before me, saying the same thing but with a few more frills

[awk]

The way that Sport England do the surveying and categorising is so risible that it would be laughable if it didn't have such serious implications for so many activities.

Mind you, it'll be interesting to see how the cycling figure will go now that the main quango that was responsible for so much successful cycling development in this country has been got rid of.

Perhaps one of the few things more risible than Sport England's surveying techniques is the government's supposed strategic approach to funding sport and related health promoting activity. Oh, and the massive overemphasis on illness treatment rather than prevention.

[mharky]

Mind you, it'll be interesting to see how the cycling figure will go now that the main quango that was responsible for so much successful cycling development in this country has been got rid of.

Two words; Sky Ride.

[Neil M40]

Of the sports showing an increase, cycling includes non-competitive recreational cycling and mountaineering includes mountain (and hill?) walking.

Can't we count anybody moving about while reading a map as doing "non-competitive recreational orienteering", whether hill-walking, cycling or just trying to find their way to the nearest McDonalds?

[King Penguin]

including tourists finding their way from site to site in London and elsewhere ?

[Red Adder]

Should we go to all the schools that have been mapped recently to find out how much O activity they do - I suspect if each map was used just once by one class the figure would get well in to tens of thousands.