Fundamental Movement Skill Development in Children With Intellectual Disabilities: An 8-Week Coach-Led and Parent-Supported Intervention.

Only 57 of the 82 recruited children were retested. The children who missed the second assessment started with lower movement scores, so the results come mainly from those who were doing better to begin with. The paper gives the number of non-completers as 23 in one place and 25 in another. The groups were small and uneven (16 control, 25 coach-led, 16 parent-supported) and were allocated by club, not by child, with only two clubs in the parent-supported arm. A handful of clubs can carry a whole result. At the start, the parent-supported clubs had lower ball-skill scores (about 14 points) than the control and coach-led clubs (about 20). That difference was not statistically significant, but some of the later gain could be those children catching up rather than the programme working. The video scoring was done by one trained but unblinded person, and the study never checked whether the same performance would be scored the same way twice. Coaches stuck to the content of the sessions but only 37.5% of activities ran within the planned time, so children likely got less practice than the plan intended. Eight weeks with about 360 minutes of coach-led sessions is well below the 600 minutes some authors recommend, and there was no follow-up after the programme ended. The two intervention groups were deliberately never compared with each other, so the study cannot show that adding parents beats coach-led sessions alone. The groups differed significantly in how many boys and girls they contained, and boys tend to score higher on ball skills. The authors raise this themselves.

Special Olympics Ireland supported the work and Sport Ireland's Research and Innovation Unit funded it. The programme being studied, Young Athletes, is run by Special Olympics, and its coaches delivered the sessions. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Do not read this as proof that the parent-led home practice caused the improvement in ball skills. The parent-supported group was only compared with the control group, never with the coach-led group, and it also started with lower ball-skill scores and a different mix of boys and girls. Under the worst-case assumption for the children who were not retested, the ball-skill difference was no longer significant (p = 0.25).