Introduction

This chapter describes the collective knowledge from social, pedagogical and historical research on girls and physical education overviewed by Flintoff and Scraton in their The Handbook of Physical Education chapter. It presents a case study of the treatment of the report of a large-scale study in England by the media to show that they invariably simplify, sensationalise and misrepresent the findings of studies of girls and physical education. The chapter deals with some of the trends in this research, some of the reasons it perpetuates the same old story, and what might be done to address the girls' problem. It explains some responsibility for the maintenance and reproduction of the same old narrative about girls and physical education that must be borne by researchers and by the media reporting the findings of their research.