State of play: Why is cricket struggling to make its voice heard in state secondary schools?

HUW TURBERVILL hears what the barriers are from staff, and suggests what might be done to spark a renaissance...

Anyone remotely interested in sport who has lived in Britain since the Second World War must have been aware of a couple of basic tenets involving cricket (even if it was not one of their favourite sports).

Cricket is one of our ‘big three’, along with football and rugby union. 

Cricket is our national summer sport.

In the last 20–30 years or so, those notions have come under threat however. Football has become a behemoth, and is now miles ahead of the other two. Many believe this can be traced back to the formation of the Premier League in 1992; its multi-billion-pound coverage on Sky; and the reduction in hooliganism that made it so much more appealing to take families to games again.

The other point is that the football season has encroached into summer, occupying cricket’s territory. But it is not just football. Youngsters have so many other sports and pastimes to choose from now – so many involving screens.

The consensus is that fewer state-school pupils at secondary level are playing or being exposed to cricket. 

Clubs have partially filled this breach. Pupils are often given a taste for cricket at school, perhaps through visits from the cricket charity Chance to Shine, especially at primary level, but then they need to go to their local club for extensive practice, and matches of proper lengths – not just softball and indoor tournaments (the fact that many of those clubs are under threat is something The Cricketer is going to shine a light on later in the year).

State of play: Cricket is in crisis in all schools

With fewer youngsters either being exposed to the game or becoming hooked on it at school, this must have ramifications for adult club cricket, and the professional and international game. Could it even be a contributory factor to the eventual death of the game in this country?

Of course the game is healthy enough in a lot of independent schools (although there are plenty who do struggle to raise sides). When you read about what some of their pupils are offered – superb facilities, video analysis, overseas tours, ECB-qualified coaches – it would be difficult to argue that there is not a ‘have and have not’ situation in this country.

Research suggests there are 4,168 secondary schools in Britain – 286 of which are HMC (independent). There are 333 who submit results and averages to the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, of which 87 are state. Seven per cent of youngsters in the country are privately educated.

In Simon Hughes’ article in our April issue, he revealed only 12 per cent of secondary school children played cricket in a four-week period in the summer of 2017 (on a proper pitch) – “the lowest numbers for a decade and possibly ever”.

^{Surrey and England’s Sam Curran learnt his cricket at Wellington College, an independent school}

The National Curriculum

Are state secondary schools compelled to teach cricket?

No, alas.

Perhaps it is unreasonable for law to be enshrined to ensure cricket is taught… but if The Cricketer cannot wish for this, who can?

Details can be found about what is taught as part of the National Curriculum HERE.

Under ‘Key stage 3 (11-14)’, it says: “Pupils should… become more competent, confident and expert in their techniques, and apply them across different sports and physical activities. They should understand what makes a performance effective and how to apply these principles to their own and others’ work. They should develop the confidence and interest to get involved in exercise, sports and activities out of school and in later life, and understand and apply the long-term health benefits of physical activity.

Pupils should be taught to:

• Use a range of tactics and strategies to overcome opponents in direct competition through team and individual games (for example, badminton, basketball, cricket, football, hockey, netball, rounders, rugby and tennis]

• Analyse their performances compared to previous ones and demonstrate improvement to achieve their personal best

• Take part in competitive sports and activities outside school through community links or sports clubs.

Key stage 4 (14–16) is similar – cricket is cited as an example of nine suitable sports, although interestingly rounders was removed from the list of sports when the curriculum was revamped under Michael Gove.

The key here is that teaching cricket is not mandatory.

The Cricketer contacted the education secretary, Damian Hinds MP, and his office responded as follows: “PE is a compulsory subject at all four key stages in the National Curriculum. Schools have the freedom to offer sports that interest and engage their pupils. There is a greater focus on competitive sport in PE lessons and we know that many schools offer their pupils cricket as part of their curricular and extra curricular sport offer. The government wants all young people to leave formal education as happy, confident and well-rounded individuals. Exercise and organised sport such as cricket can play a huge part in children’s personal resilience and emotional wellbeing.

“Through the Primary PE and Sport premium, the government has invested over £1bn of ring-fenced funding to primary schools to improve PE and sport since 2013. Through the School Sport Action Plan, which will be published in the spring of 2019, the government will work with national governing bodies of sport and local community sport clubs to make it easier for pupils to take part in sports, and this will include cricket.”

The Cricketer wholeheartedly believes that cricket would allow all secondary pupils to acquire the foundations for character building...

^{Worcestershire and England’s Moeen Ali was educated at Moseley School, a state secondary in Birmingham}

Reasons for decline 

A poster on the wall of a school – in the South London/Surrey area – caught my eye when I dropped one of my children off for an activity class. It listed 15 ‘key stage 3 games’: badminton, trampoling, volleyball, rounders, dodgeball, netball, gymnastics, outdoor education, fitness, football, dance, rugby, athletics and – wait for it – striking and fielding. There was no mention of cricket.  Striking and fielding is part of cricket, to be fair, but then they are also components of rounders…

It inspired me to contact 20 state secondary schools in the area where I live (Carshalton) to quiz them about how much cricket they teach/play. 

I was heartened that seven of the schools responded, and indeed six of them do appear to be doing their bit to keep cricket alive. They teach cricket for half a term – two lessons a fortnight for those six or seven weeks. They play outdoor games against other schools – in competitions run by Surrey Schools Cricket Association. They play in indoor competitions. There are after-school cricket clubs.

ENGLAND PLAYERS

State/non-fee paying 

Moeen Ali: Moseley School (comprehensive).

James Anderson: St Theodore’s Catholic High School now Blessed Trinity Roman Catholic College (voluntary aided school).

Joe Denly: Chaucer Technology School (partially selective) (Shut down in 2005).

Ben Foakes: Tendring Technology College.

Jack Leach: Bishop Fox’s School and Richard Huish College (sixth-form college).

Adil Rashid: Heaton School (state) and Bellevue Sixth Form College, Bradford.

Ben Stokes: Cockermouth School.

Olly Stone: Thorpe St Andrew School (comprehensive).

Chris Woakes: Barr Beacon School.

Fee-paying

Jonny Bairstow: St Peter’s School.

Stuart Broad: Oakham.

Rory Burns: City of London Freemen’s School.

Jos Buttler: Wedmore First School Academy (state) 
and King’s College, Taunton.

Sam Curran: Springvale House and St George’s College (Zimbabwe) and Wellington College.

Keaton Jennings: King Edward VII School, Johannesburg.

Joe Root: King Ecgbert’s School and Worksop College for his final two years of education.

The Beacon School in Banstead, Carshalton Boys Sports College, The John Fisher School in Purley, Southborough High School in Surbiton and Glyn School in Epsom have cricket-loving heads of PE who are determined to keep the flag flying. Greenshaw High in Sutton are also doing their bit. The seventh school responded apologetically, conceded that teaching cricket “was a problem” but asked not to be named. The teacher told me it was easier to set up alternative sports, and that cricket tended to focus on a few competitors, with “too many youngsters sitting and waiting their turn”. 

Would it be wrong to surmise that cricket is also not flourishing in the 13 who did not respond to several attempts at contact? Probably not – and anecdotally I have spoken to pupils and parents from some of those schools who – off the record – support that hypothesis.

The barriers 

Costs – of equipment and suitable venues; of maintaining pitches; of schools and clubs buying artificial pitches. Youngsters also must now, by law, wear helmets for hard-ball cricket – an additional expense. Our columnist Michael Henderson wrote in The Spectator in 2016: “In state schools cricket has more or less disappeared. The game is expensive to play, with all the clobber that participants need, and it takes up more hours than any other sport. Football and rugby are easy work.

"All you need are two lots of shirts and a teacher with a whistle. Cricket requires far more dedication from schoolmasters and the lads (and, increasingly, girls) who play the sport.” Jack Tyson, subject leader of physical education at the Beacon School, acknowledges this, but says: “Our facilities limit what we can do. We have a very small sports hall and no outdoor strip. We sometimes have 40 students doing our version of ‘nets’ using a concrete surface. Banstead is a heavy cricket area though and we do produce some really good players and teams.”

Disappearing playing fields – according to Tim Wigmore, again in The Spectator in 2015: “During the Conservative governments of 1979 to 1997, more than 10,000 school playing fields across Britain were sold off. A further 200 were sold off under Labour between 1997 and 2010.”

"How do you improve a non-cricketer in just eight hours?"

Time – alternative sports do not take so long to play, although T20/T10/Hundred have bucked – will buck – that trend to an extent. It is widely accepted that some state teachers do not coach sport out of hours as much as they did in the past (see article by Douglas Henderson).

“How do you improve a non-cricketer in just eight hours?” asks Joe Cutress, head of PE at Carshalton Boys. “I have written a scheme of work – it has two fielding lessons, a bowling lesson, three batting lessons (grip/stance/footwork, front-foot shot, back-foot shot) and two lessons where we play matches. Sometimes it is just better to let the boys gain an understanding of the rules and play a game for the full eight lessons if they are of weak ability, but then even this presents an issue – how does every student get a bat and a bowl in 45 minutes (what we are reduced to after changing and setting up)? I do pairs cricket to make this possible but students will only bowl and face six balls and spend the rest of the time fielding.

"The ability levels of students is also extremely mixed. We have some boys who play outside of school and some who have never played or seen cricket. The gap is vast. As one member of staff with 25-plus students in a class, this is a real challenge. We had an excellent turn-out of year seven and eight last year (11 and 12-year-olds), but interest wanes from year nine onwards and the Xbox starts to take precedence.”

^{From left: Ben Stokes, Joe Denly, Mark Wood, Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow, Keaton Jennings and James Anderson of England}

Jonny Ellis is head of cricket at Glyn. “The big thing for me is to make cricket more accessible to younger people. With so many sports available, cricket gets little attention. Coloured balls like pink and orange with coloured clothing would make it more attractive, although being a traditionalist myself it breaks me to say it. We also need to make cricket in PE lessons more active, rather than players sitting out when they are out and so on. I had a group last year that loved the lessons that had a lot of invasion-style games with stumps as goals, and so on.

"That way you have games where nobody is standing still for any great length of time. Those type of games are on a basketball court with a hard ball. You have two teams of five, and the aim is not to move with the ball but find space and do different types of throws and also rolling and long barrier, while the other team try and intercept. The end goal is to get close enough to the stumps to take the bails off, to replicate a run-out. My students love it and we have seen a huge improvement in fielding skills, but also team bonding and communication skills develop.” 

Passion/expertise – “I believe it comes down to the expertise and interest of the teaching staff,” says Cuttress. “If staff don’t play the game there is no real desire to teach it – although I am training my staff this summer in how to coach cricket. Generally in the industry lots of teachers would rather do the sport of softball. I have played since the age of four, having a cricket-loving father, and therefore have a real interest in developing it. I also see it as a national sport.

It also comes down to whether students are interested in playing and pursuing cricket outside of school. Generally boys with parents who enjoy cricket will be the ones who are interested in doing that. These are also the boys who play outside of school. Facilities, time and funding are barriers.”

Southborough High also has a cricket champion in James Colbert, the head of PE. “Cricket is surviving but in its proper form it is far from thriving unfortunately,” he says. “There are a lot of PE teachers who don’t push cricket – it is such a shame. I love it, hence it is pushed here.”

"We need to make cricket in PE lessons more active"

Exam pressure – the game is played at the wrong time of the year, the summer, when exam finals are held. There seems to be greater pressure than ever on teachers and pupils to achieve better grades. Head teachers are also under huge pressure to achieve good Ofsted reports. The suggestion of Stephen Charlwood, of Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Boys (a leading independent school), that playing cricket actually helps youngsters focus for exams, does not seem to have been adopted nationally. 

Lack of decent opposition – Joe Sutton is master of cricket at the John Fisher School, Purley. “There is a schedule of about eight games for sides from years seven–10, and the first team. However the divide between private-school and state-school cricket is now bigger than ever due to the amount of coaching and funding that gets pumped in. So due to this we have had to change our fixture list to play more state schools, which has cut the number of games.”

Paul Taylor, director of cricket participation at Surrey, also talks about the “amount of paperwork a teacher has to complete to enter any competition these days – it is extensive, and can prove to be a barrier to participation. Therefore we need to make sure that our competitions are easy to enter, can be played at schools (Flicx pitches will help), and that they will fit in with a schools timetable.”

"If staff don't play the game there is no real desire to teach it"

Despite all the gloom above, the rise of girls’ cricket has been an enormous positive. Many secondary schools have phased rounders out and replaced it with cricket, although most of the firm evidence of that had been in in the independent sector. But from April, Chance to Shine are launching a new secondary school girls’ programme that will include girls-only after-school clubs in 120 state secondary schools.

Former England captain Charlotte Edwards said: “A lot of time the focus has been on primary schools and getting girls and boys involved from an early age, but we’ve got so much interest now, and there’s no cricket at secondary schools. I know from the schools I’ve spoken to, they are desperate for more resources, so this can only be a good thing.”

A phoenix from the flames for the game as a whole? Perhaps. England’s 2017 World Cup triumph acted as a catalyst for the women’s game in this country. If girls start playing more cricket in state schools, facilities will be needed, they can be shared, and participation can increase across the board. And that really would improve the state of play.  

The Cricketer's blueprint

1. The teaching of cricket should be made mandatory as part of the National Curriculum.

2. The Cricketer to award certificates of commendation to state secondary 
schools who champion the game. 

3. Keep encouraging girls’ cricket in schools. If it continues to grow, better facilities will be needed, they can be shared, and participation increases across the board.

4. Greater links to be forged between professional 
cricketers and state schools. England stars should be contracted to visit.

5. Chance to Shine to receive Sport England funding again for secondary schools, enabling them to reactivate their Satellite Club Initiative (after-school coaching).

6. Monitor – and support with a critical eye – the ECB’s Inspiring Generations campaign from 2020-24. 

7. The new Sky/BBC TV deal from 2020–24 sees some Hundred games, and international highlights for men and women, shown on the BBC with all its platforms. Press the ECB to ensure some live cricket remains on terrestrial beyond these dates. 

8. Schools to change their calendar to January to December, allowing a cricket resurgence.

9. Independent schools to do more to help state schools. Offer subsidised pitches to clubs, particularly for youth practice sessions and games. More pressure should be put on independent schools by the Charity Commission to open up sports facilities.

10. Create a national schools championship for state schools only, using The Hundred format.

11. Clubs to work even more 
closely with schools, sharing resources. 

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