Coloured kit change brings parity at London's Forest School

All teams bar one have now moved away from whites

Over the last 12 months, Forest School have shifted all their teams into coloured kit.

The move has helped to achieve better alignment between their boys' and girls' programs and helped encourage more students to play cricket. 

Tomos Fowler, the school’s head of cricket, explained: "We've done that to ensure that there's parity across the boys' and girls' programme, because it looked like on fixture days that we were the boys and the girls separately, because the girls were playing coloured kit for obvious reasons.

"We play a lot of T20 cricket for the younger ones, and then we try and get a 40 over game, 30 to 5 over to 40 over game for every age team level. But then obviously our first team cricket, we still play in the classic whites and red balls for some fixtures, and then we play some games in coloured kit with a new pink ball or white ball from both ends, just bringing it a bit more in line with what pathways are doing, with what the kids see on the big screen."

This is a unique move and Forest believe they are one of the first schools in the country to put all their teams, apart from the boys' first team, in coloured kit. 

To grow participation across the school, they introduced an extra midweek session, and it has bore immediate fruit. The girls section, especially, has developed massively in recent times.

"Over the last two years, the girls' numbers have grown massively in the school," Fowler said.

"We were up to about 70 to 80 girls in Year 7 and 8 playing cricket, so we were playing A's and B's, which was the first time the school's done it, so that's brilliant. I think the biggest part of the programme's definitely been on the girls' side of things, and we've had a lot of success there over the last few years."

Amu Surenkumar, who attended the school, has been a source of inspiration and in Fowler’s words "something really good for them to look up to" after a summer in which she has played for Warwickshire and was in the Manchester Originals squad. 

Individual success has underpinned the progress of the programme, Manveer Kathuria scored a century in the 1st XI as an Under-14, Areeb Rashid made two T20 centuries in the same day and Jeevan Kathuria made five consecutive hundreds in as many games.

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