State-school cricket: Why England will never be the best until cricket becomes a truly national sport

There he was on the pavilion veranda, holding court with other men of a certain age. Of the school cricketers who stepped forward to receive their medals, how many knew that this grey-haired, stooping man in spectacles had averaged 60 against Lillee and Thomson, or defied the fearsome West Indies with a century?

David Steele was at Kimbolton School, Cambridgeshire, as president of the Fred Trueman & R66T Academy State Schools Cricket League. He was an appropriate choice, having attended a secondary modern in the Potteries. In the 1970s, the age of post-war social mobility, English cricket was more state-educated than it has ever been – and probably ever will be. Of the team selected in what proved Steele’s final Test, at a tinder-dry Oval in 1976, only Tony Greig had finished his education at a fee-paying senior school, and that was in South Africa. This was no exception: 23 of the 27 players picked for England that summer across five Tests and three ODIs were state-educated. How things had changed by December 2025, when the team at Melbourne included just two players – Ben Stokes and Josh Tongue – who had completed their education in the state sector, though Joe Root and Harry Brook had years earlier been spirited away on a scholarship.

At this point, someone usually mentions Chance to Shine. Established in 2005, the charity go every year to 4,000 state primary schools in England and Wales – around one in four – to provide introductory soft-ball sessions. Last year alone, they claim to have put a bat in the hands of 300,000 girls. But in terms of directing children towards recognisably competitive cricket, their impact is hard to quantify. In any case, the vast majority of state schools lack three key ingredients: specialist coaching, time and facilities.

Amateur status was abolished in 1962 but, if anything, the advantage of a private education has grown. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England,” vowed Labour minister Tony Crosland in the mid-1960s. If he didn’t quite succeed, then Margaret Thatcher closed more grammars than any other education secretary. Disagree with academic selection if you like, but most grammar schools played cricket. When many 11-year-olds enter secondary school today, it’s a lottery whether they come across the game. It has needed people with deep pockets, or volunteers with time and determination, to help keep it going.

Over the same 20-year lifespan as Chance to Shine, but with nothing like the fanfare, Geoff Hastings has been running the biggest state-school cricket tournament in the land. After the 2005 Ashes, Fred Trueman pledged to support his old friend, but did not live to see a ball bowled in the tournament named after him. From Hastings’s patch in south Lincolnshire, the Fred Trueman League has spread to Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Middlesex, Derbyshire and Yorkshire (where it is run by the R66T Academy). Of those, Lincolnshire is the only authority to have retained state grammars at any scale. Around 2,500 children play in Trueman leagues every year, almost entirely in comprehensives.

The potential is clear. On finals day, I see an Afghan teenager from Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough pass 70mph – so fast, his team can barely set a field. The competition has received no financial support from the ECB or the county boards. Much of the money comes via the Cricket Society Trust, and Hastings is not ashamed to ask for help: Hunts County Bats donate each participating school a kitbag worth £560.

Meanwhile, Sir Rod Aldridge, multimillionaire founder of Capita, supports a trust that runs academy schools across the country. The £1.8m Sir Rod Aldridge Cricket Centre in Brighton, which works in partnership with Sussex CCC, is perhaps the closest any state school comes to a high-performance facility. Aldridge also helped pay for the UK’s second all-weather cricket dome, in Darwen, Lancashire, which opened in autumn 2025. Thirteen local schools have access.

The plan had been to use a £35m grassroots funding package from Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government to build 16 domes in all, but the money disappeared when they lost the 2024 general election. But perhaps the most important aspect of the ECB State School Action Plan – unveiled in 2024 with the backing of England’s greatest state-educated bowler, Jimmy Anderson – was the rolling-out of cricket training courses to secondary schoolteachers. “I could have written it myself,” says Hastings. “You need to train up teachers in cricket, and offer them an incentive to add something on their CV. You can’t expect them these days to just know about cricket, or to give up hours for nothing extra. The eternal gripe I hear from PE teachers is: ‘We are last in line for time and money.’”

There remains a perception that many teachers either don’t get, or don’t like, cricket – but Aaron Smithson, a club player and PE teacher for 20 years in state schools across the north, disagrees. “I don’t think that’s the issue,” he says. “There probably is a skills gap, but mainly it comes down to time and money. A lot of schools pay lip service to extracurricular activities. They’re under so much pressure for exam results. If I have to leave early to run a cricket fixture a fair distance away, my lessons need covering – and that costs money. There’s no way I’d be allowed out of the building. There’s so much more pressure on staff. And if you run a cricket match where you’re not getting home until 7pm, and you’re often on your own scoring and umpiring, it’s asking a lot. Compare that to a friend of mine who works in a private school and is paid extra to run rugby sessions.”

Ultimately, when schools are judged on academic results, how high on the list of priorities can cricket be? At many private schools, though, sport is a major part of their offering in a competitive market. Where schools are heavily South Asian, there can be a groundswell that is harder to ignore. Ravi Bopara would climb the gates at Brampton Manor School in East Ham to play cricket alongside older boys. And at last summer’s Trueman finals day, London Academy brought an almost entirely Afghan side from Edgware. Their opponents, St Paul’s Way from Tower Hamlets, had a PE teacher with a cricket-playing background, but no grass field of their own – an acute problem in London.

Schools able to tap into specialist coaches can achieve great things. In April 2022, Canterbury Academy beat three prominent private schools to The Cricketer Schools’ Hundred title at Desert Springs, Spain, just eight years after forming their first proper team. They retained the title the following year. Among those involved is former Kent captain David Fulton, whose brother-in-law Phil Relf is Canterbury Academy director of sport. They have next to no cricket facilities. But through their contacts, they and Simon Langton Grammar have set up winter training at the St Lawrence Ground, and at Polo FarmSports Club in the summer. Though Canterbury couldn’t raise a girls’ team, Alexa Stonehouse and Darcey Carter appeared alongside the boys. Both are now playing professionally.

“It’s not so much about having an ex-professional like me,” says Fulton. “You need to be able to enthuse the kids in the first place, but also to understand your cohort. We hear other schools saying it’s impossible – but we know there are cricketers in neighbouring state schools; they’re just not playing cricket at school.”

In autumn 2021, as schools emerged from Covid, Elliot Crouch – a Year 10 pupil at St Bartholomew’s School, Newbury – asked his English teacher, Richard Clayton, to resuscitate cricket. The best training slot Clayton could secure was “the graveyard shift” of 4pm on Fridays, but there was enough interest to form a First XI, playing on the school’s artificial pitch. The following summer, he organised nine fixtures, mainly against private schools, and in 2023 persuaded five other state schools to enter the Toby Radford Trophy, named after the former first-class player and batting coach who had attended St Bart’s. Most of the tournament is crammed into April and May, and Burford (a state boarding school) and Reading (a grammar) were stronger at first. But the competition has directed youngsters to local clubs.

The MCC Foundation realise they will be building on such ventures when they launch the Knight–Stokes Cup this spring. The county boards will oversee the regional rounds, yet it has taken a charity to launch a nationwide state-school competition. The Cup is pitched at Under-15s: any older, and it would run up against GCSEs or A-levels. It’s not unknown for some schools to bar PE staff from arranging matches for Year 11s, which is also the biggest drop-off age at club level. All Knight–Stokes Cup matches, boys and girls, will be played with a pink ball, so games can take place whether the players wear whites or coloured kit, and whether sightscreens are white, black or non-existent. English cricket is right to be delighted by the fact that 820 schools – a fifth of all secondaries – signed up for the first year. Caution is advisable, though: last summer’s 96 matches (a record) in the Trueman tournament in Lincolnshire involved only 42 per cent of the schools who had registered. But the involvement of MCC, offering a final at Lord’s, and the backing of England captains in Heather Knight, Ben Stokes and Michael Vaughan, has been a powerful tool of recruitment – and, hopefully, retention.

And where will these games be played? The sale of 10,000 school fields under Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s is well known: John Major called it the biggest regret of his premiership. But plenty of secondaries do have an artificial strip, often more consistent than undertended grass pitches. Some will seek to play at neighbouring clubs, though that can be expensive: one academy school in West Yorkshire pay £70 a game to use their local Bradford League ground, and it takes a brave head of PE to bat for that.

Still, around 60 independent schools have expressed willingness to open up their facilities to host Knight–Stokes Cup games. It’s a sore point that this kind of thing isn’t the norm already, especially in July, when private schools break up before their state counterparts. Geoff Hastings can access Kimbolton and its eight grounds because he is an Old Kimboltonian, and they aren’t a rugby-playing school converting their fields for September. In fairness, where heads of cricket at independent schools have reached out to state neighbours, the pupils’ passion hasn’t always been matched by their teachers. And many private schools already play some part by hosting MCC Foundation Hubs, launched 15 years ago and now numbering 164.

Even so, expert coaching is usually needed for teenage cricketers to keep pace with their independent-sector peers. Surrey draw heavily on local private schools, but this is also where the African-Caribbean Engagement Programme began, and the county are now backing Surrey Academic Cricket Scholars, which helps local sixth-formers access elite coaching. It is run by Judy Wallis, sister of Alec Stewart, and has expanded from three to 12 colleges in just three years. The students are guaranteed four hours of cricket training a week, strength and conditioning, employability workshops and the chance to work on match days at The Oval. In 2024, George Abbot School in Guildford – Ashley Giles’s alma mater – had students Will Hamilton and Ed Marsh win selection for Surrey’s Under-18 squad, while 16-year-old quick bowler Ned Brown was talent-spotted at his SACS trial.

Schools at which the England teams to face West Indies at The Oval in 1976, and Australia at Melbourne in 2025/26, finished their education

Bob Woolmer: Skinners’	Zak Crawley: Tonbridge
Dennis Amiss: Oldknow	Ben Duckett: Stowe
David Steele: Endon	Jacob Bethell: Rugby
Chris Balderstone: Paddock County, Huddersfield	Joe Root: Worksop
Peter Willey: Seaham Secondary	Harry Brook: Sedbergh
Tony Greig: Queen’s College, Queenstown	Ben Stokes: Cockermouth
Alan Knott: Northumberland Heath Secondary	Jamie Smith: Whitgift
Geoff Miller: Chesterfield Grammar	Will Jacks: St George’s, Weybridge
Derek Underwood: Beckenham and Penge Grammar	Gus Atkinson: Bradfield
Mike Selvey: Battersea Grammar	Brydon Carse: Pearson High School, Port Elizabeth
Bob Willis: Royal Grammar School, Guildford	Josh Tongue: Worcester Sixth Form College
All schools from the state sector apart from Queen’s College (South Africa)	All schools from the independent sector apart from Cockermouth and Worcester Sixth Form College

In the north, there are not as many independent schools, but the three northernmost first-class counties have twigged that producing more state-school cricketers than their southern rivals may mean a competitive advantage. Students at Myerscough College (near Preston), the Yorkshire Cricket College (Leeds) and Park View Academy (Chester-le-Street) benefit from links with their corresponding counties. Ben McKinney, Mitchell Killeen and Luke Robinson all reached Durham via Park View.

We may already have arrived at the peak of private-school dominance. But it’s going to take time before we return to the days when ten of the England team were state-educated. The imposition of VAT on school fees has already contributed to some smaller private schools either closing, or merging. It will be an unintended consequence if they decide one way to cut costs is to quietly shelve cricket scholarships.

An independent school’s greater access to time, money and facilities is unlikely to disappear. But at least the English cricket authorities have realised they needed to step in. Perhaps it was the debate over equity. Or perhaps it was the realisation that, until cricket once again becomes a truly national sport, England will never be the best in the world for long.

James Coyne is deputy editor of The Cricketer.

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