The sound of bat on ball; the excited cry of ‘how’s that?’ and the respectful clapping for the batsman for being dismissed without scoring a run, this is the archetypical sound of an English summer’s day.  That and strawberries and cream, and umbrellas for the inevitable rain!  Cricket, as only the English (or teams from our former Colonies in the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Australia or South Africa) can play it – a game which, to the French and Germans, simply appears a complete waste of time.

Such has been the English belief in the importance of team games for youngsters that long ago the Duke of Wellington could claim that the Battle of Waterloo had, actually, been won on the playing fields of Eton.  Lacking those playing fields in the back streets of Liverpool, Manchester, and other industrial cities, determined youth workers and ardent clerics set up hundreds of youth football clubs which, over the course of the last century, were steadily United into ever bigger clubs which now – having long forgotten their origins – stalk the world stage and exchange their players for tens of millions of pounds at a time.

Back in the 1940s and ‘50s as England at last began to build an education system open to everybody, new secondary schools were required to have a minimum of 18 acres of playing fields, and primary schools at least 6 acres.  Forty years later, after successive governments had sold off many such playing fields to raise capital for further building projects, the number of secondary schools able to offer full facilities for cricket has fallen to about 10%.  While most schools offer a greater range of sports than in years gone by, the actual need for sporting opportunities has increased proportionately to the continuously growing number of obese children who take very little exercise.

Recognising that politicians would not act unless put under pressure from the public an initiative was launched by The Cricket Foundation in 2005 to raise fifty million pounds within ten years from private sources to provide more opportunities for youngsters to play the game as part of the school curriculum.  The initiative, called “The Chance to Shine”, intends to shame government into providing opportunities for cricket in every school, believing that team sports help youngsters to realise that it is not which side wins that matters as much as how each person ‘plays the game.’

But should it be left to enthusiasts to draw the attention of the thousands of policymakers in central and local government whose very job it is to make sure that educational provision always adapts to real educational needs.  Why, with all the money they are paid and all the funds they hold for innovation, does the impetus for change have to come from outside the system?

Which raises the question that goes far beyond cricket, or playing fields, or the structure of schools.  It is simply this.  Are institutions now so over concerned with management issues that they have lost the art of self-adjustment?  If so, they, as any biologist would know, will lose the ability to survive.

The good team captain knows when he or she has to make the rules, and not simply follow them.  That is what England is so short of… leaders who do the right thing, not simply managers who, by the rules around them, simply do things right.

This article is tagged: cricket, Education, government, policy, politicians.