Secondary School Girls Programme

Our programme has been designed to create opportunities for teenage girls to play cricket and to support them to develop leadership skills through the sport.

The programme consists of three parts:

Taster Sessions - 

Exciting and enjoyable sessions run by Chance to Shine coaches in PE lessons to give the target group the opportunity to experience what cricket can offer.

Leadership Training - 

Sessions aimed at building the skills of the ‘young leaders’ to help them to run their own extra-curricular cricket club; this included cricket coaching skills, support to promote the club within the school and behaviour management skills. 

The young leaders were also trained to support primary school coaching alongside their coaches. As part of the England & Wales Cricket Board’s (ECB) support for our Primary School programme, cricket festivals were held at secondary schools and our young leaders were able to develop their skills with a younger age group.

Extra-curricular Clubs - 

The young leaders were expected to lead extra-curricular cricket clubs for other girls, of all ages, supported by Chance to Shine coaches.

Read an independent evaluation of the programme here.

Digital Resources

Having received funding from Sport England, we have developed a set of digital resources for Secondary Schools that can be accessed through the Chance to Shine Schools' Portal.

The Secondary Schools portal covers the following key themes – Inspire, Learn and Compete.

Competition

Competition is a pivotal part of what we deliver in Secondary Schools, and when delivered using the appropriate format and supporting the key values of healthy competition, they can be a great engagement tool for all pupils.

Our competition offer focusses around two key segments:

Chance to Compete

Chance to Compete is our national secondary school competition aimed at giving secondary state school children an opportunity to play competitive cricket. Matches are played in under an hour and all participants play a significant part in the game.

The format and rules are adapted so to remove many of the traditional barriers to schools being unable to play competitive cricket, albeit without veering too far from the fundamentals of a game of cricket.

There are formats and rules related to indoor and outdoor cricket across all year groups, however we run flagship competitions to regional level at U13s & U15s (for girls’ and mixed teams).

To find out more about taking part in Chance to Compete, please contact your local county cricket board.

Skills Challenges

The purpose of the Skills Challenge is to provide pupils with an opportunity to try out a number of different cricket based fundamental activities, and to improve upon their personal best scores. Skills Challenges are developed to be quick and easy to set up and require limited equipment.

The challenges are a fun and fast paced way of participating in a number of cricket specific skills and keeping track of personal progress. Challenges can be adapted for all year groups and ability levels.

The Skills Challenges are housed on the Compete page of the Schools' Portal.