{"id":661556,"date":"2026-05-10T09:24:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T09:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/661556\/"},"modified":"2026-05-10T09:24:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T09:24:14","slug":"charity-gets-eight-million-state-school-kids-playing-cricket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/661556\/","title":{"rendered":"Charity gets eight million state school kids playing cricket"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chance to Shine was first established in 2005, and is supported by the England and Wales Cricket Board.<\/p>\n

It now delivers free cricket sessions in one in four state schools across the two nations.<\/p>\n

A 2023 report found that reported elitism and class-based discrimination in cricket was partly down to a lack of access to the sport in state schools<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It found that 58% of men to play for England in 2021 were privately educated, significantly higher than the 7% of the general population who went to private school.<\/p>\n

Kate Stevens, the charity’s chief executive, said: “We were set up 21 years ago to allow children to really have a great first experience of cricket at a time when there wasn’t much cricket in state schools.”<\/p>\n

She said she was “really proud” that the programme was now widespread and gave children a “sense of what it is to play cricket”.<\/p>\n

“Lots of people might think cricket’s quite complicated, but actually it’s a game of teamwork, it’s a game of fun, it’s a game of strategy and it’s a game of resilience.”<\/p>\n

Of the eight million children to take part in Chance to Shine sessions, Stevens said half had been girls – meaning “girls have really had access to cricket in a way that just wasn’t there 20 years ago”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chance to Shine was first established in 2005, and is supported by the England and Wales Cricket Board.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":661557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-661556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}