Tower Hamlets Youth Sport Foundation (THYSF) Platform Cricket

In 2005 there were no opportunities for children in Tower Hamlets to take up cricket, despite some enthusiasm and a great deal of natural talent and flair. To address this we created the Tower Hamlets District Cricket programme and appointed a Full Time Cricket Development Officer. This led to a programme of training, matches, club links and coach education led to the following achievements:

• Over 100 children playing recreational cricket annually
• London Youth Games Cricket Winners in 2009
• National Ford U14 Inner Cities Cup Winners in 2010
• 24 children from Tower Hamlets making youth county squads
• One player achieving an MCC Young Cricketer contract

What have we achieved so far?

• 360 schools engaged (16 Boroughs)
• 18,812 children engaged (14,892 new to cricket)
• 39% of participants from disadvantaged background
• 78% of participants from ethnic minority backgrounds
• 1,335 children participating in community cricket through 44 “pop up” cricket clubs
• 495 (37%) of community participants are female

School Sport Partnership (SSP)

Our organisation started life as a publicly funded body aiming to move over 90 schools towards achieving a Government Public Service Agreement of all children achieving 2 hours or more of physical activity per week. At only 27%, Tower Hamlets had the lowest proportion of children hitting that threshold in the whole of the UK in 2005 but by the time the measure was reviewed and adapted to a 5 hour target in 2009, we had increased it to 93%.

Over the same period we increased inter-school competitions from 3 per year to over 70 and we drove up the diversity of sports experienced by children in Tower Hamlets schools to over 24 - the highest average range of any UK borough.