Cricketing potential has no barriers. It can be anywhere. Where the barriers kick in is in how the talent can be developed and the access it has to the talent pathway. If you have a young person living in a deprived inner-city area and another in a wealthy area and attending independent school, there’s nothing at all that indicates one has more talent potential than the other. What makes the difference is access to the high-quality coaching and support they need to realise their potential.
We were appointed as part of the ECB’s response to the ICEC report to deliver the Talent Pathway Action Plan. As part of that response the ECB’s Pathways team is undertaking five strands of work.
Currently, we’re working with the counties on removing or reducing financial barriers to the pathways and have supported several pilot projects designed to provide supplementary support for state school pupils to enhance support for County Age Group (CAG) players. We’ve also developed an extensive network of new talent identification workshops aimed at driving best practice and reducing bias to improve the talent identification process.
A workstream of developing early engagement programmes for November 2025 is also underway to sit before a delayed CAG selection process. This must all combine to improve the transition rates of players from all backgrounds into the professional game.
The workshops are available in two options. There’s a full-day course, which is targeted specifically at full-time staff in the First-Class Counties and National Counties boys’ and girls’ pathways. Six of these have been scheduled this autumn, with approaching 120 people set to attend in total. There are also 17 half-day workshops aimed at the part-time and volunteer coaching workforce.
All of the workshops focus on talent identification; understanding the components and attributes of talent; the barriers to talent and how maturation, late development and coaching backgrounds and stages of development are factors in that. Crucially, we’re tackling the biases that as human beings we all have. When it comes to biases, we need to understand how to recognise them. And then, when we’ve done that, we need to know how we mitigate to reduce them.
Every person who attends a workshop is provided with a reflections log, where they can capture key thoughts and reminders. Three months later, we contact each participant to see what they’ve managed to achieve in terms of progressing their thoughts from the reflections log. We’ll do the same thing after six months, too. Success is not about the amount of people engaging in the workshops, but the behavioural changes that come from it.
We’re aiming to change the pathways permanently and create connections across the game, so the workshops will also be delivered to Community Talent Champions and Chance to Shine staff.
Across the country, we think we’ll go close to having 300 people completing one of the workshops – which will put us beyond our target of 75% of the eligible workforce having attended. For the remaining people we miss, we’ll be mapping out bespoke solutions such as online delivery or specific visits to geographical extremes or people whose schedules didn’t allow them to attend.
What we’re trying to do here is make sure that we’re accessing all the possible raw talent out there, whether it’s currently playing tape ball, street cricket, school cricket, indoor cricket, or traditional club cricket. This will ensure we are maximising the talent pool and developing a more diverse and inclusive pathway. Everyone has their own starting point, but if you can take players along the framework from wherever they start then there’s no reason you can’t help them become senior international players -- if they have the talent required.
Currently, there’s an imbalance in the pathway. Around 45% of CAG players in the men’s and women’s pathways go to independent schools and access high quality coaching there, but only 6% of the overall population attends those schools. So, there’s a fundamental difference in what children are experiencing, and we’re trying to improve the opportunities and coaching available to state school pupils. We also have good representation but a lack of progress in pathways of ethnically diverse groups in both the boys’ and girls’ systems.
Of course, you don’t fix bias and discrimination by creating new bias against independent school cricketers. We want them to realise their potential just as much. We simply want state school players to be able to have the same opportunity.
Our focus is on making the absolute best use of the resources we have, and in very simple terms that’s about making huge and meaningful connections between different aspects of the game. It’s a significant challenge, but if we get it right the rewards are huge by having that maximised talent pool and more diverse pathway.