Keeping people safe is fundamental to our role as the governing body for cricket.
Everyone involved in the game has the right to expect that our environments are safe. It’s also central to our wider vision: we can’t be the most inclusive team sport if we’re not also a safe sport, so embedding a culture of safeguarding and leadership in this area underpins everything we do.
With that in mind, being proactive about safeguarding really matters. Knowledge and education are critical to keeping people safe. Understanding what a good, safe environment looks like is just as important as recognising when something’s wrong.
In practical terms, that knowledge and education is delivered through our national safeguarding framework. Minimum safeguarding standards that all cricket organisations must meet have been in place for some time.
We expect this to be business as usual and are now focused on moving from a compliance-led approach to one of embedding culture. Alongside this, our Education and Support Team works across the cricket network to deliver both formal and informal education, and investment into safeguarding over a number of years has enabled us to work with operational staff and leaders across the game to support them in embedding a culture of safeguarding throughout their organisations.
We are also investing time to build trust and confidence in reporting processes. Individuals need to have confidence that if they share a concern, they will be listened to, it will be taken seriously and handled appropriately.
Our goal is to help people identify the early signs of issues and intervene before things escalate. Everyone knows that serious abuse, like that of Michael Strange, is horrific and unacceptable. However, not everyone recognises the early indicators that lead to such situations, or they don’t have confidence to report more trivial issues for fear of being wrong, which is why our preventative education work is crucial.
Some of our recent efforts have included three pilot projects – in Cumbria, Northamptonshire, and Wiltshire – that have been delivered in collaboration with Sport England. Those projects involved work around developing a culture of listening to children, helping to prevent violence against women and girls, and improving communication between coaches, parents, and carers. We are now actively evaluating the success of each of these pilots.
We’ve also established a working group made up of people with lived experience of abuse in cricket, including survivors of Michael Strange and others. In the months ahead, we would like to get the group acting as an advisory body to the Cricket Regulator and the ECB, helping to guide future campaigns and decisions so that lived experience directly informs how we operate.
Earlier this year, we published a new safeguarding strategy for 2025–2028. A key part of that is our cross-sport collaboration. I chair the cross-sport safeguarding group, which includes major governing bodies like the FA, RFU, LTA, and British Gymnastics. Together, we identify shared challenges and work to influence decision-makers, at Sport England and DCMS, to improve safeguarding across all sports.
Safeguarding is never ‘done’. It’s an ongoing, evolving process that requires constant refinement. One of the key developments for cricket is now to become much more data driven. We’ve just hired an analyst, and their role will be to help us use data more intelligently to understand risk, inform our proactive work, and improve safety planning.
Ultimately, we want to ensure our proactive work is effective and that we use evidence and insight to make cricket as safe as possible. Safeguarding is a foundational part of everything we do. It requires constant attention and improvement, and we are fully committed to doing everything we can – at every level of the sport.