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Young cricket star bowled over with success of Lambeth pupils
(l-r) Denise Cooke, Connaught customer experience co-ordinator, Charlie Picard (10) of Henry Fawcett school, Leah Swaby (10) of St Mark’s CE school, and Arun Harinath.
Young cricket star bowled over with success of Lambeth pupils
July 22nd 2009
Over 130 pupils from schools across Lambeth were joined by a rising star of Surrey Cricket to celebrate their recent achievements of completing the Playing for Success learning scheme.
Hot-prospect batsman Arun Harinath joined pupils from Ashmole, Archbishop Tenison, Vauxhall, Henry Fawcett, St Mark’s CE, ST Anne’s RC, Reay and Lilian Baylis schools at The Brit Oval to present a certificate, cricket sets and soft cricket balls donated by Connaught Partnerships.
Playing for Success is a national scheme that acts as a community initiative to encourage pupils to participate in a 10 week curriculum of literacy, numeracy and IT tuition. The programme offers a unique link between education and sport to help motivate children and young people to perform better in school and tens of thousands have completed the programme with improved skills, motivation and self-esteem.
Leah Swaby (10) from St Mark’s School was one of the pupils who participated in the Playing for Success scheme. She said: “I’ve never really played cricket before but I definitely really enjoyed it. I liked that the teams were picked randomly by giving each player a number so this meant we didn’t just play with our friends and instead we mixed with other pupils.
“It was exciting to learn outside of school and everyone really tried to do their best and it was a lot of fun.”
As part of Playing for Success, The Ben Hollioake Learning Centre at Surrey County Cricket Club offers out of school hours tuition mainly for 10 to 14 year olds who are at risk of underachieving, using the stimulus of sport to motivate them. The pupils have access to state of the art IT equipment and typically each receive 20 hours of literacy and numeracy learning in addition to IT training while using sport as a route to other knowledge, skills and understanding.
Arun Harinath said of the Playing for Success scheme: “It’s great to see so many young people here today who have embraced cricket as a way to enhance their learning. For the pupils to come down here and make use of the excellent facilities at The Brit Oval can only help enhance their education and by the looks on all of their faces today it’s obvious that the scheme has been both enjoyable and highly successful.”
Denise Cooke, Connaught customer experience co-ordinator, said: “Research has shown that Playing for Success helps encourage young people to improve their education performance, with pupils often seeing their reading comprehension scores improve by the equivalent of six months.
“When you come and see the enthusiasm of those taking part you can’t fail to be impressed and hopefully the success of the scheme at The Brit Oval will rub off on the England team when the final Ashes test gets underway!”
Connaught is currently working in partnership with Lambeth Living to deliver building and environmental services to over 15,000 properties in Lambeth.