I have just completed a 6 week block of work visiting schools to deliver cricket-based PE lessons for secondary school-age girls.

With only three lessons with each class, there wasn’t going to be time to coach skills in any depth (even if this was appropriate for a PE lesson), so the emphasis was on introducing an understanding of the game of cricket (what is cricket? what skills are needed? what tactics might be needed?) and on engagement with the game (playing for the sake of playing).

Hence I aimed to play games in every lesson, and we finished with a “games-sense” session.

What follows is a look at the course structure — skills & games — and some of the thinking behind it, and a summary of how the lessons were received.