A NEW director of English cricket visited a Bradford school today to discuss ways the sport can be more inclusive, meeting the school's champion girls team in the process.

Lord Patel was named as a director of the England and Wales Cricket Board earlier this month, and this afternoon visited Carlton Bolling College in Undercliffe, a school that has been pushing to get more of its mainly Asian pupils involved in sport.

During the visit he heard about the school's successes in cricket, especially in the past year.

The school's under 13 girls, who have only been together for a year, were recently crowned champions of Yorkshire. And the boys team has found similar success, named champions in the Under 15s category.

The England and Wales Cricket Association has called for more diversity in cricket, and Lord Patel, a veteran of the Bradford league, got to see what the school was doing to meet these goals. It was one of his first visits since he was appointed to the ECB, and he was looking at what can be done to encourage more young people, especially girls from Asian communities, into the sport.

He was discussing the issue along with Australia and Yorkshire women's cricketer Beth Mooney and Zaheer Jaffary, the member of staff who set up the girls cricket team, and was recently voted Extra-Curricular Inspirational Teacher Award for his efforts to get more girls playing the sport.

It is not just cricket that the school is getting its girls competing in. Last week the school's girl's rugby team, set up with the help of Keighley Cougars and Saima Hussain, the country's first female Muslim rugby league player, were given their Rugby League Skills Bronze Awards at an assembly having formed earlier this school year.

The school has made an effort to be more inclusive in the past year, since it was given an "inadequate" rating by school inspection body Ofsted. Among criticisms were that the school was not doing enough to protect its pupils from the possibility of extremism.

The school's governing body was sacked and replaced, and since then there has been an effort to be more inclusive, which in some cases has challenged cultural traditions by getting Muslim girls more active in extra curricular sports. Their efforts have been praised by inspectors on recent return visits.

Mr Jaffary told Lord Patel that despite initial reservations from some, the families of the girls were happy that their daughters were competing.

Adrian Kneeshaw, head of the school, said: "In the past year we've done two packages to deal with extremism, one called Getting on Together and a Syria safeguarding programme. This wasn't something we were asked to do, it was something we wanted to do. We got imams from the local community involved so it was a local delivery for a national message."

He said the school had been so successful in dealing with issues of safeguarding and extremism that other schools were now asking for advice.