Most people have no interest at all in cricket. Some positively loathe it. I accept that. So the chances that many teachers listened to the cricket commentary on Saturday morning on Test Match Special seem slim indeed - particularly as it was “rain stopped play” - dull upon dull, in most people’s worlds. And yet Jonathan Agnew’s interview that morning with 15-year-old Waleed Khan (pictured, centre) was surely one of the most moving and uplifting moments on the radio in recent times. 

The programme was inundated with appreciative responses, long before the interview had finished. One listener messaged in to say that he had been casually going about his routine Saturday morning shopping and had suddenly found himself walking around in tears. I was listening to it while jogging, expecting just to hear the usual cricket chat and merriment from the commentary box. Instead, I was taken to a very different place. I had to run even more slowly than I normally do. Even Mrs Wilkinson’s dog saw fit to leave me alone.

Waleed - now a talented young cricketer and all-round sportsman - was a 12-year-old pupil at the school in Peshawar where 149 people were killed in a terrorist attack in 2014. He was shot repeatedly in the head, witnessed the shooting of friends and many teachers and was in a coma for eight days.

Education can end extremism

After giving a graphic account of the attack and of his miraculous survival, he then explained how it had affected him. This was the bit that really got me. Agnew asked him whether his horrific experience had made him angry and full of rage. Waleed said that such a response would merely perpetuate the violence. “What will happen if I take revenge? I could bomb their children but then their children will grow up and bomb my children and this war will be going on for generations”.

Education, he then said repeatedly and with deep passion, was the solution, the key to tackling the causes of extremism and intolerance everywhere. “Send books and pens to underdeveloped countries, not weapons and bombs.” 

And so I come to the start of a new half-term. I am sorely tempted this week to play some of that interview to my classes. The first 15 minutes is perhaps too upsetting for some young ears, so I may summarise his story and play the 10 or so minutes where he explains how he has responded to it all.

This final stage in the school year can be characterised by a lack of motivation and focus for children not involved in external exams. I expect this time around will be no different. Listening, however, to Waleed may just help to start my half-term lessons off in a more inspiring way - for them and for me. It is a great story of triumph over adversity and of how education is everything!

That interview is not in the official scheme of work, of course, but sometimes I think I have to take a step sideways - not merely with a view to moving students two steps forwards on subsequent days, but mainly because the occasional sideways step just feels like the right thing to do. 

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire