I don't like cricket

"You're English? We love England! Go Michael!"
"Oh, yeah... Michael Owen's pretty great."
"Who's Michael Owen? Michael Vaughan! Michael Vaughan!"

It turns out that teenage boys in India don't care much for football. At Akshay Pratishthan, a school in Vasant Kunj in Delhi, when the bell goes for break it's bat and ball they reach for rather than jumpers for goalposts. I never played cricket at school, so after I'd taught English phrases and pronunciation in the classroom, they returned the favour by schooling me in the playground.

Akshay Pratishthan has over 400 students but what makes it truly remarkable is it's integration of children from different social backgrounds and with different physical abilities. One of the defining architectural features of the school is the long, gradual wheelchair ramp that loops up the side of the building to ensure that all students can get to the second and third floors - something that, now I think of it, couldn't be said for many areas of my university.

It's a relatively prestigious school, but parents are assessed and then pay what they can afford. Wealthy parents were happy to pay the fees to get their child in, but equally it was not uncommon for some parents to be supporting several children on 1,200 rupees a month, which at the time translated to around £15, or a dollar a day. In these cases, schooling was free, subsidised by donations the school received and by the higher fees those who could afford it were paying.

The important thing, though, is that it worked. Nobody, least of all the students, seemed to care about their contrasting home lives or the wheelchairs, crutches and prosthetic limbs which were commonplace. Due to the school's limited provisions, wheelchairs were usually old and crutches and prosthetics were never guaranteed to match the size of the child, but on no account would this be allowed to interfere with that obligatory game of cricket.