Todmorden Cricket Club stalwart Brian Heywood and Burnley Football Club chairman Barry Kilby and press chief Darren Bentley were on hand at Turf Moor's 1882 Suite on Tuesday to officially launch the educational workbooks and CDs to an audience of schools from Burnley and surrounding areas.

And what Brian, a former teacher who now who now works on a freelance basis for Tikit at Mytholmroyd (the company undertakes data indexing and editing work on legal documents for some of the biggest law firms in the country), has been able to do in conjunction with Burnley can be adapted for virtually any town in the country.

The focus of a workbook could be adapted for any local sports club and it guides teachers through ways in which aspects of the National Curriculum can be taught using an organisation which usually has deep roots in the community.

Brian explained that he was first asked to develop a teaching aid using local sports clubs through his links with Dr Peter Davies and the National Lottery funded Cricket Heritage Project at Huddersfield University, which has since been used in a clutch of Yorkshire schools.

He worked on a model using Todmorden Cricket Club and when co-writing Cloth Caps And Crazy Cricket, which details the first decades of club's history, with his parents Malcolm and Freda quickly realised that here was rich subject matter which also mirrored the social history of a town, not just the pure sporting facts.

"There were lots of activities and themes which could be developed around how cricket came to Todmorden, and the theory can be transferred to other sports with any club that has a Victorian background," said Brian. "I went on to contact Dave Edmundson when he was chief executive at Burnley Football Club and he gave me the go-ahead to develop the project."

Club trustee Julie Bradley's husband Mick was head of a primary school in Nelson and the workbooks, with the material also available on CD, have been successfully trialled during this school year.

Brian explained: "For schools, once they have them the material is free, they are fully resourced with no research to do, they are curriculum referenced and they are a great way of encouraging and motivating children who are not as academic as others.

"There are also a lot of benefits for the clubs, consolidating and establishing links between schools and clubs and increasing children's interest in organisations which are a part of their community. It is living history rather than something in the past, the clubs are ongoing things."

Brian had to work hard to include and develop all angles. For example, it was important to get a girls' angle into the workbook and he achieved this in the Burnley package by contacting England Ladies' goalkeeper Rachel Brown, who is from Burnley.