International Partnerships Open Children’s Eyes To The World

The beginning of a partnership

For the last 15 years, I’ve led my school’s partnership with another school in South Africa, enjoying experiences I never thought possible in teaching. Travel in general is important to me, but remembering to stop and look around, to take in my surroundings and to appreciate what’s there, is vital. When I’m free-thinking like this I hope to understand more of the place I’m in – which is what happened when I was in the staff room in 2009, listening to a passionate speech from Protus Sokhela as he thanked us for our hospitality.

Protus was headteacher of Shea O’Connor Combined School in Nottingham Road, KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, with which my school had been paired and to which our headteacher and a PE teacher had travelled as part of the UK’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics (we were to help to improve sports access for girls at Shea; funding covered reciprocal visits and a small project). Protus and Wellington, his deputy, were due to leave the next morning and I formed a quick plan: to understand more and to appreciate his school more, I needed to go to PC World.

So, £70 of my Citizenship budget and 24 hours later, Protus was on his way back to South Africa with a pair of computer speakers, a microphone, a webcam and my email address, along with a promise that we’d Skype and stay in contact. A real difficulty with international work is ensuring the depth of a partnership, as teachers may be focused on more than one project at a time.

This was the start of what has now become the longest-running partnership from this initiative. As a school, we are very proud of this. I can still see the fascination students had when chatting to students in South Africa in 2009 and the countless realisations of how connected our world can be and how we can engage with communities beyond our country’s borders.

That was the start of a lot of things, of course. Since then, we have run a very successful Sixth Form trip to Shea in addition to 40-50 smaller projects, as well as raised tens of thousands of pounds in donations. This year we are on track to raise enough to employ another teacher and to subsidise a safe taxi scheme so children can get to and from school more safely. I loved working with the British Council (before funding was brutally removed by the central government) and we have been an accredited International School since 2010.

Last year’s donation drive aimed to pay for solar panels at Shea and we achieved that, which is why the children there now have a school that can function properly even through the rolling blackouts (‘load shedding’) that plague South Africa. Importantly, our work has never been confined to charity purposes and an overriding passion has been to work together and to enrich pupil learning. The African proverb ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together’ resonates here, as our partnership could have fizzled and cooled as fast as a spent match if Protus hadn’t put the time and effort in during the hard times of dealing with IT problems and sketchy internet access.

I’ve also found it hard to persevere at times, but embedding projects in subjects is key here and a wide variety of colleagues have used our partnership to enrich their work. As a Catholic school affiliated with the de la Salle Brothers, these achievements enhance our ethos. We align our actions with the five main LaSallian core principles: quality education; concern for the poor and social justice; faith in the presence of God; respect for all persons and; inclusive community.

When we raised enough money to provide solar panels for our partner school in South Africa, our concern as a community was that pupils at Shea would not receive a ‘quality education’ due to power outages. Whilst this enables a practical understanding of our school ethos, this is an area for future development as there are more than 1,000 LaSallian schools and educational ministries globally. We have such a lot more to discover and I’m keen to use future chances to really make a difference to pupils in our school and beyond.

We have discovered other fascinating insights through our international work, such as the small group of Christians in the Punjab area of Pakistan that receive charitable donations from the Islamic school we worked with for a couple of years. Through connections like this, our RE Department developed an excellent scheme of work aimed at improving students’ knowledge and understanding of Islam.

International work and citizenship

From a Citizenship Department point of view, looking beyond our borders provides essential contrasts with which students quantify intangibles. A great example is human rights in Russia, a place where simply holding a blank piece of paper can easily lead to an arrest and teachers referring to anything other than heterosexuality whilst teaching can be landed in extremely hot water.

Students understand how the right to think is controlled in China when they look at how the Uyghur Muslims’ language was outlawed, but it’s not very likely I’d be able to link up with schools in Russia or China to openly work on that. Indeed, when I asked a visiting teacher from China if she’d talk to a class about living in Chongqing she flatly declined, saying that she might not have a job or apartment when she returned if my students posted something negative on social media following her talk.

The UK’s soft power, part of Theme D in the Edexcel GCSE Citizenship Specification, is so visible when we look internationally because our language runs through the global business world and British music, film, TV and fashion are so well-known. Start talking about fish and chips or Yorkshire pudding and we’re back to Theme A and Identities.

One of my favourite lessons here is to illustrate our melting pot of ethnicities through food. If I can find £35 from the budget to spend on a wide range of country-linked foods (such as chow mien, cannelloni, sauerkraut, Polish beetroot soup, pad Thai and whatever is in that aisle in Asda) then I can borrow a microwave, get students to rank all the nice food and along the way we can discuss diverse communities and how food bridges cultural divides.

An added bonus to this exercise is writing to the winning manufacturer and then seeing if they send us loads of freebies (I really recommend enabling a win for Quorn as they were super generous)! Students love wielding some consumer power, and if we can get some laws and rights in there then we’re back to bits of Theme D.

Where to start

The British Council runs a fantastic set of resources that help teachers find ways to use international links in their work. Their experience as ‘an authoritative voice on language learning through our English teaching around the world’ means offering languages teacher training scholarships and impressive support for learning Arabic and Mandarin. As we did back in 2008 or so, schools in the UK can partner with another school overseas and get high-quality support for projects and, should you feel the calling, arranging a visit to a partner school. Search online for ‘British Council teacher resources’ to get started, as this is a very well-trodden route into working with colleagues abroad.

Teachers need easy access to resources, so if you’re looking for a quick download I’d recommend the British Council’s website as a starting point. Another organisation – one that brings together over 13,000 educators in more than 130 countries – is the Global Schools Alliance (GSA) based in Liverpool. Their platform is free to use and finding a partner school or even just one teacher in another country is very easy, with an online forum dedicated to requesting projects and working collaboratively.

John Rolfe MBE, Global Schools Community and Partnerships Manager at the GSA, is hugely experienced in ensuring the work of educators is recognised and that monthly webinars, student councils and conferences for face-to-face engagement all give authentic opportunities for engagement. Teachers at St Peter’s School have worked with students and staff in Uganda, China, Taiwan, Pakistan and Spain through the GSA. John calls teachers ‘the most important people in the world’, probably knowing that flattery gets you everywhere.

Like the British Council, the GSA runs an accreditation scheme so a school can be recognised for its work. They also offer comprehensive support for applications to the Turing Scheme (the UK Government’s global programme to study and work abroad). The team at the GSA are really engaging and it’s easy to recommend this avenue for a straightforward way into international collaborations.

The value of residential trips

Perhaps the most intense international project a teacher can undertake is a residential trip. While about ten members of staff from St Peter’s have visited Shea over the years, there has only been one student trip, which we ran ourselves. Without the burden of providing profits for another organisation, the trip was a bargain in my opinion and we used our contacts to stay in bunkhouses at a local, secure farm in South Africa.

I ran a programme of preparation events running up to departure and when we finally got students from both schools together it was magical. Students had an instant recognition of the similarities they had, just because they were a similar age, and their differences were never an obstacle. Fascination, exploration and fun drove that week and when we finished with two days at a safari lodge our students reflected hard on their own lives, with five of them changing plans and returning to South Africa to complete charitable projects.

Now that the impact of COVID has melted away, residential trips are starting to look more affordable and we would love to run another, as the impact on students is terrific. When we take so much for granted it’s hard to understand the constant fight for basic conditions that millions of people face, and when driving past slums or discussing the need to ration drinking water our students felt deep sorrow and a sense of gratitude for their own conditions. Evening talks from local farmers, a hotel owner and Nicholas Nxumalo, headteacher of Shea, helped students to make sense of their own feelings, which fed into the work they had planned to carry out at the school.

Those student activities included running a dance workshop – which had to consider the Shea students’ own impressive skills – a fashion course using rubbish and football coaching. Every activity had been planned by the St Peter’s students when in the UK and informed by FaceTime chats with Nicholas, but students still had to adapt to the resources of the school and the skills of the students.

When our student Francesca realised, for example, that the Shea students were really good at making clothes, she knew that she needed to provide an adequate challenge. This process generated a newfound understanding for her, where she discovered more resilience and creativity than she thought she had. In fact, Shea students still run projects to do with her ‘Trashion’ and I’m very proud of the work Francesca completed that week. When we left Shea there were tears and an awful lot of deeply-held promises of continued cooperation and St Peter’s students gave away or swapped the trip t-shirts I had made for the week: it was a very special moment.

What’s next for St Peter’s?

In the next year, I’d love to get a new type of project embedded; homework swap. Here, the Maths Department has pioneered a project where students write a homework sheet of tasks and questions for students at our partner school. The teacher converts that to a PDF using the photocopier here, emails it across to South Africa and students there complete the tasks and send their work back, which St Peter’s School students mark. The cycle then repeats or gets swapped around.

When this idea was tried with a lower-ability Maths group they found it highly engaging and an appropriate level of challenge. Students were intrinsically motivated as they anticipated the return of their own homework and carefully marked the other students’ work and progress. Learning and collaboration were abundant.

This project was cut short for reasons beyond my control, but I believe it’s a good idea and I’ll persevere with it. There are just so many opportunities to enrich teaching and learning with international collaboration that experiences like this, where students are so enthused they seek you out to rave about what they’re doing in another teacher’s class, with another department’s work, that it’s all a bit addictive.

Should you want to get in touch with John Rolfe MBE at the Global Schools Alliance, email him at john@globalschoolalliance.com to get started.

Martin Ridley is Head of Citizenship and International Coordinator at St Peter’s Catholic School in Bournemouth.