Eco-partnerships forged through the British Council’s World Links team have been breathtaking in their global scope. Dominic Regester reports  

Since 2000 the British Council’s World Links team has managed a number of school partnership programmes. These include both DfES-funded bilateral programmes with China, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Russia and Spain, and more recently British Council programmes with Africa, the Middle East and India. Some of these programmes have a strong language learning element, but this is not necessary of all cases. Some of these programmes are designed for individual schools and others for districts or clusters of schools. Interest in all of these programmes has increased considerably since the 2004 publication of the DfES International Strategy, with its stated aims that by 2010 every school will have an international partnership and ‘an international experience whilst  at school’.

Once a school has entered into an international partnership, there is a varying amount of funding (depending on the programme) to develop an international project with their partner school. An emerging trend in the project grant applications that we receive, at both primary and secondary level, is an increasing desire to use the partnership to explore global issues. This is rather than, or in addition to, a more general desire to internationalise the curriculum and explore the differences and similarities between one culture and another.

Understandably, one of the most frequently recurring global themes is the environment and there has been a marked increase in project applications focusing on green issues. In some cases, where the project involves students flying abroad, carbon offsetting to compensate for international air travel is an integral part.  

So how can schools use these school partnership programmes to connect with their peers in other countries – and bring to life global green issues in their classroom?

Data exchange

The school partnership strand of the UK India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) partners clusters of four UK schools with clusters of six  schools in India. One such partnership of schools in Leicestershire and Delhi plan to exchange data about fauna, flora, rainfall, climate changes, fuel, architecture, soil and agriculture and natural resources. The students will then take photographs of their neighbours and identify good and bad environmental practices. Each school in the cluster will carry out the activity and contribute two or three of the best photographs to be collated into a teaching resource or activity book.

Once compiled, the resource will be circulated among the clusters to be used in the teaching of sustainable development, environmental sciences and geography. Teachers will encourage their students to use the data in a range of subjects and communicate their findings through a range of media, such as digital video, podcasts and blogs.

The next stage of the project will consist of the application of the other country’s experience in water treatment, water harvesting, composting, paper and waste recycling in order to inculcate values for the conservation of ideas. All the work produced by students will be shared within clusters but will also be celebrated on a common website launched by one of the Indian schools.  

Another school partnership programme involves one mixed UK school or two single-sex schools working in partnership with two single-sex schools from the Middle East, with a focus on Key Stage 3 students. Invicta Grammar School partnered with Khwala Bint Al Azwer School in Yemen after a contact seminar in Oman last December, and both schools were keen to focus their joint project on the environment.

The project, titled ‘Facts about our environment’, enables the children  to learn about a variety of natural settings, in the place where they live  and around the world. The students can explore the global environment, learning that the issues that they face at home are common throughout the world, and work together on how to overcome them. One proposed strand to the project will have the students comparing the causes of the hosepipe ban in the south of England with the environment in Yemen.

Another programme called Connecting Classrooms joins up UK schools with counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa. Following a contact seminar in Mombasa last October, a cluster of schools in Buckinghamshire are working in partnership with groups from Tanzania and Ghana. The six primary and three secondary schools will all look at developing and comparing gardening projects, with a focus on food growing, tree planting, composting and environmental management.

Chopwell Primary School in Gateshead and Amaji Elementary School in Hyogo Prefecture in the west of Japan have been working together since April 2006, when they were partnered through a UK charity called  Japan 21. Initially the schools compared what they taught about the environment, with a focus on recycling. Now, in one of their many  green-themed projects, they are looking at how crops grow differently and improving the students’ observation skills by growing daikon radishes and monitoring progress by exchanging photographs of their crops.  The radishes are now part of a joint healthy eating initiative and the two schools have been sharing recipes for a proposed joint cookery book. Chopwell have now applied for a Joint Curriculum Project to further develop their partnership with Amaji School.

Working with China

As part of a wider, county-level link between Norfolk and the Xuhui District of Shanghai in China, Notre Dame High School is partnered with Wei Yu High School. Twelve students from each school will be visiting their partner school, staying with local families and learning about environmental change, its causes, consequences and what can be done about it. The Notre Dame students are already working with the University of East Anglia’s successful Carbon Reduction programme (CRed) and will visit Wei Yu as part of a  DfES-funded Joint Curriculum Project.

Once in China, the students from both schools will go to Dongtan, a new development heralded as the world’s first ecologically sustainable city.  The Dongtan Sustainable Technologies and Renewables project has teamed up with CRed to ensure that the most up-to-date research is used in planning every stage of the city. In its first phase the city will become home to 50,000 people and include its own renewable energy plant, research and development unit and visitor education centre.

On the return visit, the Chinese students will visit the Norfolk coastline to see first-hand the environmental impact of global warming, examining how rising sea levels are threatening the Norfolk Broads, and looking at British responses to this climate challenge, including a wind farm. All the students involved in the project will also visit CRed to discover innovative ways to calculate and counteract the carbon emissions of their international flights. And the students who are travelling have all pledged to offset their CO2 footprint – just one example of a new ecological sensibility that the international dimension can help to engender.  

Dominic Regester is senior development officer in the World Links team at the British Council

For more information about all of these programmes, details of how to apply and deadlines, please visit School Partnerships Website or  e-mail world.links@britishcouncil.org  

For details on Japan 21 see www.japan21.org.uk

For information on the University of East Anglia Carbon Reduction programme (CRed) visit their website.