08 July 2009
Martin Hooper, 56, is the inclusion manager at Warden Park comprehensive secondary school in West Sussex. Here, he talks about his school’s successful DFID Global School Partnership with Little Flower School in Chennai which he has been coordinating since 2007.
Photo slideshow
How did your partnership come about?
Our first contact was with a number of schools in Tamil Nadu. I had a contact in the area which is how we got the project off the ground. Eventually we agreed to work with Little Flower Convent School.
Choosing Little Flower
We felt the leadership team were very responsive and wanted to work with us. In Chennai at that time, the internet connections weren’t that good, but Little Flower had access to broadband.
Our key objective was to establish a global communication project. 'UK and Indian schools working together' was our tagline. We needed to support our specialisms – languages, maths and computing – so we needed a school which had some information technology capability and Little Flower did.
What happened next
We met the then-head teacher of Little Flower who agreed and then we applied for the DFID Global School Partnerships grant.
Now we’ve had three years of the curriculum grant – we’ve had ten teachers go out to Chennai and about as many return as well.
We have about ten projects running in five or six curriculum areas. The underlying themes are global citizenship, diversity, and supporting human rights.
For instance, one of our projects with the year sevens is called ‘Me, my family and friends’ which looks at rights and responsibilities. We look at what happens in India, and what happens in the UK. We share our work on a virtual learning environment called Moodle. We post work up and they post work up. That is where the information technology specialism came in.
We’ve also got a maths project on place value – the Indian system of place value is different to the English system. We count in tens, hundreds, thousands where they then introduce a lakh (hundred thousand) and a crore (one million).
In science, we’re learning about sustainability. We’ve done projects on acid rain and pollution. That helps the youngsters learn that we aren’t living on a small island, but in a great big world and that we are all interdependent; that we have to support each other.
We’ve done lessons on rainwater harvesting. We know nothing about rainwater harvesting really in the UK. But every building in India by law has to harvest its rainwater. And then it’s collected in big tanks underneath the buildings and sold on. It’s part of the culture. And that’s because a couple of years ago they didn’t have rain for a few months and there was a serious water shortage. So new rules were brought in Chennai and that’s the situation now.
So the projects are bringing interest and life to both our curricula. We don’t deviate from our curriculum. They’ve got a national curriculum which is very strongly enforced and so have we.
We stick with our curriculum and yet expand it. Something like this adds interest for the young people.
'An eye-opener for our young people'
There are mutual benefits from both sides in the partnership. We may have the technology, but they have the values that we’ve lost, or are in danger of losing: the love of education, respect for teachers, appreciation of the need for qualifications to secure employment. All of those we are in danger of losing in this country.
Whilst we have the interactive white boards, the laptops – what we’ve really learned is how the young people love and value their education. That’s been a bit of an eye-opener for our young people and certainly the teaching staff.
So it’s definitely a partnership based on equality. With the teachers that are coming across, we’re more than just colleagues, we’re friends now. I email them once or twice a week about all sorts of things.
Long-term benefits
We’re finding more and more people understand what’s going on. They’re beginning to see that we’re not an island. In leafy West Sussex we’re not very multi-ethnic. So it opens up people’s understanding to other cultures.
When you meet people, all those stereotypes and prejudices fall away. One of our projects in geography is to compare those stereotypes and prejudices that UK children have of India and Indian children have of UK. For the Indian children, it’s all about red buses, red post office vans, the Millennium Wheel, the Houses of Parliament, the royal family and so on. It’s so interesting for them to see the reality as well as it is for us to see theirs.
The students’ understanding is growing. Parental understanding is growing. We love the project and we want to see it grow.
Impressions of Chennai
I’ve been five times with full support of our head teacher. What you need is a degree of continuity but you also need a change of staff as well. That’s how we’ve been able to take ten different teachers. And they’ve done the same thing. That’s been very good.
Chennai was an assault on the senses! I had never been to India before the partnership so first impressions were of a vibrant, colourful, loud, expressive, and very exciting place. Never a dull moment.
What really makes our partnership is the lovely, lovely people and the dedication of the teachers to their students. Little Flower is a school for the deaf so that’s a really interesting new dimension for the partnership as well.
Do students visit India as part of the project?
We’re an 11-16 school so we don’t have a student exchange at all. If we had over-16s, we would. Some of the other schools that are about to join the partnership have sixth forms so will be taking students. So that will add a new dimension in the next five years.
For our situation, the exchange is teachers. The lessons, of course, are shared through our virtual classroom in the sky.
