13 July 2009
Blossoming future
It’s 9am at Little Flower Convent School for the deaf in Chennai, India, and already a simmering 33 degrees. Away from the surging city streets, morning prayers in the shady courtyard follow a solemn flag-raising ceremony.
Then to the beat of a Tamil drum, 500 girls march off to lessons.
June is the hottest month in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu, with lunch hour soaring to 44 degrees. But heat does not put the children off their geography lesson.
Teacher Evangeline Kennedy shows the class lush spring scenes of West Sussex countryside. “In England, everything is green, green, green,” she says. “It’s a treat for your eyes!”
“I love England. Spring English weather is very good, if a little cold,” she tells them.
Chennai-born Evangeline visited England in May as part of a three-year partnership with Warden Park secondary school in West Sussex. It is one of 1,800 such links – reaching 3.3 million students worldwide - made possible by the DFID Global School Partnerships (DGSP) programme.
The scheme "opened our pupils’ eyes"
Interweaving global issues like climate change and social injustice into the curriculum, the programme encourages schools to share lessons, projects and ideas. The partnerships it fosters bring learning to life, enabling children to realise they are not so different from their friends in other parts of the world.
“The students involved are the scientists, businesspeople and decision-makers of tomorrow,” says Andy Egan, DGSP’s programme manager. “In our interconnected world, international events have a huge impact on the lives of people in the UK. School partnerships encourage students to make decisions as adults that have a positive impact on poorer communities across the world.”
Martin Hooper, Warden Park’s Inclusion Manager, says the scheme “opened our pupils’ eyes to how their lives and futures are so closely tied up with those of other young people across the world.”
This is echoed by Evangeline. "We now have the sense that we are citizens of the world," she says. "At this time of global economic recession, students can recognise and think critically about development issues."
Hearing new voices
In the UK, the parents of one Warden Park pupil, Alisha Burman, value the reach the scheme has had in their community.
“I’ve noticed just how forceful a role the media plays in our daily lives. You get one perspective of different cultures from the media and that can be quite a tainted view,” says her father Raj. “Giving our kids the ability to talk over the wires to kids in a developing country provides an opportunity to hear another voice.”
In Chennai, the father of 15-year-old Little Flower pupil Tanu puts it like this: “It’s good for our children to interact with another school. Children nowadays are very smart. They receive a lot of knowledge which we didn’t have 20 years ago. Back then, nobody was thinking about the future.”
Tanu for one agrees. “Since the partnership began, I know so much more about England,” she says. “I want to know even more now!”
Key facts
- The DFID Global Schools Partnership was set up five years ago to raise awareness of global issues and give students in both the UK and developing countries the chance to understand a different culture.
- The scheme provides direct exposure to people in a developing country via shared classroom-based projects and supplies grants for teachers to visit their partner schools.
- Due to the success of the scheme so far, DFID now wants to raise the total number of UK schools involved to 5,000 over the next three years.
- India is likely to meet its primary education targets thanks to a big rise in enrolment of primary school children. DFID has spent £350 million on education in India since 2003.
- Although the exchange programme described above was funded by DFID through DGSP, the Little Flower school for the deaf is not funded by DFID.