Local 4 Global

~ Global School ~
Actively promoting social justice, equity and sustainable development

SS Mary and John is a large (350 children currently on roll), lively and friendly, Church of England voluntary aided primary school, situated in East Oxford and serving a multi cultural, multi faith community. There are three parts to the school:
• The youngest children, for the year in which they are five, are part of the Comper Foundation Stage School on the Hertford St site.
• Keystage 1 is in the Irving building, also on the Hertford St site

• Keystage 2 is based at the Meadow Lane site, a fifteen minute walk away from the Hertford St site on the south side of the Iffley Road. 48% of the school community are from minority ethnic backgrounds, the largest group being of Pakistani origin. Many of our children are at the early stage of learning English.
We have a strong interest in environmental education and have our bronze Eco School's award. We are also an Oxfordshire Healthy School, and are working for the International School award.

We first became aware of Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC) when our EMA staff started to use RISC's global resources. Oxfordshire's Ethnic Minority Achievement Service (EMAS) had organised a training day at RISC which was so enjoyable that I was encouraged to organise a similar day for our school staff to evaluate the Global Dimension in our curriculum. This took place in October 2004 and was the best Inset day we'd had for a long time, with staff inspired by the wealth of resources available at the centre and the stimulating gc ideas which the education team shared with us. We reviewed our practice as a school which claimed to be inclusive and to address global awareness. We came away celebrating much of what we were doing but with our eyes opened as to how much further we could develop our expertise.

Shortly after this, Barbara Lowe and Louise Robinson, RISC's education officers who had worked with us for our Inset day, invited us to become a ‘Global School', an opportunity to work closely with RISC and three other primary schools over the next four years, to develop the Global Dimension within the curriculum and to support the staff through INSET, with a view to creating region wide centres for the development and dissemination of good practice for use as a resource by other schools.

The invitation came at a time when we were expanding from a first school to a primary school and were very focussed on developing the curriculum to make it more relevant and enjoyable. Whilst we acknowledged that we had many strengths as an inclusive school where the rich diversity of our families was celebrated as a core part of our ethos, I welcomed the opportunity to analyse in depth where we were in terms of fully embedding the Global Dimension in the curriculum and to be supported in systematically working through all areas to identify our strengths and develop those requiring further support. The development of the school as a Global School was incorporated into the school development plan and Barbara Lowe came to talk to the Governors about what the partnership entailed.

The baseline audit carried out in 2005 with Years 2, 4, 6 showed that whilst some children had quite mature ideas about various aspects of global awareness, others still held stereotypical views and their experience of global issues was ‘patchy'. This highlighted the need for a more consistent approach to ensuring that the curriculum offers opportunities to challenge stereotypical views and gives balanced information to enable the children to develop as global citizens.

Following the audit, and also as part of our drive to develop a more cross curricular approach to learning, we embarked on a major review of our long term planning. This process is ongoing and as we learn more from the Inset which RISC has made available to us (so far D&T Art, Maths & Science and Oracy days have been held) so we are able to incorporate more and more ideas and opportunities into our planning. An added benefit from the Inset days shared with the four schools working with RISC has been the opportunity to meet other staff, and share ideas, resources and good practice.

Some of the ways in which we promote the global dimension include:
• Staff and children come from all over the world. Where appropriate, we actively recruit bilingual staff. Children from minority countries, and increasingly those from Eastern European accession countries are supported and their cultures are celebrated. Large world maps show where our children originate from.
• Letters, notices, pamphlets and signs are regularly translated into a variety of languages. The ‘Starting School at SS Mary and John' welcome book is available in many different languages.
• We have an annual International Evening, a social event run by the PTA when families bring dishes from around the world to share, those who have are encouraged to wear traditional or national dress, and entertainment comes from around the world.
• We have a growing collection of, and use global pictures, posters and photographs in displays throughout the school, e.g. in the dining hall there are posters about food from different countries, the OXFAM ‘Change the World in 8 Steps' set of posters is displayed in the Keystage 2 library. Artefacts and resources are borrowed from RISC.
• Children are greeted in different languages when the register is taken and also learn to count in a variety of languages. They learn songs in different languages and dances from other countries. Musical instruments reflect musical traditions from around the world.
• Our acts of worship often reflect celebrations, festivals and traditions of other faiths in addition to Christianity. RE resources include books, artefacts and software about a variety of faiths.
• Our school uniform allows children to wear salwar kamise and the hijab if they wish
• There are ethnic dolls to play with and different skin colour pencils and papers are provided.
• Art Club focuses on the cultures, faiths, festivals and art techniques from around the world.
• We are a site for Oxfordshire Art Weeks and our exhibitions reflect the rich diversity all aspects of the school community.

• The PTA supports the local organic vegetable box scheme and parents run a ‘School Ethical Supplies Initiative' enabling the school community (staff, parents, governors, friends of the school) to order fair-trade, and organic food and household goods

I wanted to increase my understanding of the term ‘Global Dimension'. The opportunity to do this came not only through the support given by RISC and the excellent resources which were accessible to us through the partnership, but also because I was awarded a Farmington Fellowship which gave me twenty research days during 2005/6 to explore how the work on environmental education and with RISC was reflected in the school's ethos as a Church of England faith school within a multi faith community. This was written up as a report ‘Caring for God's Creation, Developing the Ethos and Religious Education of a Global School' which can be found on the Farmington website at www.farmington.ac.uk.

Three days of lesson observations by the RISC team in January 2006 confirmed that many of the principles of global citizenship were present in the classroom culture and a regular part of project planning. Feedback provided useful ideas for further development which included making sure we had Peter's Projection maps of the world in all classrooms. The library audit carried out at the same time revealed a need to weed out many of our older books and embark on a restocking programme to update both our fiction and non fiction books. This obviously has financial implications and we have been grateful for funding from our PTA to help towards this, and have also enjoyed practical help from both parents and governors in sorting out the library.

Increasingly we have become aware of the need to work locally to make a difference. We have developed a sense of democracy and citizenship through the School Council which is elected annually and is used as a means of enabling the ‘children's voice' to be involved in the decision making processes of the school. The School Council was actively involved in the consultation process on the introduction of new healthier menus, and organised a Lunchtime Charter to help improve the atmosphere in the dining hall. They set up and help run a Fair Trade Tuck shop. They have also been to the town hall to meet the mayor and find out about the working of the City Council. Most recently the KS2 School Council and I enjoyed the opportunity to spend a day at Clanfield Primary, a small rural school in the west of the county, the other Oxfordshire primary school in the partnership. We held a joint school council meeting, the outcome of which was the recognition that both school councils are, despite being very different in character and setting, addressing many similar issues particularly in relation to promoting good eco practice, and can help each other further by sharing ideas which have worked for them. A reciprocal visit is planned for the Autumn.

Apart from the obvious ways to promote a sense of responsibility to care for our environment such as recycling as much of our waste as we can, monitoring and trying to reduce our energy consumption, making and using compost, the children have been involved in a number of projects designed to improve the school grounds on both sites. These projects have included:
• Creating an orchard in which each class has it's own traditional variety of apple tree
• Creating a raised vegetable bed for KS1 and for each class at KS2 (each year we harvest a bumper crop of vegetables which were used to make soup, and other dishes for the children to try)
• Involved all the Keystage 1 children in designing the creation of a bio-diverse garden. A press release at the time of the official opening in April 2006 stated ‘A desolate concrete playground in Hertford Street, Oxford has been transformed into a biodynamic wildflower meadow and green playground with help from a £5,000 grant from Biffaward's Small Grants Scheme. As there are no other playground facilities in the area, the Biffaward grant contributed to a project to transform the old school yard into an outdoor space that can be enjoyed by the whole community. The site includes a biodynamic garden with shade giving trees, a wildflower meadow and wildflower border, living willow play structures that have been inspired by Islamic architecture, a turf mound and a stepping stone pathway. Native tree species have been planted, including silver birch, cherry and rowan. All members of the school community were involved in the design process.

• involved all Keystage 2 pupils in the process of designing, democratically selecting ideas and carrying out the transformation of dull outside areas at Meadow Lane in our award winning Courtyard Project to give each class their own personal space.

We have also worked with the Co-operative Society on our Cloth Bags project, where all the children decorated their own cloth bag and took them home to encourage their families to reduce the number of plastic bags they use. The project was funded by one of the Co-op's Community grants, and the bags were used in their publicity to encourage the public to use fewer plastic bags.

In addition to our growing local partnership with Clanfield we are developing links with schools abroad and have set up, with the help of the British Council, a partnership with a school in Lahore, Pakistan. Our shared memorandum of understanding, written during my visit to the school in April 07, calls for the two schools to promote peace through understanding and working together for global citizenship, to work jointly for environmental conservation and sustainability, to support the professional development of the staff of both schools, and to encourage curriculum development through the exchange of ideas, projects and resources. Our partnership is helping us to challenge stereotypes of people and places and offer pupils a more balanced view. It is developing pupils' awareness of the wider world and raising their awareness of the connections between their own lives and the lives of others.

A second audit of the children's understanding was carried out in January 2007 and led us to question whether and how we should deal with controversial issues like the war in Iraq. This will form the basis of our Inset at RISC in February 2008. One of our staff has just taken part in the Advocates for Global Citizenship course run at RISC, and we have also taken part in a major Oxfordshire conference on Global Citizenship, as part of our undertaking to disseminate the work we have done to others.

The school's involvement in the Global Schools project has created an ideal opportunity to ensure that our work on the Global Dimension has had a whole school focus and is fully reflected at the heart of our ethos. In a recent survey 100% pf parents responding at KS1 and 94% at KS2 agreed that the school encourage understanding of global and environmental issues ~ a pleasing affirmation of our work with RISC.

Pip Murray, headteacher, SS Mary and John CE Primary School, Oxford, April 2008

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