Local 4 GlobalWest Sussex
West Sussex Healthy Schools / Citizenship team and BPEC
West Sussex Healthy Schools team is a joint programme within the local
Primary Care Trust and Education in West Sussex County Council. The Citizenship advisory team are part of the West Sussex Healthy Schools team.
As part of the yearly action plan the development of support materials for Citizenship - the Global Dimension had been identified and a link was made with Brighton Peace and Environment Centre.
This link meant that we were able to facilitate some joint working, which in turn enabled a particular piece of quality work to be undertaken.
It had been identified that many of the Primary school within the local authority had poor levels of provision generally in the field of Global Citizenship. Many schools were able to identify the needs of their students and could generally access training that would challenge and inspire members of the school community. However, many schools felt that in order too really meet the needs of the children both and enable them to develop as Global Citizens there needed to be more support with embedding the key skills within the curriculum.
As there is a strong movement in Primary schools towards a more creative curriculum, it was felt that this was an ideal opportunity to develop a tool that would enable schools to do this across all key areas of the taught curriculum, as well as the school as a whole.
Working with BPEC has meant that we have been able to use specific teachers to create a document that is of a very high standard and is seen as a very exciting and inspiring resource. The curriculum resource is now ready to be used with Primary schools in West Sussex.
It has also enabled us to make a proposal for a lead teacher to work within our team to support individual schools to embed the Global Dimension with each school's curriculum planning.
Once this work has begun in school it will mean that;
• all targeted schools will show an increase in the quality of its taught Citizenship curriculum.
• all targeted schools will be working towards meeting statutory guidance on community cohesion and prevention of racist incidents.
• all schools will be working towards developing a global dimension in the curriculum as recommended by the DCSF and in line with government guidelines.
Without the link with BPEC this piece of work would not have been possible and as a result the appointment of a lead teacher, the support in schools and ultimately an improvement of quality provision for children would not have happened.
Alison Hannant
Associate Adviser PDWD, Primary Curriculum lead
West Sussex County Council/ Learning
May 2008