Department for International Development
 
  An Indian Summer  
 

Sussex and Chennai school partnership flowers

As UK schools finish up for the summer, DFID’s new Indian Summer feature looks at a flowering partnership between a West Sussex secondary school, and an Indian school for the deaf.

Little Flower and Warden Park Secondary School in West Sussex have just completed another year together. It's one of over 1800 partnerships between schools in the UK and developing countries, funded by DFID.

The Global Schools Partnership scheme encourages teachers and pupils to share lessons, projects and ideas about climate change, social justice and much more. The idea is that those partnerships bring learning to life, enabling children to realise they aren't so different from their friends in other parts of the world. DFID aims to raise the total number of UK schools involved to 5,000 over the next three years.

Sussex schoolgirl Alisha Burman said: "Having the Little Flower teachers visit Warden Park has helped people here to overcome prejudice and bring our nations closer to one another". Click on the banner above to start the video (YouTube).

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Evangeline teaches English literature, commerce and accountancy at Little Flower and in 2009 she visited the UK for the first time using the DGSP travel grant: “It’s really helpful exchanging culture so that we can go back to our school and talk about England – the similarities, the differences”.

Passionate partnership

Evangeline Kennedy is a teacher at Little Flower, in Chennai, India. She also loves poetry, and when she came over to teach some English classes at Warden Park in Sussex, her lessons were designed to demonstrate cultural differences.

Drawing on her own painful experience of racial discrimination, she prepared a lesson on an English-language poem by acclaimed Indian poet Sarojini Naidu, known there as the 'nightingale of India'. Read more

More about Global School Partnerships

  • 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.
  • Are you a teacher, or know someone who is? Forward this email or try our games section - or even set up your own Global School Partnership

 
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