Achieving global dimension: a case study

Sir John Lawes School in Harpenden, Hertfordshire shares how it has taken an all-encompassing approach to incorporating the global dimension both within and beyond the whole-school curriculum

Helen Gosnell, Advanced Skills Teacher for Global Dimension and Sustainable Development, Sir John Lawes School, Harpenden, Hertfordshire

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During the last few years, Sir John Lawes School (SJL) has gone from good to outstanding in a number of areas and the ‘global dimension’ (GD) is no exception. Our work in this area exemplifies the ‘care’ in our achievement, care and excellent (ACE) approach to standards, particularly in the way that it has developed our pupils’ care for others (locally and globally) and for the environment. The global dimension has become infused in the ethos of the school and pupils now have a range of opportunities to engage in global issues and become active global citizens.

There have been several catalysts that have led the school to incorporate more of the global dimension into the curriculum and into the wider life of the school.

After only three years in the school, I was appointed this September as an Advanced Skills Teacher for Global Dimension and Sustainable Development. As a local-authority funded post, this means I will be supporting schools across Hertfordshire. The title of ‘global dimension and sustainable development’ was seen as appropriate because these appear together as a cross-curriculum dimension in the new Key Stage 3 curriculum. As far as we are aware, this is the first such position in the country and is a testament to the importance the school and local authority place on the global dimension.

How we started to develop GD

When I arrived at Sir John Lawes School in 2005 as a geography NQT, I was keen to contribute to the wider life of the school by establishing links with a school in a developing country. I had benefited from this type of activity when I was at school and recognised how much it had opened my eyes to another part of the world and was formative in terms of my ongoing interest in global issues. Since completing my own schooling, I went on to work in a number of countries – teaching English in Nepal, working as a consultant with an international development firm in Bangladesh and Kyrgyz Republic, and working in Zambia through Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) on a Department for International Development (DFID) research project. This gave me contacts I could approach with regard to setting up a school partnership.

I also set up a Year 9 ‘International Links’ group at SJL to select the school we should link with. Starting our journey towards a greater global dimension with pupils at the centre has been integral to our success.

In hindsight, it was the establishment of this partnership that was the first area of focus in terms of incorporating more of a global dimension in the curriculum. I say ‘more’ because actually we (like all schools) already delivered aspects of the global dimension; it just wasn’t very explicit. What we have done during the last few years is develop this area, starting with our Global School Partnership (GSP).

Role of Global School Partnership

In September 2005, the newly-formed Y9 International Links group chose to set up our partnership with Ndeke High School in Zambia. The reasons for our choice are given in this box – these points would be worth considering by any school venturing on a similar activity.

The next step was to identify exactly what the two schools wanted to achieve. We had already shared something about what we were aiming for in a partnership when we initially contacted the school – see the box below.

Funding from DFID would initially support a teacher from both schools to visit each other and establish the link. If this was successful, more funding would be available for developing the link.

We wanted our partnership to be focused on teaching and learning with both schools being able to learn from each other. This doesn’t mean there has been no transfer of resources; only that this hasn’t been the focus of the partnership. The Global School Partnership Programme (which we were intending to apply for funding from) doesn’t fund ‘charity’-style links where the emphasis is on the UK school ‘helping’ the school in the developing country.

To apply for the GSP Reciprocal Visit Grant, we had to work with Ndeke High School to identify areas of collaboration and joint curriculum work. Teachers from both schools suggested ideas and pupils were also consulted. These areas of joint curriculum work had to involve one or more of the eight key concepts of the global dimension:

We developed our initial grant application ideas during the subsequent visits involving the partnership coordinators from both schools. Looking back, the decision of who should visit first was very important. The coordinator that visited SJL from Ndeke, a human resource manager and biology teacher, was very passionate and full of life; pupils and staff warmed to his personality and he made them want to find out more about Zambia. It was this visit that raised the profile of the partnership at SJL and captured the school’s interest. This then made it easier to gain support for subsequent activities.

Initial curriculum work
In terms of curriculum work, our first focus was on the partnership coordinators’ two subject areas (geography and science).

In geography, we adapted our KS3 scheme of work on ‘development’ to incorporate the learning we had gained from Ndeke High School. During my visit to Ndeke, I took video footage of the Zambian pupils talking about development issues such as debt and HIV/AIDS, which were then shown to the SJL pupils back in the UK. The SJL pupils also benefited from a question-and-answer session with the visiting Zambian teacher who went into all Y8 geography classes. We also adapted an existing Year 7 activity – in which pupils produced a collage on ‘life in the UK’ – into a competition in which we asked them to design their collage for pupils from Ndeke High School. Pupils at Ndeke also prepared collages about their country and these were exchanged and displayed.

During his visit to the UK, the Ndeke coordinator worked with one of our science teachers to develop an activity in which pupils would compare the nutritional value of their diets. Pupils from both schools had to keep a weekly diary of their diet, which was then sent to the other school for nutritional analysis. We have now integrated the healthy eating theme into our life skills curriculum at SJL where pupils have a lesson comparing typical diets in the UK and Zambia and also explore the fact that within Zambia there is great diversity (for example, not everyone is poor and malnourished; many people have a very balanced diet with a lot of fresh food).

While much of the organisation at this stage was by the coordinators, without the support and encouragement of the senior leadership team (SLT), it would have been more difficult to make progress. As the partnership has gone on, many more teachers from each school have been involved, making the partnership more sustainable.

During our three-year partnership with Ndeke we have experienced a number of benefits:

but also a range of challenges:

The partnership has acted as a catalyst for other global dimension activities at school and in the wider community. The box below gives examples of some of our partnership activities showing some of the ways in which we have covered the eight concepts in the last year, and illustrating the range of teaching and learning approaches used.

Impact of Ofsted focus on ESD

Being selected for an Ofsted inspection on ESD, as part of its survey on teaching on sustainability, had a number of benefits for our school – see below.

As a result of the inspection, we completed (and recently updated) the sustainable school self-evaluation form, helping us to prioritise areas for future development. We also now have ‘ESD’ as a cross-curricular theme on our Ofsted lesson-plan proforma. However, we have decided not to go down the route of asking staff to highlight the concepts of the global dimension (or ESD) on individual lesson plans, mainly because there is enough evidence that we enable our pupils to gain knowledge, skills and understanding in these areas without having to add to paperwork by formalising it within individual lesson plans. Also, the way in which we might incorporate the ‘global dimension’ will change from year to year given global issues are constantly changing.

Assessing progress

We haven’t yet formally undertaken a broad evaluation of pupils’ knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes in relation to the global dimension. However, we do feel it is important to monitor progression so this year we are going to train some Year 10 pupils to audit the attitudes of Y7 and 10 pupils using a toolkit produced by Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC) called How do we know it’s working (RISC, 2008), which has a range of participatory activities.

Evaluations of specific activities as well as discussions with staff members has provided us with various evidence of how the emphasis on the global dimension has made a difference to our pupils – see the box below for examples of how.

International School Award

Being involved with the International School Award (ISA) raised the profile of the global dimension in our school, helped us to develop GD in different areas of the curriculum, and acted as a catalyst for new ideas and activities (for more details on this award, see the box below).

We applied for the ISA in July 2006 and following our various activities over the year, achieved the award in summer 2007. Using the evaluation proforma available on the ISA website, we collected the views of staff and pupils to evaluate and learn from this work. This not only provided us with the evidence required, but also gave us ideas for how to improve activities in future years.

Non-curriculum events

There are many non-curriculum events and opportunities that have complemented our curriculum activities. These activities can provide important learning opportunities, as often they are the things that make the global dimension ‘real’. They also tend to be fairly high profile and so capture the attention of the whole school – see the box below for examples.

Learning from other schools

Developing the global dimension in other schools in our area has involved organising activities for pupils, as well as communication with other teachers. The chance to benefit from tried-and-tested ideas from other schools was one of my prime motivations for starting a Hertfordshire Global Dimension Working Group, which I have now been coordinating for the past year and a half. Funded by the DFID Enabling Effective Support Programme, this enables teachers to meet to discuss ideas and share good practice in relation to the global dimension. Our last meeting was on how we can use ICT to promote GD and our next meeting will be on the Fairtrade schools programme. We have also organised annual conferences aimed at sharing good practice.

Equipping teachers to deliver GD

To help ensure our teachers are equipped to implement the global dimension, for the last two years, all new members of staff have attended a session on the ‘global dimension at Sir John Lawes’ as part of their induction programme. We also provide opportunities for all staff to receive updates on this aspect of school life. For example, for the last three years all of our annual residential staff conferences have featured pupils talking about an aspect of global dimension work.

Future plans

During the last three years, we have made substantial progress in developing the global dimension, but we are not complacent and recognise that there are still areas in which we can make improvements. For example, we are looking at how we can have a greater emphasis on human rights and the new head of life skills is exploring the UNICEF Rights Respecting Schools award programme as a vehicle for this (see: rrsa.unicef.org.uk). We also want to do more to track our learners and find out how their attitudes change as they move through the school, which is why we are going to use the RISC toolkit mentioned earlier.

We are realistic in terms of what can be achieved. One of the main obstacles we face in implementing any initiative in school is time, and we need to ensure that our well-intentioned ideas aren’t overly timeconsuming for our staff. At SJL, we have been in a fortunate position where exam results are outstanding and so perhaps we have had more freedom to introduce new ideas into the curriculum and wider life of the school than colleagues in other schools.

I hope that the global dimension will continue to be infused within the ethos of our school: this is far more important than paperwork and policies as it means that staff and pupils across the school are coming up with and implementing new ideas themselves and aren’t waiting for a ‘coordinator’ to tell them what to deliver and how. This is the only sustainable way to embed a global dimension in a school. In hindsight, there is not a lot we would (or could) have done differently. Key action that enabled us to make progress is set out in the box above.

Helen Gosnell, Advanced Skills Teacher for Global Dimension and Sustainable Development, Sir John Lawes School, Harpenden, Hertfordshire