Case Study: Toot Hill School

The Banks, Bingham, Nottingham

Global Teacher's placement and the Link Schools Programme

Jenny Brown acquired legendary status almost within the first week of being a member of the first round of Global Teachers who went to South Africa in July 2001. She was easily the youngest of the group of 24 and yet never ceased to amaze and delight them with her eager efficiency and unobtrusive leadership skills. Added to the sheer challenge of the project itself, Jenny had just left Ashfield School in Kirkby-in-Ashfield and was mentally preparing for her new post at Toot Hill in Bingham. This post came complete with a brand new Head and Jenny was concerned to know to what extent he would engage with the requirements and aims of the Global Teachers Programme.

She need not have worried. John Tomasevic's enthusiasm was scarcely a nano- degree less than her own and he has been a constant support and active participant in the link with Little Flower Senior Secondary School in Qumbu, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Situated in a rural landscape about an hour from Umtata, this small secondary school has about 300 learners on role and is led by the Principal Mr Kondlo. Toot Hill has about 1300 students and the area around Bingham is also relatively rural.

This link is a particularly significant one in that staff and students from both North and South have visited each other's schools. There is a wealth of learning to gain from this experience and to share with other schools wanting to undertake such an ambitious project.

Activities and benefits

The reciprocal exchanges have undoubtedly been mutually beneficial but they have come as the result of a lot of preparatory work in both schools and over the 'phone. Once Jenny had ascertained the strength of her Head's support she was able to begin to involve the whole school right from the beginning of her appointment. Assemblies and staff INSET have been delivered to all except for the Sixth Form who have their own special connections and activities within the project.

Enthusiasm and commitment for linking with Little Flower was quick to develop and the idea of mutual visits was eagerly supported. In order to raise enough money for all the visitors' flights several activities were organised including sponsored runs, music concerts and donations from parents and governors. A new policy was also created whereby an extra £1 is added on to every school trip on a voluntary basis and this money also goes towards the Little Flower Fund. A 'Swimathon' in the community donated half the proceeds to the fund and the proceeds from an annual non-uniform day ensure a steady income for future activities between the two schools.

The students asked for their own working party to help organise events and raise funds. They have their own board with a staff member as an observer and have been particularly successful in starting up a pen-pal scheme.

Members of the sixth form have engaged with the project at a business level and one group are developing the skills of Xhosa beadwork. They have started a mini-enterprise which also helps to raise money for the fund and their bead work is sold at local Trade Fairs and school events. They produced a video of their work and entered the Channel 4 "World of Difference" competition, which unfortunately they did not win. Undaunted however, they are embarking on a closer link with Little Flower to set up a co-operative with the neighbouring Ikwesi group of bead sellers. This is a disabled group of adults and before too long the Toot Hill enterprise hopes to be linked with them by email to send orders and to arrange profit sharing details over the web.

Another part of this project involves the A-Level IT course and members are working on a database for stock control and recording all their finances. In their English and Media lessons they are developing the persuasive language skills required for positive marketing of their products.

The potential of this very practical project exemplifies what opportunities there are in all aspects of the curriculum for using material, information and artefacts from a link with South Africa in day-to-day studies.

Curriculum and citizenship

"The aim of this Link is for it to underpin the whole school curriculum" Jenny asserted in her Global Teacher self-assessment report. From the outset she recognised the merits of involving as many colleagues as possible in order to build in sustainability. A staff committee was formed to discuss ideas about funding and curriculum development and this still meets regularly. Two years into the link, Jenny is now trying to formalise this enthusiastic working party by having a representative from each faculty so that each one has a subject-specific topic embedded into its syllabus.

Initial connections to various subjects include Jenny's own lessons on the 'Mathematics of Citizenship' in which data collected in South Africa was used to enable students to compare their lives to those of their peers in the Eastern Cape. Toot Hill pupils designed questionnaires to gather information about various aspects of teenage life such as hobbies, music, family members, means of getting to school and the subjects studied.

Story-boards in English lessons involve accounts of "A Day in the Life of ..." with photographs to exchange with the learners in Little Flower as have Geography displays using Jenny's photos brought back from Qumbu.

Design and Technology students in Year 9 had a day 'off timetable' to produce items using African resources and they also cooked an African meal for staff and guests, one of whom was Koleka Ntantiso, a Project Manager from Link Community Development in Umtata.

In Year 7 a series of dance lessons introduced pupils to the elaborate sequences of actions required for gum-boot dancing. Fun to watch and to learn, this dance is still performed in South Africa and is a reminder of the freedom felt when miners were released from the dark, gruelling days of digging for gold.

The artefacts Jenny brought back have given new opportunities in Art work both at Toot Hill and at her previous school. At the latter they were used extensively by the Expressive Arts faculty for the GCSE course. Jenny was thrilled to receive a card from the school to say that "all the students had received high grades and that they had been inspired by the artefacts and the differences in culture."

Connecting communities

One of the requirements of applying for a Global Teachers Millennium Award was that follow-up work should include other schools and a community group. Jenny's choices have been two groups within the University of Nottingham and a local church which meets as house groups.

Jenny held an African evening for her church group which is already very focused on overseas mission. This event may well have a long-term impact if a specific connection with the Eastern Cape is sought.

A Development Education Centre called MUNDI operates from the university campus and Jenny has been sharing her experiences and worksheets with them in order to offer support to other teachers wanting to make school links. Her packs are being used in schools and will eventually become part of MUNDI's resource library. Jenny also intends to contribute to their website and is preparing INSET sessions using her experience of linking and its impact on the curriculum.

This connection has lead to a contact within the LEA, Sue Green, who has a responsibility for an established linking scheme in the city and Jenny also hopes to contact a local MP, Alan Simpson, with an interest in South Africa.

One unexpected outcome of Jenny's follow-up work was working with a group of 40 PGCE students at the university. She was asked to deliver a presentation on her placement in South Africa and to speak about developing Citizenship through Mathematics. As well as the data her pupils were working on, figures to do with HIV/AIDS, illegal abortions, general health, clean water and other development indicators such as the GNP, literacy rates and infant mortality statistics were all used.

This was enthusiastically received and many have expressed interest in taking part in similar schemes of Continuing Professional Development (CPD). Her session will now be included as an annual event in the PGCE course.

The communities that have perhaps benefited most directly and personally from Jenny's placement are those within the two linked schools. In October 2002, a group of four members of staff and nine pupils went to visit Little Flower for 10 days and in July 2003 two members of staff and four pupils came to visit Toot Hill. It could be difficult to estimate for whom the learning curve was steepest.

Members of the group who went are in some ways still trying to accommodate all that it meant to them and were eager to recount details and memories to 'an outsider' with some knowledge of where they had been.

"There were no white students - I was the only one in the class."

"I didn't expect them to be so clever and so loud."

"They put us all into separate classes to start with, but one day on my own was enough."

"And the toilets echoed and the doors didn't even fit!"

"When we went to Coffee Bay, there were lots of white people."

"We learnt a lot about Apartheid from the Nelson Mandela Museum in Umtata."

Each statement could begin a citizenship lesson, and this group would have plenty to contribute! They were adamant that it was not a holiday and as their memories flooded back, one year later, they obviously felt they would like more opportunities to describe their feelings and experiences. Perhaps Link Community Development could give them this chance at a forthcoming conference?

Their openness about how far away they felt from home and the sense of being a tiny minority almost everywhere they went augurs well for sharing such experiences with peers and to extend their learning to issues such as asylum seekers and ethnic minority groups within Toot Hill. Some felt that they needed even more preparation for what to expect:

"It was quite a big shock!"

Their confidence grew as they were asked to teach some Little Flower learners how to use the computers, a digital camera and to write a personal profile to be brought back to England. Excitement is reviving at present as the promised email connection is due any day now. There has been some frustration about the time delay in receiving letters, or worse, not getting any reply.

Having experienced the sense of being so different themselves, they were well prepared for such feelings in their guests whom they hosted this summer. The Little Flower learners were considerably older than them, but this was of little advantage in coping with homesickness and the exhaustion of living in a second language environment 24 hours a day. Several were almost silent for the first week and only ventured to try and communicate when on outings at the weekend or playing cricket - a universal language!

One completely unexpected outcome was described by one Year 10 student from Toot Hill. He had organised a Chinese meal for the whole group of visitors and invited his Scottish grandmother to join them. She was extremely reticent and made several almost racist remarks which her grandson excused as being 'typical of her age and background'. At the end of the meal however, it was difficult to prise her away from one of the Little Flower students with whom she had spent the evening comparing notes on their respective Presbyterian churches. Her views have apparently changed completely.

One major event that brought both groups together in a shared sense of celebration was the Toot Hill "Carnivent". This annual Arts Festival has an international flavour and involves the whole Bingham community. All the Little Flower visitors wore their traditional Xhosa costumes and entered fully into the spirit of the occasion. John Tomasevic's observations as he escorted Mr Kondlo around the displays and activities reflect the close professional bond they formed. As well as describing their initial contact as "A WOW! Thing", the immediate chemistry they felt led to discussions of numerous issues of common concern.

The "Carnevent" demonstrated the relationship of the school to community issues. John sees it as "an opportunity to lessen the isolation that can exist between a secondary school and its surrounding community and as a means of legitimising what the school is doing."

Mr Kondlo was keen to discuss the culture and values that underlie a community and to share his wealth of experience of a concept that is considerably more advanced in South Africa than in our well-resourced Western isolation.

John's enthusiasm for the time spent with Mr Kondlo was infectious and highlights the significance of this aspect of the Link Schools Programme. All of a sudden there is a real person from a real school with real problems similar to those in the UK. There is "a meeting of equals with different contexts but generic issues in common."

Sustainability for the future

The strength of this link can largely be traced to Jenny's initial intentions for it to underpin the whole curriculum. Yet it has had far reaching impacts that Jenny, Link Community Development, Toot Hill and Bingham cannot possibly have foreseen.

Without doubt the curriculum links are being forged and details written into the School Improvement Plan and these are also being used to support Toot Hill's application for Specialist School Status. John Tomasevic has a vision of the school becoming a centre of excellence as a Business Enterprise School with links to various other countries. He envisages a global community of businesses run by and for students to make profits for those in both the Southern and Northern components of the partnerships.

He and Mr Kondlo are actively seeking sponsorship to enable their ideas to become realities and the first of these will hopefully be a regular email contact to continue the dialogue regarding curriculum issues. Jenny's comment in her final report emphasises the enormity of this achievement:

"Having two schools communicating and jointly planning curriculum initiatives doesn't happen in this country, so to manage this across two continents is just fantastic."

The impact of the link on the staff in both schools is another significant feature. On arrival, John Tomasevic realised that he had a challenge ahead of him to harness the energies of a relatively young staff and to raise their expectations both for themselves and for the pupils. Linking with Little Flower has helped in enlarging everyone's vision and their quality of professionalism in curriculum delivery.

He would be the first to say that this is a slow process but already Little Flower is challenging the stereotypes and behaviour in 'Little Bingham'. It is offering an exceptional opportunity to these students for them to become world citizens and to be connected with real people on the other side of the globe.

The wider community of Bingham has pledged part of its Trust Fund to helping its young people to go out to South Africa and the keenness of the school governors is yet another thread in the web of support that will enable this link to prosper even more.

Jenny's final comments echo those of the majority of Global Teachers:

".my expectations have been blown out of the water. I never believed those five weeks would have such a big impact on my life and that of others."

Compiled by Frances Hillier, Education Advisor, Link Community Development UK, Nov 2003