Swindon primary school receives award for international focus in curriculum
Bridlewood Primary School is paired with May Pen in Jamaica
A primary school in Swindon has been given the intermediate level of the British Council's International School Award.
Bridlewood Primary School’s curriculum has a special focus on international education including cross-curricular International Days.
They have also been partnered with a school in Jamaica for a year now and recently ran a reading project together.
Vicky Sammons, the school’s headteacher, said:” They recognised how we've embedded some of our topic topics to understanding international links around the world. So for example, in year three we study the rainforest, so we're looking at South American countries.
“So, there's lots of geography links within our curriculum generally and then to supplement that we do discovery days across the school year and one of those is our International Day and the children will have an experience of lots of different countries depending on what is going on in their class”.
Since the scheme was set up in 1999, over 6,000 International School Awards have been awarded to schools.
The awards are supposed to encourage schools to help children get an understanding of other cultures and soft skills that will prove valuable for their later lives.
“It's a big, wide world out there and helping them to grow up and be aware of how different issues play out across the world. We want them to understand cultures, we want them to understand the histories of different countries and ultimately that enables them to be more rounded citizens as they grow up”.
Even though their partnership with May Pen in Jamaica was initially only planned to be a one-year thing, they are positive that they will keep in contact and run more projects together.
For their Reading for Pleasure Project, the children worked together over Teams to bridge the distance of over 4,500 miles.
“They had some teams calls between the classes, they were able to wave at one another and have discussions with one another.
The project they did was based around reading for pleasure. So, they looked at what was similar and what was different in the two countries and the children sort of posted photos of where they like to read.
“Actually, there were lots of similarities as in they liked to snuggle up in soft cushions and read, so there was lots to discuss about what they like to read, but also where they like to read as well”.