Woodford County High School For Girls has recently been awarded the Bronze Global School Award.
Why is global education important to you and your school?
We seek to make Woodford a school of no boundaries for learning & to promote global citizenship to our students. We are a richly diverse staff & student body and consider our global ancestry and connections a vital asset. We always seek to nurture and develop these ties for educational purposes.
We have demonstrated expertise and knowledge of video conferencing technology and have effectively deployed it across the school. The impact is beyond the school and wider community largely due to the sharing of good practice with colleagues and other professionals local, national & global in education. The pursuit of video conferencing as a means to enhance and enrich learning and to place it in a real-world context has been a central target on our school development plan since 2014/2015. We identified the enormous educational potential of this technology and worked with vision, imagination and tenacity to launch video conferencing at Woodford and to design and implement a developing programme, steadily increasing subject coverage across the curriculum and building the numbers of students, colleagues involved & fostering partnerships with educators, business & industry across the globe.
How can/has the Global School Alliance benefited you as a teacher and the opportunities for your school?
We have chosen to prioritise membership with the GSA because we believe in their core tenets of: school improvement; staff development; to achieve student transformation. It is exciting to be part of a global community that is active in pursing our shared values & the platform is collaborative. It is exciting to make connections with other schools that are equally committed.
In the past, we have experienced ‘hurdles’ to promoting partnerships & creating new schemes of work with other organisations & academic institutions. With UK schools struggling with funding & time it is always a choice to provide the ‘extra’ that staff & students really crave.
What benefits do you think this award will have on the whole school community?
The award will celebrate the achievements made by our staff and pupils. We will feel rewarded for our efforts and feel proud to have worked together as a school. The award is mentioned on the Curriculum enrichment partnership framework (NVCEG matrix) as exceeding use of VC so it will help us gain accreditation for use of VC through international collaborations.
We also look forward to exploring further the rich and diverse GSA community to enable students & staff to participate in many more developmental and inspirational events and programmes.
How will you use this award to motivate students and staff?
Though, we are pleased to have been recognised as a Bronze Award level school, no motivation is necessary, we have actively been collaboration with others for years. The exciting element about membership with the GSA however is meeting like-minded schools. The GSA community is our first port of call when designing new schemes of work and looking for others to work with. We are very keen to learn what others are doing and if we can implement their programmes into our school. Rarely do you come across such a generous group of educators.
What are your plans to develop your international work?
We continue to look for partners with ‘ready baked’ programmes or developing new opportunities.
We have an active and vocal student body who want to raise the profile of social justice campaigns; improve educational opportunities for all young people and environmental concerns that require immediate attention. We have an active staff who are in the final planning stages of CPD & European residential opportunities/collaborations with our current partner schools. We have hosted our friends, now it’s time to go on tour!
To learn more about the Global School Awards, visit: www.globalschoolalliance.com/global-school-awards/.
