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Newsletter: Sign up below to hear all the latest news about the project: About the partnership: |
The Zest For Life Partnership The Zest For Life Partnership is a collaboration between The Thomas Adams School and Buntingsdale Infants School in Shropshire, England and Miriu Mixed Secondary School and Innis Primary School in Kenya. The Story behind Our Partnership I think the first communication between Tony Stephens, the previous Head of The Thomas Adams School and Charles Okuche a senior teacher at Miriu Secondary School probably occurred in 2004. Charles wanted to find a British School which would be prepared to enter into a Global Partnership with his School. In those days our school was just known as Adams School so when Charles started at the beginning of an alphabetic list of English secondary schools it did not take him too long to reach ours. He sent out a lot of emails with his request but only Tony replied. In a very short time Tony obtained a grant from the British Council for a mutual exchange and in February 2005 he visited Charles and his school. Charles then repaid the visit later the same year. Amazingly quickly, with the help of Roger Dakin, the school’s bursar, Tony set up a programme, where staff and parents agreed to sponsor Orphaned Kenyan children so that they could attend Miriu Secondary school to complete their education. The programme was so successful that 40 such children are in a position to be sponsored each year and have been since the programme’s inception. Tony then approached Hilary Alcock, the Head of Buntingsdale Infant School with a view to extending the partnership to include her school and the large Innis primary school in Kenya. Hilary similarly established very strong links with Moses the head of the Innis School. She has visited the partnership schools twice and now has a lot of contacts within the local community as well.
However when the schools applied to the British Council the following year to obtain a grant for further exchanges, the bid was turned down on a technicality and shortly after Tony Stephens moved onto a new challenging headship. The sponsorship programme continued but the way ahead seemed less clear until Neil Hemming the new head of Thomas Adams, appointed Lynne Edwards to oversee the partnership between the 2 secondary schools. Between them they decided to send 2 staff and 3 of our senior students over to Miriu in February 2007. Dave Taplin and I went on behalf of the Adams Staff whilst Izzie Boggild Jones, Abi Alcock and Liam Orton represented not only our student body but also the student ‘Down To Earth Group’. This group was set up by Tony on his return from Kenya. These students have worked tirelessly over the years raising both awareness and money for the partnership. This became a joint trip with Hilary Alcock and Sue Price from Buntingsdale completing the party with a joint aim of fact finding so that a successful bid could be re-submitted to the British Council. From start to finish the visit was highly successful but not without problems. Many new friends were made and without exception we left Kenya with a much greater appreciation of how valuable to all the partnership was. We were particularly impressed by the way that despite the horrific effects that diseases such as Malaria and AIDS have had on every family, typical Kenyans are warm generous people who place a great emphasis on traditional family values and their innate generosity tries to compensate for the tragedies that are part of everyday life.
Whilst we were there we managed to obtain an assurance from a Senior Area Education Minister at a specially arranged meeting that not only was Charles’ position secure at Miriu but our Global Partnership had his official support and that he wanted it to succeed. March 2007 resulted in the new bid to the British Council being completed and to great relief by all being accepted. The significance of this is that we now have funding for three sets of teacher exchanges so that we can increase the swapping of ideas, resources and friendship between our schools and communities. Exchange visits are now being planned for November 2007 and March 2008 and although the grant money is strictly to be used for school and curriculum projects it gives us the opportunity to attempt so many other ventures at the same time.
Dave Q |
