A PARTNERSHIP between two very different Lake District schools separated by language, climate and thousands of miles is helping its pupils to become truly global citizens.

Leck St Peter's Primary School, near Kirkby Lonsdale, is working with a school in the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa to spread around teaching expertise and broaden the horizons of pupils in both schools.

As part of the project, the children of Leck welcomed Derek Nkata, the director of education for the Masindi district of Uganda, into the school to celebrate Common-wealth Day.

Mr Nkata joined the primary pupils and head teacher Sue Simpson, who travelled to Uganda last summer to teach in a Masindi school as part of Link Community Development, a UK-wide educa-tional exchange project.

"It was a life-changing exper-ience," said Mrs Simpson of the trip, during which she stayed with a local family and worked at Kabango Primary.

The 1,000-pupil school with classes of up to 40 children was quite a change from her 38-pupil rural primary - for a start there was just one textbook to every five or six children. But she found she was able to offer tips, like getting the teacher to put up three sets of work on the board to cater for different abilities.

April 10, 2003 11:00