Case study: Altrincham Grammar School for Girls

Summary
Altrincham Grammar School for Girls developed a range of activities to enable pupils to take an active role in seeing themselves as world citizens rather than simply focusing on their own needs. The Global Citizenship project work at the school enabled pupils to further develop many of the activities that were already in place and to develop several new areas.

Project activities

The project encompassed a number of citizenship activities instigated by project workers, teachers and pupils themselves:

• the setting up of a school council;
• a Europe Day investigating the countries of the European Union;
• an Earth Summit Simulation;
• Human Rights week;
• Fair Trade Fridays.

The activites organised by the school were inspired by preliminary research into pupils' thinking and experiences. There were strong opinions about refugees and asylum seekers and having the Escape to Safety exhibition in school for a Human Rights week was one way of providing less biased information than some of the national media.

Outcome
The pupils were shown to be very well informed for their age groups but they were vague about what they could do to make a difference in the world and we are hopeful that now that Global Citizenship has a higher priority in the school the evaluation research will show that we have made some progress in this area.

Taking part in the Developing Citizenship project has had an enormous impact throughout the school and involved everyone from the youngest year 7 student to the most experienced members of staff. Our biggest difficulty with the project is that it is really a victim of its own success. Every aspect of the project has tended to take on a life of its own and lead to something bigger and better and there are just not enough hours in the day for either the pupils or teachers to take part in all the Citizenship activities that are now happening in school.

Global Citizenship activities

The School Council
The school council acts as a pupil voice and focuses on the needs of pupils within the school community, but they also have links with the local community and often respond to global issues raised elsewhere in school. One example of this is the recycled fashion show that school councillors organised in response to the issues raised by the school’s Eco-school committee. The students have studied global environmental issues and are aware of Local agenda 21. The school had just joined the Global Citizenship project and the school councillors were very keen to become involved. The impetus for the show began with an assembly that focused on ‘Thinking globally and acting locally’.

Fair trade
Pupils had studied the issues of Fair trade in their year 9 Geography lessons for some time, but taking part in the Global Citizenship project has really encouraged its development into a whole school issue. Some of the school councillors began a fair trade group and developed links with a local supplier of fair trade goods. Gradually, as several other pupils wanted to become involved, the group became a separate entity. There is now a flourishing Fair trade stall-’Fair Trade Fridays’ is their slogan and although their best selling products are Divine and Dubble chocolate bars, they sell a wide range of goods.

Europe Day
As part of a Comenius project supported by the British Council the school has made links with schools in Latvia, Denmark, Italy, France, Portugal and staff and students have visited these schools and attended conferences where there were representatives from many other European countries. Inspiration from these experiences and support from the Global Citizenship Project provided the impetus for the Europe day that year 8 students took part in just before the expansion of the European Union in 2004. The year councillors were responsible for much of the planning and organisation of the day. They divided their classes into groups representing all the countries of the newly expanded Union and were responsible for communicating to them about the practical arrangements for the day. During form time and Citizenship lessons they researched ‘their’ country, making good use of some of the resources provided by the global citizenship project, and they prepared presentations about the people, places, culture, language etc. Many groups chose to create power point presentations and several groups incorporated music, language lessons, national dress into their ten minute presentations.