Category: British Council

Liss Federation gains International Schools Award reaccreditation

Yesterday was a brilliant day for Liss and Kafuro as we received an email from the British Council with the good news that for the third time we have been successfully been reaccredited with the full International Schools Award. This has taken a year of hard work from all of our staff co-ordinated by Mr Stanley. We are very grateful for the assistance of many of our parents but would particularly like to acknowledge the help we have received from Mrs Bourne and Mr Vystavkina, who have given the school very helpful feedback on some of our international activities. We would also like to thank Mr Mukama and all the staff at Kafuro Primary School who have run several of the activities in sync with Liss and shared their learning with us. The British Council assessors wrote:

The Federation of Liss Schools has successfully met the criteria for International School Award re accreditation. You have firmly embedded a genuine commitment to internationalism and the global learning into the whole school curriculum. The teaching and learning of global and international issues remain at the forefront of the school ethos. You have continued the collaborative work with your long established partner school in Uganda and have previously gained Connecting Classrooms funding which has allowed reciprocal visits as well as CPD opportunities for staff. Despite the pandemic and Brexit you have managed to keep the partnership thriving. The activities presented involve the whole school and often linked to the SDGs which you intend to further embed into the curriculum. The required language activity shows the pupils learning a variety of different languages and learning about their cultures. The blog between yourself and your partner school is very useful for us to see the great collaborative work being carried out. The local and wider community are involved in the various global and International projects and the feedback from the pupils and parents is very positive.  Congratulations again to all staff at Federation of Liss Schools . Good Luck with your future plans.

We are looking forward to developing our partnership with Kafuro even further over the coming three years and, when he visits Uganda next month, Mr Stanley will be sitting down with Mr Mukama to look at opportunities in each year group to enhance the shared learning further in every year group.

Kafuro’s return to school

It’s been some time since we were able to update you on Kafuro Primary School, but Mr Stanley has spoken to Mr Thembo over the past week and we now have plenty of news.

Firstly, pupils returned to school on January 10th after nearly two years without any school attendance. The only pupils who have attended were last year’s P7 who returned for a brief time before their PLE (Primary Leaving Examinations). One of the questions that the children at Liss have asked regularly has been about the learning that children have had at home. It has been explained to them that the pupils have had no access to remote learning – no one has laptops, and although there is internet in the area it is 3G and very slow. The school has been unable to send workpacks either as they do not have a photocopier – some secondary schools have access to them but primary do not. Consequently, the pupils have had almost two years of lost learning. This places what has happened to education in the UK into a bit more context.

Another frustration for the staff and pupils in Kafuro is that Covid cases have been virtually non – existent. The remoteness of the community has obviously been a positive factor in this, but the school has been unable to open because of government rules.

The teaching staff underwent training similar to that in the UK about how to reintegrate the pupils back into school and to recover lost learning. Initially, attendance was very poor, but has picked up quickly and Mr Thembo said it was currently at about 98%.

Regular readers of the blog will be aware that one of the projects based around our last round of Connecting Classrooms funding was building an African Keyhole Garden. As you can see from the photos below, ground has been prepared in two areas around the school but nothing has been planted yet as the weather is so hot at the moment that straw has been spread out over the surface in order to stop moisture from evaporating. Mr Thembo said that they have planted banana suckers (these will grow into teees) in different parts of the school campus as banan trees are highly drought resistant.

March 18th update: Mr Thembo has been in touch to say that the children at Kafuro have been planting water melons – not something we could realistically grow at Liss. Mr Thembo said that the seedlings have to be heavily watered at the beginning and the end of the day because it is so hot in Uganda at the moment that if they were to water in the middle of the day the water would just evaporate. They are also planting some cabbage seeds which is more like the crops we would grow in the UK.

  • Banana Suckers
  • The area marked out for the keyhole garden
  • Staff Training
  • Children preparing the ground
  • Planting seedlings
  • The seedlings need lots of water

Completing our African Keyhole Garden

This morning, Year 3 pupils with the assistance of Mr Stanley and Mr Haycock completed the building of our African keyhole garden. The first task was to complete the second course of bricks so we moved them down to the garden site so Mr Haycok could lay them in the correct place. After that, we had the task of adding compost to the garden. Mr Haycock has been piling up leaf litter for the past couple of years and much of it has broken down into excellent compost. Half the pupils went with Mr Stanley armed with forks, trowels and wheelbarrows to collect the compost, while the others remained with Mr Haycock to spread and stamp down the compost when it arrived.

By the end of the morning, we had moved most of one of the big piles of compost into the garden. We now need to leave it to rot down further before adding more in the spring. Mr Haycock and Mr Stanley just need to put a bit of render around some of the bricks to keep them secure.

In the Spring we will also create a willow basket that we will place in the keyhole garden. Food waste will be placed in the basket which will then rot and provide nutrients for the soil.

We aim to plant vegetables in late May/beginning of June and then Year 2 will be responsible for growing and maintaining the crops. We are very excited to see what the Kafuro pupils decide to grow when they build their keyhole garden hopefully in the New Year.

  • The garden is now going to be left until the spring before we add more compost

Continuing our look at Fairtrade chocolate

To begin today’s lesson, Mr Stanley drew two chocolate bars on the whiteboard and asked the class to deliberate on what factors would lead to them buying one bar or the other. The children came up with the following considerations:

  • Taste/texture
  • Price
  • Size
  • Special offers/promotions
  • Fairtrade mark
  • Advertising
  • Brand
  • Type (dark, milk or white)
  • Quality
  • Condition

We then looked at what the Fairtrade mark actually means and identified the four key components of this:

  • It means farmers and workers get better wages and working conditions
  • It guarantees a fair price for the producers
  • It provides extra money to go to the community
  • Allows small farmers to join together in cooperatives to sell their products.

We discussed how community money might be used to improve sanitation, provide teachers for a school,improve medical care or to build housing. Next, we looked closely at the different stages of the journey from producer to consumer and arranged them in the correct order.

  1. After he has scraped the cocoa beans out of the cocoa pod, the farmer leaves them to dry.
  2. The dried cocoa beans are weighed.
  3. The sacks of cocoa beans are loaded onto a ship, ready to be brought from Africa to Europe
  4. The cocoa beans are ground. Milk and sugar are added to make chocolate – yummy!
  5. Chocolate bars are formed, wrapped and packed. Then they are delivered to the shops.

Mr Stanley then outlined one final task before we evaluate the learning unit. The children have been set the task of writing to Tesco persuading them to stock a new Ugandan Fairtrade product – Crested Crane Chocolate. They have also been asked to design the chocolate bar and a new Fairtrade Mark. The results of this will be seen in the next blog post.

Fairtrade and chocolate

For our third session on fair trade at Liss Junior School, we focused on chocolate. Two thirds of cocoa produced worldwide is estimated to be grown by smallholders. West African economies are critically dependent on cocoa. For example, revenue from cocoa accounts for more than one third of Ghana’s total export earnings, and 40% of those of Cote d’Ivoire, the
world’s largest cocoa producer. The instability of the world cocoa market, with its huge fluctuations in prices, means cocoa farmers are in a precarious situation – most struggle to make a living.


In Britain we eat more chocolate per capita than any other country, each consuming around 9.5kg per year (and these figures are from before the Covid pandemic when chocolate consumption rocketed).

As a class we approached the topic by taking part in a survey all about chocolate. The class were first asked if they liked chocolate. 26 out of 27 (96%) said YES. Next, they were asked what their favourite chocolate was. As you can imagine, there was a wide range of answers from the classic galaxy bars all the way up to posher Lindt (just for information, Mr Stanley favourite is the Kit Kat chunky – which was fairtrade as of last year). they were then asked to explain what attracted them to certain types of chocolate bars. The children were very honest and many of them said that advertising played a major part – it just goes to show how much of an influence advertising has on children.

The children were then asked a question. For every 100 chocolate bars in the UK, how many are eaten by men, women and children. This promoted a fascinating discussion. Most of the children thought that children ate the majority, men the second biggest amount and women the least. There was one exception in the class (who shall remain nameless) who thought that his mum ate more chocolate than the rest of his family put together.

The children were surprised by the results. Out of every 100 chocolate bars:

Men ate 26

Children ate 34

Women ate 40

So our nameless pupil was the closest to being correct. We then looked at how much money went to various people in the production chain of chocolate. So for every £1 bar of chocolate:

7p goes to the cocoa farmer

40p goes to the chocolate company

28p goes to the retailer

15p is taxed.

Once the children heard these figures they were outraged and questioned the fairness of this, There then followed a discussion about how many times we have all bought chocolate that is not fair trade rather than fairtrade chocolate because the non fair trade chocolate is cheaper.

Next week, we are going to look more closely at how fairtrade helps chocolate growers and what we can do to support them

Fairtrade: Session 2

Following on from last week’s fair trade lesson, Rowan class started off with a quick recap of the previous week’s learning, in particular a renewed discussion over how much people should be paid for the process of growing and selling bananas. The children decided to write their thoughts. Here are three of the children’s arguments:

After the children had completed their writing, we repeated the previous exercise when the children had to sell their bananas to Mr Stanley in his role as representative of the Big Banana Company. However, this time some of the children were given fair trade tokens. When Mr Stanley came to buy their bananas he gave each of these pupils 8 tokens instead of the two which he gave to the rest of the class.

This then led to a discussion on what Fairtrade means to the growers and the children completed an exercise on the difference between a banana and a fair trade banana.

The children came to the following results:

For a fairtrade banana

  • My workers have better homes and better education
  • My farmer has a guaranteed contract
  • My workers spent many hours looking after me
  • My workers are members of a co-op. They can make their own decisions.
  • My farmer doesn’t use dangerous chemicals on the banana plants.

For a non fairtrade banana

  • My workers have poor housing, poor education and poor health
  • My workers have no union and no say in how their lives go
  • My workers had to work 12 hours a day, six days a week
  • My workers could lose their jobs anytime
  • My workers used dangerous chemicals to kill any pest which might damage the banana plants.

We finished the session by discussing what fairtrade means and came to the conclusion that fair trade allows the farmers and growers to obtain a fair price for the work they carry out in producing many of our staple foods. It also stops big companies driving down prices at the expense of the growers just so we can have cheap food

Beginning our journey to investigate Fairtrade

This morning, the Year 6 classes as Liss Junior School began to take a detailed look at fair trade. We began by discussing what causes poverty. The children were given 3 beans each and were asked to investigate nine statements. When they found a statement that they felt was most accurate they could place one of their beans in a cup next to the statement. If they wished, they could place all their beans in a particular cup. These are the results for Rowan Class:

StatementVotes
cast		Percentage
Climate change means flood and droughts1926%
International trading system is unfair to poor
countries		57%
People can’t grow enough food because of wars1318%
People are too poor to buy food1521%
Food grown on the best farmland is sold to rich
countries		34%
Many big companies don’t pay the tax they should
to poor countries		23%
People in rich countries want to pay less for
things they buy, so wages in poor countries stay
low		23%
Corruption and bad government in bad countries11%
People in rich countries don’t give enough in aid
and charity		1318%
  • Casting votes for the causes of poverty
  • There was a lot of thought and discussion

Once we had calculated the percentages, we had a discussion as to why the pupils had made their choices. What became very clear was how aware the children are of the issues relating to climate change and war – the situation in Syria was mentioned several times. Where the children had less awareness was on the issues of corruption and bad government. This is not necessarily surprising as they are not at an age where they would study politics yet.

With this opening task complete, our next task was to find out where much of our food comes from in the UK. We used a world map and identified which countries supplied the UK the following foods:

Bananas – The Caribbean, Costa Rica

Soya – Brazil

Pineapple – Costa Rica

Cocoa – West Africa

Sugar – The Caribbean

Palm Oil – South East Asia

We noticed that many of these ingredients came from poorer parts of the world. This raised the question – if all these poor countries are selling us lots of good then why are they so poor?

We then looked at the ingredients in a chocolate bar and found out that only one of the ingredients is produced in the UK. A discussion followed about why chocolate was so cheap in the UK when so many of the ingredients were imported. Mr Stanley told the children how big companies will pay producers very low prices in order to ensure that prices are kept low in richer countries like the UK and to ensure that their profit margins high.

Next, Mr Stanley got the children to undertake an exercise. He asked the class to draw their own bananas to represent bananas that were grown.

  • Drawing bananas

Once the children had finished drawing and cutting out their bananas, Mr Stanley said that he would return to the class in five minutes to make the class an offer for the 25 bananas that had been produced.

When Mr Stanley returned to the class, the children had discussed the sale carefully and come up with a price of 1000 counters for all 25 bananas. Mr Stanley said that he would consider the price and would have a think about it. After 30 seconds Mr Stanley made the class a counter – offer of 50 units: one – twentieth of the price the children had asked for. This caused understandable outrage in the class, but Mr Stanley told the class that BB (Big Bananas), the company he was representing had been to another class who had accepted this offer. If Rowan Class weren’t prepared to accept his offer then he would do business with the other class.

With the exercise over and the children very angry, Mr Stanley took the children through the stages from a banana being grown to being sold in a supermarket in the UK. This can be seen below:

We discussed who should get the most money from the sale of the banana. The children thought that the grower should receive the majority of the payment or at least an equal share. They were genuinely shocked when they saw how little the grower was actually paid. One pupil was so angry about this that she was almost speechless.

In our next lesson we will be writing about what we have discovered so far as well as beginning to investigate what fairtrade actually means.

Uganda 2019 Day 2: Journey to Mweya

The day began with breakfast at Entebbe Zoo. Again the backdrop to our meal was the gorgeous Lake Victoria. This morning Joffrey brought his wife along to meet us. She is pregnant with twins and was about to wave goodbye to her husband as it was his job to drive us the eight hours to our base in the Queen Elizabeth National Park at Mweya.

Before we could start we all had jobs to do in Kampala. For the CM Spots crew this was a trip to a Sports Shop to purchase sports equipment for the training they’ll be doing in 10 schools over the next two weeks. Between them Nick, Luke, Megan and Andy have raised £400 and the equipment they purchased today (including footballs, tennis rackets, dart boards and dominoes sets) will be remaining behind in the schools they visit.

Miss Duncan and Mr Davies paid a visit to the British Council whose offices were housed within the British consulate in Kampala. The British Council have funded much of this visit through their Connecting Classrooms Project and this meeting was an opportunity to share our plans and expectations for the next two weeks.

Most of the rest of the day was spent in the minibus driving across Uganda, a distance of over two hundred miles. Despite the cramped conditions, the team managed to entertain themselves with games and conversation. The journey through the countryside was a great way for us to become familiar with the real Uganda. The scenery was staggeringly beautiful as we headed towards the Rwenzori mountains.

The quality of Ugandan roads is not great, although I’m told that they are much improved in recent years. This was apparent from the fact that most of the way, roads were still under construction. This lead to a very bumpy ride and I received what Geoffrey termed a ‘Ugandan Massage’ as I was thrown around in the back of the bus. Uganda also has speed bumps all along their main roads. Sitting on the seat above the back wheel is not a good idea on these occasions and I managed to bang my head several times on the roof of the bus! We made a couple of brief stops to use the ‘bush toilet’ as well as a welcome rest in Fort Portal for a drink.

As we got closer to our destination I was very excited to see Kasese; a bustling town that is home to Rihamu Junior School – Hambledon’s twin. I look forward to returning on Friday.

Today was also notable for the huge amount of wildlife we saw in its natural environment. At one point we swerved to avoid baboons and as we entered the area of the Queen Elizabeth National Park we were welcomed by Hippos and Hyenas. We eventually made it to Hippo House in the dark at 8pm. The hospitality of Tembo, the Parks’ restaurant was very welcome after a long and tiring day.

Uganda Day 2: 2019

Well rested after a good night’s sleep, we walked through the (empty) zoo to breakfast – a full English of course, hopefully we’ll be brave enough to try some authentic food soon! Whilst we were packing our things, the animals in the nearby enclosure moved close to our huts, perfect for some photos! Shortly after, we packed up and began our journey to Mweya. When we reached Kampala, Paul and I had to visit the British Council to let them know that we had arrived safely and were asked if we needed anything. Once we had checked in with them, we went back with Joffrey to pick up Nick and co. who we had earlier dropped off at the sports equipment shop. 


With the van all loaded up with equipment in almost every available gap, we resumed our travels. Although long and tiring, the drive was made bearable by the beautiful scenery and went a lot quicker as we were playing games. Along the way we drove past some baboons, one of which had a baby on their back so we fed them some cheese crackers so they came really close to the van! Further on, we stopped at Fort Portal to have a drink (Nick and I had a Long Island iced tea to quench the thirst) and then it was the final stretch of the journey. 


Arriving into Hippo House, we immediately were greeted by amazing wildlife – a water buck, herd of elephants, a hippo and a hyena. All of this was in the dark so I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings! We also paid a visit to one of Mr Stanley’s favourite placeS for dinner – Tembo. I tried chapatis which were just as Mr Stanley makes them. Other exotic choices included Andy and Paul trying Tilapia which came with the head still on! 


Tomorrow we have an early start for the crater drive to take in the local scenery. 


(Photos to follow later as they are on my camera!)