As with volunteer placements, our trips make valuable contributions to communities we visit through project work and tourism support. In common with school expeditions, our trips contribute to developing students’ confidence, teamwork, grit and resilience in challenging environments.
Uniquely, our programme is centred on cross-cultural collaboration between your students and their peers in the developing world, with an emphasis on mutual learning outcomes rather than project work per se. This way of working delivers significant educational benefits to your students over and above other trips and delivers meaningful benefits to the communities we work with, as well as opening up opportunities for teacher development for both local and visiting teachers.
We will work with you to understand your school and develop a bespoke trip that meets your desired learning outcomes. We do the same with local schools, teachers and students in conjunction with the local education service to maximise the benefits of your trip to them. We further work with local charities to understand how your students can best contribute to and learn from their programmes.
To find out more about the trip programme and our focus on educational value please see below.
Our aim at Partner Schools Worldwide is to inspire and enable young people to create sustainable, positive change for themselves and their world through cross-cultural collaboration and exploration. Our unique trip programme brings together school students from countries at different stages of development for a once-in-a-lifetime shared adventure.
On this trip the students will:-
The adventure begins long before you travel with months of preparation to maximise the effectiveness of the trip and enable excitement to build!
The trip itself is action packed with a full range of stimulating activities plus plenty of time built in to reflect and assimilate learnings.
The real value of the trip is judged by its impact after it takes place; our programme has been carefully designed to deliver significant educational benefits to travelling students and to have positive impacts on everyone else involved in its delivery.
The programme weaves together themes of Cultural Immersion, Projects & Development Education and Wellbeing; please click below to find out more about them.
Ultimately, our programme is designed to enable students to develop the skills they need to live happy, healthy, fulfilled lives no matter what future direction they choose. We believe that students benefit hugely from unplugging themselves from their usual environment and immersing themselves in a completely different culture to get a fresh perspective on their current lives. Interaction with their peers from the developing world significantly enhances this reframing of their current lives.
What will they learn from their experience? These are some of the things teachers and students tell us they’ve taken away:-
As well as these personal life skills, students will have a rounded understanding of development issues and how they can personally contribute to the UN SDG’s.
Some schools we work with also build on the above by incorporating other subjects into the other programme e.g. Geography, History etc. The above can also be reversed i.e. learnings from the trip can be incorporated into your curriculum to enable whole school impact. We will work with you to design the ideal trip to meet your school’s educational needs.
Taking this further, some schools use the programme as a vehicle to engage with their wider school community. This is not just about fundraising from the local community but sharing learnings – one school plans to re-enact a community initiative developed in Ghana with their local community in the Midlands!
The above focusses on educational value from the travelling students’ perspective; the programme also delivers educational benefits to the host community students and teachers.
Deciding on a trip can at times seem daunting with so many aspects to consider.
Please do get in touch to see how we can help – we promise no pushy salespeople, just an open, friendly chat!
+44 (0) 1252 819462
welcome@partnerschoolsworldwide.co.uk