Projects

Current Activities

From Poverty to Prosperity (P2P)

P2P is a new development awareness project working in three EU countries plus Ghana. It seeks to address three challenges.  Firstly, current development awareness for young people is not significantly changing behaviours and attitudes to the extent necessary to mobilise support for the MDG's.  Secondly, much development education is based on the needs of young people in developing countries and fails to recognise the needs of young people in Europe. Thirdly, the quality of development education amongst new member states is very weak, with little formal support for schools and teachers in the way of training, resources and programmes.

P2P will work with 4500 young people to increase their understanding of the interconnections between EU and developing countries, how their actions can support developing countries, and have the confidence to voice their opinions to decision-makers.  The quality of development education in each EU partner country will be improved through developing new resources and providing capacity building to 300 teachers.

The project is a partnership between five NGOs:

- Field Studies Council - FSC (UK); NSA
- Cumbria Development Education Centre - CDEC (UK): NSA
- Bokor Oko Csoport Alapitvany - BCOS Foundation (Hungary): NSA
- This Is My Environment - TIME Foundation (Bulgaria): NSA
- International Centre for Enterprise and Sustainable Development (Ghana):NSA

We now have five schools recruited for the planning and development of our needs analysis and work on our forthcoming Challenge Packs:
Cockermouth School
Appleby Grammar School
William Howard School, Brampton
St Joseph's Catholic High School, Workington
Mayfield School, Whitehaven 

The FSC and CDEC have been in to all five P2P schools and carried out Focus Group Activities with Year 8 and 9 pupils. We have found out plenty of information to get on with our work on the Challenge Packs over Summer and Autumn 2009.
The UK partner meeting was held in late June where we stayed at the FSC Blencathra Centre. Our Bulgarian, Hungarian and Ghanian partners were impressed by boiling hot weather after hearing about typical Cumbrian rain and wind! As well as lots of hard work, we all sampled some excellent local pub grub, and some of us managed a hike to the top of Saddle Back at 6am before our busy work schedules began!
During the week we also travelled into Ambleside for a P4C taster day run by Eleanor Knowles (CDEC Director) and had the opportunity to watch a P4C session with pupils from Ambleside Primary School. This style of teaching was particularly interesting to our Hungarian partners who seem to have a much more formal style of teaching and learning. We hope everyone got some good ideas to take away back to the classroom.
Our next Teacher Focus Group meeting is planned for Tuesday 6^th October 2009 4.30 – 6pm at Cockermouth School. Any further interest is welcome. Please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

If you work in education and would like to assist us with our research about Development Education, please complete the teacher questionnaire which you can download as a Word Document and email back to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .
(P2P is delivered with financial assistance of the European Union.  The project is the sole responsibility of the P2P partners and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union)

Carlisle Fairtrade Cluster Project (running until March 2010)

With funding from CAFOD and support from Carlisle One World Centre, CDEC have been working with four schools in the Carlisle area to work towards gaining Fairtrade status.

Newman Catholic School, James Rennie School, St Bede's Primary School and St Margaret Mary Primary School have been recruited and are working with Beki Cosh, CDEC's Global Education Officer for the North and West of Cumbria, to work towards the 5 aims to become a Fairtrade school.
The schools had the rare and exciting opportunity to meet the Patron of the Fairtrade Foundation, George Alagiah! George is perhaps best known for presenting the BBC 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock news, but took time out of his busy schedule to come to Carlisle for the Carlisle Fairtrade Business Conference and talk about his personal passion, Fairtrade.
Rajah Banerjee, a tea producer from the Makaibari Tea Estate in Darjeeling , was also there explaining the difference Fairtrade has made to his estate and his community. Local Fairtrade expert, Joe Human, of Cumbria fair trade network and also a CDEC trustee, spoke and is supporting the cluster schools with advice and assemblies.
After inspiring many businesses to take on board Fairtrade products with their speeches and Q&A sessions, George and Rajah then paid a visit to Newman Catholic School for an informal chat with the staff and students from the Fairtrade Steering groups from each cluster school. The pupils loved meeting a real celebrity and were all inspired to get the Fairtrade work moving forward in school!

 A FREE full day CPD event was also held on Thursday 5th March to celebrate the closure of Fairtrade Fortnight 2009 and for schools to find out more about what they need to do to work towards Fairtrade status. The event was very well attended and supported by COWC, CAFOD and by High Hesket Primary School and St Joseph's Catholic High School - 2 Cumbrian schools who have already achieved Fairtrade status. The pupils spoke confidently about what they are doing to embed Fairtrade issues into the curriculum. Many thanks to all those who came along!

The CDEC AGM had a Fairtrade twist to it this year! A celebration event was hosted by James Rennie School, one of the Fairtrade Cluster Schools. Presentations were made by Beki Cosh (CDEC), Joe Human (Cumbria Fairtrade Network) and by teachers and pupils from each Cluster School so everyone could hear what schools had been up to. Everyone took part in a fun Fairtrade game, sampled home baking and had the chance to network to get more ideas in their bid to work towards gaining Fairtrade Status.
Many thanks to James Rennie School for hosting us – keep up the excellent work too! 

A Cluster meeting is planned for September to plan for a Christmas Fairtrade event.

For lots of FREE Fairtrade resources and more, visit http://www.cafod.org.uk/

For more information on gaining Fairtrade Schools Status or any Fairtrade information look at http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/ 

For local Fairtrade needs, contact Cumbria Fairtrade network http://www.cumbriafairtrade.org.uk/ or you could email the coordinator Joe Human This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

For more information on the Carlisle Fairtrade Cluster Project, local schools support and Fairtrade resources contact Beki Cosh This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Get Global in Cumbria 

The Department for International Development (DfID) has granted further project funding to CDEC, until 2010 for ‘Get Global in Cumbria ’ to introduce critical global awareness into schools across the county.  This includes focused work with up to twenty schools who will consider a whole-school approach to global education, and its links with core curriculum, developing speaking and listening and talk for writing, the requirement for schools to support community cohesion, and active citizenship.

Kirkby Stephen Primary School , supported with extra CPD funding from the Teacher Development Agency, was the first school to take up the challenge of embedding global education across the school. Eleanor Knowles, CDEC's Director, has been working in the classroom with each year group, alongside teachers and support staff, from the beginning of 2008.
 
Four more schools have now come on board - St Joseph's Catholic High School , Business & Enterprise College; Broughton Primary, Cockermouth; St James' Infant school, Whitehaven; Sandside Lodge School,  Ulverston. CDEC staff have begun with an initial audit of pupil's perceptions about other people and places, and are currently meeting with teachers & TA's, governors and school management to introduce the relevance and benefits of the project.  

The objectives of this project, to bring global education to all schools in the county, is further supported by the Lake District National Park Authority ‘sustainable development fund’ for a courier service to enable outlying schools to access CDEC loan boxes and use them in the classroom.

To see staff and pupils from Broughton School in action please go to http://www.nahttv.com/ and click on Teaching the Global Dimension to the right of the page.
 

Identity and Diversity - revised KS3 citizenship curriculum

The Teacher Development Agency has funded CDEC to lead a CPD progamme for secondary citizenship teachers, developing and trialling classroom approaches within the framework of the revised KS3 citizenship, specifically focussing on 'Identity and Diversity-living together in the UK', and using critical thinking and active learning approaches.  This is also relevant to the requirement for schools to support community cohesion.  This programme will result in a conference for secondary citizenship teachers in November 2008, with supply paid place for every secondary school in Cumbria.

Philosophy for Children

CDEC continues to offer Philosophy for Children (P4C) Level 1 training to whole school groups (contact the office if you are interested in buying this training for your school). We recently completed this training with the staff teams of Ghyllside Primary School , Kendal and St Oswald’s Primary School, Burneside.  Also look out for our open courses.
We are working with Barrow Excellence Cluster Partnership and Creative Partnerships on a Philosophy for Global Citizenship, involving a few schools from Barrow. Pupils of these schools will be invited to take part in an outdoors activity day during summer term 08, probably at the Rook How centre in the Rusland Valley .  We will be sharing some of the work from this project through our website in the coming months.

Previously we have worked in partnership with Lancashire Global Education Centre on an innovative project to trial the effectiveness of Philosophy for Children in the delivery of Global Citizenship to pupil referral units in Lancashire and Cumbria.  For further information on this project click here