Shared Sharing Practice

Developing the Chinese theme

An image of Perth High School

Introduction

The focus is Perth High School's development and implementation of a Chinese theme in international education. This is one of four themes - Africa, China/Asia, Europe and North America - in international education through which pupils in all the school's year groups (and involving associated primary pupils from P4 onwards) have a varied involvement with global issues and international activities via the internet, videoconferencing, classroom learning, visits from speakers, visits to companies and international study visits.

The school’s commitment to developing international education has been significant in terms of time, effort, finance and involvement of large numbers of pupils and staff in all of the above activities.

Perth High School

Perth High School is a large secondary school with a pupil roll of between 1500 and 1600. The average S1 intake is 275 to 300 pupils.

The school has over 100 members of teaching staff and 25 support staff.

There is a purpose-built Confucius classroom, over 100 'conventional' classrooms, and ICT suites to support teachers and departments operating within the school's Curriculum for Excellence programme.

Staff involved

The International Education programme has been led by the Curriculum Team. Individuals and departments involved have been drawn from Art and Design, Business Education, Drama, English, Home Economics, Modern Languages, Modern Studies, Music and Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies. They have worked in partnership with colleagues from Perth and Kinross Council, Learning and Teaching Scotland and many community supporters.

Pupils involved

Children and young people in all year groups have been involved in international education, starting with S1 pupils, who work on Chinese New Year projects (along with P7 pupils from associated primaries) through to 22 S6 pupils who visited Shanghai in December 2007.

Curriculum for Excellence in Perth High School

Perth High School has been working towards the implementation of Curriculum for Excellence for the last three years. The school has partially completed its development programme and is now at a stage where a number of initiatives have begun to coalesce into a more coherent whole school approach within which pupils can be involved in cross-curricular, cognate subject group and individual subject activities to assist them in developing the four capacities.

The vision and rationale for this work is contained in the school’s handbooks:

  • Building A Curriculum for Excellence – 1 A Whole School Approach
  • Building A Curriculum for Excellence – 2a Curriculum Architecture
  • Building A Curriculum for Excellence – 2b Planning and Implementation

These handbooks are available by emailing Perth High School.   

Curriculum for Excellence has been exemplified in the school through cross-curricular initiatives, cognate subject developments and, of course, developments in individual departments and classrooms. International education is one of eight major cross-curricular initiatives being developed by the school as part of its response to Curriculum for Excellence. These initiatives are:

  • International education
  • Outdoor education
  • Vocational learning
  • Literacy across the curriculum
  • Numeracy across the curriculum
  • ICT-supported learning and teaching
  • Enterprise
  • Health and wellbeing.

They are being developed by groups of teachers and support staff from across subject departments.