Since the last post a couple of weeks ago, we are pleased to let readers of the blog that we have made contact with Kafuro Primary School. Ronnie Musabe used the money that had been raised by the Liss Film Club to buy a smartphone and some data. This was sent by courier (along with some tomato seeds) to Kafuro where the headteacher, Mr Twinamatsiko received them last Tuesday. He was immediately in touch with Mr Stanley to express his thanks, and since then the two teachers have exchanged regular messages.
It has already been decided that both schools will undergo a tomato growing challenge. At the moment, it is very dry in Uganda, so it may be a little while until the pupils plant the seeds that Mr Stanley sent out to Uganda. However, nearly 20 tomato plants have been planted at Liss and we will post regular photos of how they are doing.
Expect to see in the coming months many different ways how the schools are working together.
The tomatoes had been grown from seeds in pots.
They were now being transferred into raised beds in the school garden.
Readers of the blog will have noticed that it’s been a long time since there was any sort of update from our twinned school, Kafuro Primary School. To recap, the Covid pandemic meant that the last reciprocal visit had to be cancelled although some work was carried out at both schools.
Since then, the prospects for another reciprocal visit has become minimal. The British Council (which has had its funding slashed) is no longer offering funding through Connecting Classrooms for reciprocal visits, and the replacement Turing Scheme doesn’t work in the same way. Therefore, any chance of face to face contact is remote at the moment .
However, we now have some up to date news on what is happening at Kafuro Primary School. Ronnie Musabe (who is the twinning project’s man on the ground in Uganda) visited Kafuro last month and was able to spend some time at the school.
Firstly, the school has a new headteacher. Mr. Stephen Thembo (the last Ugandan headteacher to visit Liss) has been transferred to a school in Katerera. This is pretty common in Uganda – most headteachers spend 3 – 4 years at a school before they are moved onto a new school. The new Headteacher is Mr. Jackson Twinamatsiko.
From the photos received from Kafuro (below) and the information Ronnie has already passed on, Kafuro is facing a number of challenges. Firstly, although the school population has remained the same since the pandemic, there has been quite a shift in numbers in each year group. P1 (which is roughly equivalent to Yr R/1) has 145 pupils. They are likely to be in two classrooms with totally inadequate seating! P7 (which is equivalent to Yr 6) has only 16 pupils.
There are now big issues with water coming into the school. Readers of the blog will remember that during Mr Stanley’s last visit to Uganda, he was at Kafuro Primary School when running water was turned on at the school – Liss pupils had funded the cost of the pipeline to the nearest lake and Kafuro pupils and parents had dug the pipeline to the water source. Apparently, although the pipeline is still secure, the source of water appears to have dried up or receded. To make matters worse, the massive (2000 litre) water tank at the school has perished so there is now no water source at the school. This means that children will have to fill jerry cans of water at the nearest crater lake.
Other issues that are facing the school is that although the solar panels (which Liss pupils raised the funds for installing) still work, the batteries to store the energy created are no longer working. These will need replacing. There are also issues with some of the windows no longer keeping rain out of the classrooms.
For all the negative news that has come before, there are also some positives. The last major fundraising that Liss pupils provided for Kafuro was in getting windows and shutters for the staff blocks which was under construction at the time. The staff block is now complete and several of the teachers (including Mr Twinamatsiko) live there during the week. Another area where Liss pupils had helped in the past had been to pay for the draining and upgrade of some of the school latrines. The Ugandan government has now built a brand new latrine block which will help to improve sanitation further at the school. Kafuro also continues to innovate with the construction of a bin for collecting rubbish made entirely out of recyclable materials.
Our immediate priority is to re-establish communication with Kafuro on a consistent basis. For many years the film club at Liss has raised money from selling crisps at screenings and Mr Stanley will be sending out some funds to allow Mr Twinamatsiko to communicate regularly with him. The plan is to identify some projects that both schools can work towards, and see if there are things we can do to help.
One final piece of really good news is that Ronnie Musabe is in the UK for the next three weeks and will be visiting the Liss Federation next Thursday. He will be working with Yr 2 and Yr 3 who have learning about Uganda in their geography curriculum.
A large part of the first week of a new school year in Yr 6 is an examination of wants and needs and how it plays a part in our lives.
Rowan Class started their study by being placed into table groups. Each group was then giventhe outline of a child before being asked to give their child a name. Next the group were allowed 10 minutes to write on post – its as many things that the child would need in order to grow up happy and healthy. At this point they were asked to stop.
Generating ideas for each group’s child
The next task the children were given was to start removing post – its that they felt were the least important. Initially, this was to leave only the twenty most important post – its then removing five at a time until they were left with the five post -its that they felt were most important.
Among the most important considerations the children came up with was education, a family, clean water/sanitation, nutritious food, recuperative sleep and exercise.
Mr Stanley then gave the pupils 20 wants and needs cards and the same type of exercise was repeated. The children worked together to get down to the five most important cards to them by removing 5 cards at a time. As they gained more understanding of some of the statements, the discussions became a bit more heated. What became clear was that the children were making a distinction between wants and needs:
Needs – the things that are absolutely necessary for all children to have or be able to do to live a happy and healthy life
Wants – the things that are nice to have but are not necessary for a full life.
When the groups shared their final 5 post-its there, was some similarities between what they had originally selected for their child, but there was also some differences. Nutritious food, shelter, medical care and sanitation were the most popular, but there were some changes to what the children considered most important. The right to express opinions, the freedom to practice their own culture and religion, and protection from abuse an neglect were all very important. This is quite possibly a recognition of things we value from living in a democracy.
We then compared what our pupils had shared with that of Kafuro pupils the last time they carried out this exercise. There was a good deal of commonality in that Kafuro pupils felt that shelter, nutritious food and clean water were really important. Where there was a difference was that Ugandan children valued clothing and land really highly. In Uganda, particularly where there are rural communities, having land to grow crops on is highly important. When your family’s livelihood is dependent upon harvesting and selling those crops, then everything else pales into insignificance. Likewise, for some children, they might only have a couple of sets of clothes (one of which is their school uniform). Therefore we can see how depending on your circumstances, your needs may change slightly.
In the next post, we will look at how the UN Convention on the rights of the child is centred around needs.
Mr Thembo has been in touch again recently to share more photos of the growing crops at Kafuro. They have been adding muich, spraying with chemicals to avoid diseases and making sure that the plants are well watered every day.
The water melon crop is being looked after in Kafuro
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.
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
Late last week, Mr Stanley received an email from the British Council with the good news that the work we have carried out over the last three years has resulted in the Federation being awarded full International Schools Accreditation for the next three years. The assessor’s comments are published in full below:
“This is a strong application from The Federation of Liss Schools and meets the standard for International School Award Reaccreditation in 2021. You have provided evidence of the minimum of four eligible activities which have taken place between September 2019 and July 2021. Two of these activities are collaborative with your overseas partner school in Uganda and one activity has a foreign language element. Pupils in all year groups have been involved. Well done! And especial congratulations on sustaining the Kafuro link for over a decade. You are almost certainly correct with your prediction “that the type of visits we are used to taking part in are not going to be possible again for some time, but we feel happy that we have a robust communication network.” And your submission confirms this. The Keyhole gardens will provide a regular point of common interest. Throughout the Impact Evaluation your resilience in the difficult and on-going period of the pandemic is demonstrated. It is in fact one of the most informative and lively reports this assessor has seen because you have illustrated the Action Plan and the breadth of the activities with some wonderful comments from the participants. Quoting from the application, “when the children found out how little banana growers were paid for their product compared to the retailer there was almost open rebellion in the class. Their views on taxation & Fairtrade changed dramatically over the six lessons.” One parent observed that “my daughter has ‘advised’ me that I should not be buying food with palm oil from unsustainable sources and now refuses to eat certain brands of chocolate spread!” There are good links with other schools and the International School Award of 2018 is mentioned on your website, although you could perhaps feature the outstanding Kafuro partnership more strongly. Moving forward the assessor is pleased to see that you are now entering into a partnership with Maria Mather School in Roquefort Les Pins, France and also that you are acknowledging “that where we have taught the SDGs implicitly in the past, we now need to teach them explicitly particularly as the world emerges from the Covid pandemic.” This is a very honest reality check of what all schools need to be doing. Overall, this is excellent.”
Many thanks to all the children, staff and parents who worked so hard to support our application. There will be an award ceremony later this year.
Congratulations to everyone in P7 at Kafuro Primary School who took their PLE (Primary Leaving Examinations) at the beginning of the summer. Mr Thembo contacted me to say that there was a 100% pass rate this year. Despite the challenges of lockdown due to Covid, when the P7 pupils were able to return to school, they were able to access small focused group teaching as they were the only year group allowed back into the school at the time. Congratulations to all of the pupils and to the staff.
Results from Kafuro
Unfortunately, all schools in Uganda are still closed at the moment due to lockdown. The news I have been given suggests that schools will not reopen until such a time as all teachers are fully vaccinated. The UK is doing its bit to help with this.
The project to install doors and shutters at Kafuro on the junior block and the staff accommodation block is now complete. Mr Thembo has sent photo and expressed his gratitude to the pupils and parents at Liss Junior School.
Mr Thembo also reported that more year groups are returning to school. P4 and P5 started just after Easter and P7 have sat their Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) which are their equivalent to SATs.
Mr Thembo sent more photos yesterday of the new shutters and doors being fitted to the Junior block and the staff accommodation block. Work appears to be progressing quickly and Mr Thembo will be sending more photos this week.
Queen Elizabeth Parks Project Schools' Blog 