School audit

Young people growing up now will have to deal with various, often as yet unknown, issues. Increasingly those issues originate elsewhere in the world, or where they are 'local' they have repercussions on a much wider scale.

How can education support young people in gaining understanding, skills and attitudes that enable them to respond to such local-global issues and to make a positive contribution to their locality and wider world? What would a rationale for a global dimension in a school be?

The publication Supporting a Global Dimension in Citizenship Education contains an in-service activity that supports teachers, senior management team or governors in discussing and developing a rationale for a global dimension to the work of their school. The outcome is an action plan that, depending on a school's own priorities, focuses on curriculum and/or policy changes.

Whole-school Global Citizenship audit

The Whole-school Global Citizenship Audit provides another good and simple basis for developing education responses to a school community's local-global connections. Designed by Oxfam's development education programme for use in primary schools, it is equally suitable for use in secondary schools (and colleges).

View Audit table

The Audit table sets out key areas for consideration in devising whole-school involvement, including through the school environment, school leadership, curriculum policy and practice. It can be adapted to suit your own needs. The columns could be enlarged and the first four used to record your current position. The 'action points' column could contain ideas on how you want to take this aspect forward.

The Audit table is also available as a Word document (51 KB).

An Audit table such as the one shown can be a starting point for discussion and development of ideas across the school. A more detailed audit that leads to specific Citizenship curriculum plans, the formulation of identified learning outcomes and considerations of teaching and learning styles is provided in the Auditing Citizenship KS3 and 4 publication.

More: Action planning

Publications

Supporting the Global Dimension in Citizenship education; Glade; 2000

Global Citizenship - the handbook for primary teaching; Oxfam; 2002

Auditing Citizenship KS 3 and 4; DEC (South Yorkshire); 2002