Chinese Delegation visit Cranford Community College – Monday 10th December 2007

On Monday the 10th December Cranford Community College was proud to host a visit from a Chinese delegation who was interested in visiting a British Secondary School and also looking at school improvement, inspection and governance. As we already have successful links with China through our Tianjin link we were keen to support this visit.

The group was visiting the UK under the auspices of a project called the ‘Southwest Basic Education Project’ (SBEP) which is a British government project in four provinces in Southwest China. The project focuses on improving the education system for these areas with a focus on the particular groups (girls and ethnic minorities). It does this through building the capacity of the government's own policies and practices to support these. The main support is in training teachers to adopt a more participative style of teaching and develop teacher support systems for continuous professional development.

The group consisted of some members from the Ministry of Education and some from education administrations of the four provinces. The group were given a tour of the school by four of our prefects; Bhavin Bhatt, Anuj Nehra, Tranga Patel and Bijal Bhimjiyani who were thrilled to be involved and also to receive token gifts from the delegates at the end of the tour. The delegates were very interested in the lessons and took a number of photos to remind them of their visit.

The delegates were then invited to attend a Question and Answer session hosted by the Language College Manager, Ms Tiffany Robinson, who was pleased to have Ms Veronique Gerber and Mr Peter Stumpf – Deputy Heads at the school and the Headteacher Mr Kevin Prunty present at the session to answer questions regarding inspection and funding.

The visit was a great success and future links between the four provinces and the school are promising. All delegates left with a wealth of information and thoroughly enjoyed their time at Cranford Community College – a Specialist Language College.