There are many roles education plays but preparing children for resilience and endurance, and equipping them with the skills, understanding and knowledge they require to lead secure and prosperous lives are key. Encouraging and developing creativity, mental strength and confidence are crucial, and developing a deep understanding and appreciation of the challenges faced in daily life, locally, nationally and globally is vital for individuals and society as a whole.

I am a keen advocate of global learning and see this as something that should be an essential and integral part of the education systems across the world. As a teacher within the arts, I am interested in exploring ways in which arts education can be linked to global learning and help bring about change in the lives of individuals and in the approach to life that these children and communities take.

Local and international co-operation on joint goals such as the United Nations’ seventeen Sustainable Development Goals would be one way forward to establish links and shared aspirations that could then be shared and worked on in various ways. This is the approach the British Council takes through their Connection Classrooms programme which I am involved with. Through this I have been working on sharing SDG related work as joint activities between our partnership with a school in Palestine and a school in India (I work at the primary school in Milton Keynes). Children in all three schools seem to thrive on these relationships and learning about each other’s lives and work on these shared subjects and they can be easily integrated in the curriculum in many ways.