ST JOHN'S GOES INTERNATIONAL

Dear Mr. Robertson Thank you for submitting your Impact Evaluation of international learning activities. We are delighted to inform you that St John's School & Sixth Form College - A Catholic Academy has been successful in being accredited for the International School Award and is accredited for three years from 1 September 2015 to 31 August 2018. Here are the assessor’s comments on your Impact Evaluation, to highlight where your application was particularly impressive and points to take note of as you continue to develop the international dimension in your school: ‘This Impact Evaluation is outstanding and a credit to your school. It is excellent to see the level of commitment and passion that you have applied to your international education programme. In fact, your whole cross-curricular approach to your work provides scope for stimulating work while ensuring that the quality and details remain consistent with the requirements of the ISA.
As you progress through your work, you will find it helpful to look back, at regular intervals, at the work you have done through the earlier stages of the ISA (especially keeping track of the relationship between curriculum areas and global themes) in order to maintain sight of the valuable expertise that you would have acquired in order to attain the full award in the first place. You will then be reminded of the importance of identifying and assigning as many relevant global themes as possible to each of your cross-curricular activities in order to make an accurate assessment of how far the ethos of internationalism has truly penetrated your curriculum at every level.
Your partnerships with your international and local schools are impressive and your collaboration with them over so many interesting projects just adds more weight to your Impact Evaluation.
In terms of your appropriate use of a foreign language as a vehicle for exploring international themes, it is clear that MFL (Spanish and French) occupy a high profile in your international learning programme. Your links with Spanish speaking countries like Chile and Peru make the embedding of Spanish more interesting by combining language studies with topical global themes such as ‘sustainable living’, for example. You could also compare and contrast with the experience of your Bangladeshi partner school. In that way, both the specific subject matter and the related global themes will begin to make sense at a profound level to your students and those of your partner schools and the scene will have been set for preparing them to become responsible global citizens in the future.
Your work would is further enhanced by your desire to reach out to other schools and the wider community in an ambassadorial capacity, involving encouraging, assisting and mentoring other local schools to engage more closely with internationalism by beginning the journey towards attaining the ISA. This will also positively affect your community impact assessment and will strengthen your position as an example of good practice, also creating an opportunity for a wider section of the community to benefit from your expertise and experience.
As you continue with your excellent work, I would like to recommend that you consult with your partner schools regularly to re-visit the global themes that you have been working on and perhaps try to extend your work in the future to incorporate other themes that you may not yet have considered. In conjunction with this, it would place the understanding of your students and those of your partner schools in clearer context and make it more complete if you familiarized yourselves more with the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and used these both as a ‘lens’ through which to view your activities as well as a ‘barometer’ through which to measure your progress in terms of understanding and embracing the relevant themes that constitute good global citizenship.
Once again, congratulations on the work you have done so far and best wishes for your continued success in the future.’ Congratulations on working so hard to co-ordinate such an impressive range of work as the International Co-ordinator. You are a credit to the school and the wider community.We will be sending you a certificate of achievement by post in the next few weeks.