It was purely by chance that the friendship between Tuovila and Broadford primary schools came about.
During a visit to Vaasa in 1997 to look at immersion teaching in Finnish and Swedish I visited a number of schools and nurseries in the city, with no plans for any visits elsewhere. However, the home of the then Director of Education in Vaasa was in Mustasaari and he felt that to gain a balanced view of immersion teaching he would arrange some visits for me in Mustasaari kommune where I could see how language immersion worked in rural schools.
Two of the schools I visited were in Helsingby and Tuovila and it was during the visit to the latter that the idea of an international exchange was planted.
In the beginning, the shared vision was simply one of a joint project with exchanges of letters, faxes (there was no email in those days), photographs and artefacts and it was not until I made a further visit to Finland the following year that the concept of a family-to-family exchange of pupils on a regular basis was hatched. The real purpose of the 1998 visit was to set up an international project with a school in Vaasa and another in Haparanda but this was to fail as the Swedish school had to withdraw. However, during my stay in Tuovila we decided to float the idea of a pupil exchange with parents in both school communities and so began a connection which has now been firmly embedded in both schools’ forward planning for the past eight years.
There have now been four pupil exchanges between Broadford and Tuovila and as far as we can gauge from the feedback from pupils and parents, these have been highly successful, giving pupils who have been involved, unique insights into the reality of living in our two countries and communities by allowing them to experience them first-hand.
As well as pupil exchanges between our two communities, we have formed links with schools in other EU member states by inviting partners to join us in an international education project through the Comenius scheme. This ran with varying degrees of success for three years and made it possible for teachers and pupils from our two schools to visit each other and also to visit and experience schools in the mountains of north Greece and in the Basque Country of Spain.
The EU project is now over but links still remain with the partner schools, with none stronger than the link between Broadford and Tuovila where we are already discussing the next (fifth) exchange which is planned for May/June 2007.
And not only that !
We are also already considering ways of marking the tenth year of international co-operation between our two schools when the sixth exchange takes place in 2009.
This may have all come about purely through a chance meeting of two head teachers ten years ago, but that element of chance has opened up a host of opportunities for the pupils of our two schools that are not available to many of their peers and for me personally, it has engendered a fondness for Finland and the Finnish people that has brought me to visit the country twelve times since my first trip, back in 1997.
Hopefully the links between our two schools will continue to flourish and grow and perhaps will yield further European partnerships and experiences for our pupils in the future.
Head Teacher - Maigstir Sgoile
Broadford Primary School – Bun Sgoil an Ath Leathainn