Aston Comprehensive School has developed, over a number of years, an increasingly strong link with Makunduchi Secondary School on the island of Zanzibar. Several teachers and many students have visited the respective schools for a number of weeks and two of the African school?s students have studied Maths and Sciences to A level in Aston?s sixth form.

The last teacher exchange brought two teachers of chemistry to stay at Aston. We discussed the difficulty of teaching the subject up to GCSE level without the kind of resources a British school takes for granted. When a box of test tubes costs a month?s wages the teaching tends to rely on chalk and talk. This confirmed what our African sixth formers had told us. They had performed no practical work during their GCSE course.