School Background: 
Tarleton Holy Trinity Primary is situated in a village outside of Preston, when the link started the school was 100 % white. St. Matthew’s Primary is situated near the centre of Preston along a busy main street, the majority of students are Asian heritage children, a small proportion Afro-Caribbean heritage children and a small proportion are white children.

Why Tarleton wanted to link:
To bring alive a new geography topic ‘settlement’ for year 4.
Students from the school had recently made racist comments whilst on a trip.
Developing Global Citizenship in the curriculum.

Why St. Matthew’s wanted to link:
During a visit  to another school students had laughed at the Muslim Call to prayer.
Developing Global Citizenship in the curriculum.
Improve friendship making skills outside their local environment.
Provide the opportunity for their students to experience green spaces.
Both schools therefore had common aims.

How was the link established?
The link was first initiated by Tarleton's head teacher who contacted St. Matthew’s because she knew the head teacher. A meeting was set up between key teachers in both schools (including senior management) and facilitated by Lancashire Global Education Centre. A partnership agreement was made to outline key aims, objectives and activities. It was agreed that the link would first start with year 4 with the idea of extending the link to other year groups once established. Further meetings were set throughout the year to plan and evaluate the link.

Activities:
All the activities were all built into the timetable.
Autumn term: students exchanged letters and photos, then Eid and Christmas cards made out of recycled paper.
Spring term: citizenship activities were ran in each school to prepare the students for meeting in the summer term. These included UK diversity activities, anti-racist activities and sense of place activities (perception activities of each other’s localities).
Summer term: students visited each other. Both visits included a mapping exercise of the local area. Other activities included; parachute games, Henna painting (drawing around the hand of someone from the other school), visiting a garden project at a city park, food tasting, year 6 presenting artefacts from different religions, sports activities with mixed teams, dancing and making a collage of images of the two localities. After the link days teachers did a debriefing with the students and they write thank you letters.

Developments:
The above activities are now written into schemes of work and repeated for every year 4 class.
The schools are working on building activities into year 5 and 6 schemes of work. An earth summit on fair trade has been run in year 5 with the students from the original year 4 classes, this was facilitated by Global Link.
Teachers have developed further links through developing a shared Global Citizenship Policy for the schools.
Both schools have since developed global links using their experience of local linking.