At one desk a group of eight-year-olds, heads down over a map of the Birmingham area, are looking for signs of water such as canals, rivers and reservoirs. At another, they’re busy charting what they discovered on the previous day’s “water safari” around their immediate locality.

Meanwhile David and Parvinder are sitting on the carpet, telling their teacher Karen Gwinnell how their two families used to obtain water. Though the two boys now live in Birmingham, they can both still recall how they had to work the pump back in their villages in Jamaica and India.

This Year 4 lesson in Boulton Primary School in Handsworth, for children just starting a project comparing water use in the West Midlands and in Ethiopia, nicely encapsulates the development education ideas which the staff are trying to put into practice right across the curriculum.

The non-white children in the class are from a variety of backgrounds: Sikh, Afro-Caribbean, Bangladeshi, Muslim. Some have personal experience of their families’ countries, which are made use of in the classroom. And a familiar primary topic such as water is being taught in a truly global context.

“We build a global perspective into the whole curriculum, but without dropping anything in the process,” says headteacher Chris Leach. “It fits in well with a collaborative, active learning approach, because children are involved as problem solvers, and the outcomes are more open-ended.”

Although development education may not inform much of the school’s maths or PE teaching, it’s very much in evidence in history and geography, as well as English, science, technology, and personal and social education. Assembly, too, is used to encourage children to be more aware of other cultures.

At Boulton, as in other Birmingham schools, there is also a strong emphasis on equal opportunities, and the breaking down of race and gender stereotypes - issues that are intimately bound up with and complement development education in encouraging children to be more tolerant and open-minded.

Such elements came together in the school’s recent Bangladesh Week, when the ordinary timetable was suspended. The staff had felt that the culture of their small number of Bengali-speaking children was not much known about or valued, and that a special focus on it would be worthwhile for all the children.

Throughout the week there was story-telling, music workshops, dance performances, poetry, and cooking, as well as conventional geography and RE sessions with a Bangladeshi theme. Bangladeshi parents spent most of the week in the school, providing food but also acting as human resources.

Chris Leach is aware of the dangers inherent in such an event. “You have to avoid being tokenistic, and show that it’s not just a matter of dressing up and eating nice food,” he says. “It’s important to get to grips with the real issues in these countries.”

One of the issues the children have been investigating is that of fair trading in countries such as India, where they have looked at why the growers in the tea trade gets comparatively little money for their work.

“We try to get them to consider ways of solving problems, but also to look at causes, and to learn not always to accept what is handed down to them as truth,” says curriculum co-ordinator Jill Rose. “It’s about looking behind the image, about asking questions, about what they think is the truth.”

One way in which teachers can help the children come to more informed conclusions is by visiting the countries themselves. Chris Leach, for example, has recently been to Egypt, and spent time in rural communities, looking at the many links between ancient and modern Egypt. The Year 4 lesson on water was prompted by Jill Rose’s visit to Ethiopia. “As in many countries, water is a predominantly female issue there, and I was able to gather a lot of very useful information,” she says. Both these visits will result in contributions to project publications that will soon be available to all Birmingham schools.

Boulton School gets a lot of support from the city’s development education centre. One of 40 such centres in the UK, it provides a wide range of development education courses and resources for teachers, and publishes carefully trialled curriculum materials for all age-groups.

“Development education is meeting children’s needs in terms of the circumstances they are growing up in,” says Scott Sinclair, the centre’s director. “Things are increasingly happening at an international level, and many Birmingham children visit other countries.”

He believes such a global perspective fits well with the postDearing national curriculum, especially since development is now one of fifteen themes pupils must study in key stage 3 geography, and the revised orders emphasise study at a variety of scales, from the local to the global.

Despite these changes, Scott Sinclair admits that not all teachers are convinced of the value of development education. “Although it needn’t be a burden in curriculum terms, some schools are still resistant to the whole notion,” he says. “There’s still a fair amount of xenophobia around.”

Chris Leach feels that a multi-ethnic school such as his has some obvious advantages in promoting development education. But he also believes all schools should be embracing the idea: “Otherwise children get stuck with stereotype images, where Africa, for example, means safari parks and starving children. ” He’s in no doubt that the global approach across the curriculum helps to raise standards in the school. “It’s about children’s self-esteem, about giving them a clear message that we value all cultures,” he says. “And when their self-esteem is high, it has a positive effect on their approach to their work.”

For details of your nearest development education centre contact the Development Education Association. Tel: 0171 490 8108