On the shores of Lake Albert, deep in Africa’s Rift Valley, lies the small fishing village of Bugoigo, home to some of the world’s poorest people. The local mud and stick primary school is bursting with 800 pupils, 80 per cent of whom have bilharzia, the blood-worm parasite endemic to this area. The children, often 200 or more to a class since primary education was declared free in 1997, mostly sit on the floor. There are few desks or chairs and little in the way of books, paper or other resources, although some classes have earth benches.

Bugoigo is remote - 50 miles from the nearest made-up road and mains electricity - but beautifully situated on the edge of a game reserve. The mountains of the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo shimmer 20 kilometres away across the lake in the calm following last night’s wild tropical storm. And through the still morning air comes an eerily familiar refrain: “The wheels on the bus go round and roundI” Even more incongruous, perhaps, is the distinctly Lancashire accent of class P2‘s 200 enthusiastic singing voices (“bus” rhyming with “puss”). Their teacher, Deborah Sandercock, is from Oldham, Greater Manchester. She is one of 24 “global teachers”: UK teachers who have volunteered to give up their summer holiday to help improve teaching and learning in the Masindi district of Uganda as part of the Global Teacher Millennium Award scheme, run by the charity Link Community Development.

Living with Ugandan families in very basic conditions, they spend five weeks sharing ideas with Ugandan teachers, giving demonstration lessons, making resources from local materials, running workshops and helping with school development plans. On their return to the UK, they are given a pound;500 grant to promote wider understanding of development issues.

As part of the scheme, funded by the Millennium Commission, a further 23 global teachers spent their summer with teachers in South Africa’s Eastern Cape region, and 10 have just left on a similar mission to Bolgatanga in Ghana’s remote, dry Upper East region.

Giving up your long holiday, living in a mud hut, risking mosquito and tsetse bites, eating the limited local diet of matoke (savoury bananas, boiled and mashed) and teaching classes of 200 or more in a resource-free zone may sound a less than tantalising prospect. But when The TES announced the global teacher awards earlier this year, more than 1,300 readers contacted Link. The main aim is to try to improve the host schools. But the global teachers have clearly learned as much as they taught. Though standards of teaching and learning are low in Uganda, they speak movingly of their African colleagues and what they have to contend with - many have not been paid for 18 months. And living close to village life - and death, in a continent where Aids is rampant - the British teachers have come to appreciate the strengths of Ugandan family and community commitment.

When international leaders last year set a target of 2015 for achieving a primary school place for every child in the world - a drive The TES supports in its Education for All campaign - they held up Uganda as a model of what can be done. But though President Museveni declared primary schooling free for the first four children in every family in 1997 (two must be girls if there are daughters), the country has a long way to go before it can offer a meaningful education to all children.

Pupil numbers doubled overnight without the necessary investment in schools and teachers. More than 7,000 classrooms are being built each year, but this barely keeps up with increasing pupil numbers. Even to reach the official class size of 80 in the first two years of primary and 55 thereafter, 400 more classrooms are needed in the 171 schools in Masindi district alone.

Uganda needs 30,000 more teachers - and few of the new ones being appointed have any training or education beyond the equivalent of GCSE. They often teach in the formal, passive secondary school-style in which they were themselves taught, and act as subject specialists rather than general primary teachers. So, in the schools I saw, even when there are enough teachers and classrooms to split year groups, they tend to follow a timetable as though they were one huge class. A class of 600 is the record in Masindi, according to district education officer Derek Nkata. “We have solved the problem of access,” he says. “Now we are talking about quality.”

If large classes and no equipment are not enough to contend with, children are taught in Uganda’s official language (English) rather than their home language.

“What is the weather, the weather, the weather. What is the weather, the weather today?” chant Deborah Sandercock’s second-year “infants” - some of them perhaps as old as 15 if they have missed their education earlier. The black rectangle painted on the wall was about the only teaching aid in the classroom when she arrived. Now the room is festooned with words, pictures and phonic prompts. On the “board” are chalked the English words “sunny”, “windy”, “cloudy”, “raining”. She points to these in succession in this singing game, the class responds with enthusiasm, “Today it is surney, surney, surneyI” At Kizibu, half a day’s drive closer to the district capital, David Rosenberg, from north London, (see box, right) reinforces the work he did with class P4 yesterday on transport and the ecological advantages of bicycles, which are Uganda’s principal load-carriers and taxis. His animated delivery is peppered with questions, something the children are unused to, but hands shoot up confidently. Teachers and children outside the class are drawn to the windows to watch. Earlier he used his memorable juggling skills to demonstrate the meanings of up, down, under and over.

As all the global teachers have found, five weeks is not enough to remedy all the deficiencies they’ve come across. But a combination of teacher workshops and leading by example seems to have brought about improvements in concept-checking and questioning techniques in 90 per cent of the lessons David Rosenberg observes towards the end of his stint at Kizibu, as well as improvements in timekeeping and writing.

“Previously, there seemed to be a single lesson model of the teacher talking followed by copying off the board, or an exercise impossible to achieve in the time. I have concentrated on making the writing achievable and on exercises that involve thinking while you write.”

At the village of Kyatiri, Joan Ferguson, from Northumberland, has run workshops for teachers from a cluster of schools on effective teaching and learning: the importance of clear objectives and activities chosen to promote them, challenging questions and positive feedback to encourage and reward performance and build self-esteem. “I’ve tried to show how positive treatment by teachers leads to improved performance.” She has also found Kwik cricket and rounders go down well. An unexpected find is an untouched copy of Sue Lloyds’s Jolly Phonics, a generous but useless donation without training. Joan provides a two-hour workshop. “In the UK you’d expect two days.”

At Kinsansya, the most remote posting in Masindi, headteacher Byenkya John Joseph says their global teacher, Liz Nesbitt, from Nottingham, has inspired the staff and “raised us up from the Rift Valley to the escarpment of achievement”.

Almost every head says the global teachers’ presence has improved “time-management”. Teacher absenteeism is widespread in rural schools throughout Africa. On average, Ugandan children face a daily walk of seven kilometres to school. And too frequently, when they get there, they find no teacher - and this is not just indolence. Teachers may be reassigned to distant schools at a moment’s notice, and as few schools can provide on-site accommodation, many have to travel up to 20 kilometres on foot, by bicycle or on unreliable transport over dirt roads that frequently flood or wash away. Often they have illness or death in their family - visiting the sick or attending a funeral is an over-riding social obligation.

Many new teachers are the children of subsistence farmers; they may be the first or only ones to have paid work, so contractual obligations are unfamiliar (particularly if they have not received their pound;38 a month salary anyway). And teachers without money may regard tending their own crops to feed their families as the priority. But schools frequently have unoccupied teachers, who rarely cover for absent colleagues, a culture several of the global teachers tried to change.

But this is not their only or worst culture shock. In spite of being banned officially, beatings seem ubiquitous in Masindi’s schools. Teachers and prefects alike wield sticks. Even where these are restrained for the sake of visitors, the flinching reflexes of children tell their own story. Several global teachers intervened directly, or raised the issue at staff meetings or with headteachers.

Some say they made headway against prevailing attitudes on corporal punishment; parents expect their children to be beaten and many teachers seem to believe it is an essential motivation to learn.

Sarah McCallum, a teacher from Bristol, spoke out against beatings and seemed surprised to be listened to. She gave staff talks on positive discipline. “Teachers here don’t feel valued, and they treat the children accordingly. When children are scared, they don’t learn.”

The position of rural women also appalled many. Women are expected to kneel when they serve their husband meals, and one headteacher says: “Women are for fetching water, collecting firewood, digging and cooking.” A more enlightened Ugandan aid worker emphasises the importance given to educating girls, not least as part of the fight against Aids. Giving them confidence through education to resist early sexual experience is seen as vital, especially as older men target virgins as safer partners.

Having several wives is common, he says, as is the sharing of them with brothers, so the virus can spread throughout a family, even to the next generation. “Husbands who lose their wives may take a daughter instead.” He supports the slogan, “Educate women and you educate a whole nation”. But traditionally, he recognises, daughters are regarded as temporary family or clan members - their value is principally to do domestic chores and to secure a dowry that will provide the necessary bridal price for sons of the family.

But no one visiting these schools and meeting the cheerful, hardworking people of Uganda can help but be moved by their poverty and their strengths. “I’ll never moan about anything again,” says Tina March, a deputy head from Cambridge, who confesses she does not know how she will react when teachers back home complain. “It’s made me realise that I miss real teaching rather than cramming for a test. Coming here has made me rethink my values.”

Sarah McCallum, too, says that being a global teacher has given her confidence to speak up - and changed her priorities. “So much of what we do back home is irrelevant. What values do we instil in pupils? One thing I will take back is a determination to ensure children know about their world and appreciate what they’ve got.”

Link plans to send 120 global teachers to Africa over the next two years and all UK schools can twin with schools in South Africa, Ghana and Uganda. Details from Colin Ellesmere, Link Community Development, Unit 39, Kings Exchange Business Village, Tileyard Road, London N7 9AH. Tel: 020 7681 8763 or www.lcd.org.ukemail: globalteachers@lcd.org.uk