Teachers and students at Fulston Manor School have been celebrating after being awarded the highly regarded British Council eTwinning National eTwinning Award. Teachers from across all four regions of the UK came together from Friday 27 September until Sunday 29 September 2019 to celebrate the 14th annual British Council eTwinning National Conference, which was held for the first time at The Crowne Plaza in Nottingham.

The eTwinning National Award ceremony took place at a Gala dinner on Saturday, recognising outstanding international projects led by UK schools. There were 12 awards presented across various categories and one award for the overall winning project.

To secure the outstanding contribution to international school collaboration award, Fulston Manor School worked in partnership with other schools from Germany, Romania and Crete to create an outstanding project using digital collaborative tools. Entitled Bioplastic: The Future Food Packaging?’, the project entailed working alongside their European counterparts to find a way to reduce pollution caused by plastics. Meeting with chemists and scientists from the plastic packaging industries, the students were able to create prototypes of new and innovative ways of packaging foods and scored highly against each criteria of the below pedagogical framework.

•             Pedagogical innovation

•             Curricular integration

•             Communication and exchange between partner schools

•             Collaboration between partner schools

•             Use of technology

•             Results, impact and documentation

eTwinning, the digital community for schools has seen over 700,000 teachers from 44 countries across Europe and beyond register since 2005. The programme is funded by the European Commission as part of the Erasmus+ programme and managed in the UK by the British Council. The eTwinning National Award is issued to schools that produce outstanding work as part of their eTwinning partnership.

Mr Lee Matthews, English teacher at Fulston and in charge of the Erasmus+ project, said: “We are delighted to have been the awarded the eTwinning National Award. Everyone at Fulston Manor School has enjoyed working with our friends in Europe on this wonderful project. To secure the eTwinning National Award is a real honour for the students and teachers who participated in the project. The eTwinning project has brought a deeper understanding of other cultures and an increase in knowledge of the food packaging industry and the harm to our environment it can cause.”  The judging panels comments for the winning project were: The food packaging project is innovative, highly topical and uses the TwinSpace right at the heart of its collaboration and communication strategy.  It promotes a positive, 'can do' approach to making a difference attitude in its students. Using international development teams to experiment, create and exploit commercial products this is an excellent example of education and enterprise combining to address pressing global issues’.