PUPILS at a Bournemouth secondary school have sent textbooks and school uniforms to South Africa to support students at their partner school.

St Peter’s School has a close partnership with the Shea O’Connor Combined School in KwaZulu Natal since 2009, when they were brought together as part of a British Council programme to link schools around the world to promote sports.

Since then, teachers from both schools have visited each other and run successful collaborative programmes.

Both schools share a Catholic ethos and have worked together in a number of ways.

Support from St Peter’s has helped acquire a sports field for the school so children don’t have to walk a three-mile round trip along a busy road to play sports.

The last few years have also seen the Shea O’Connor school increase the number of girls participating in sports and expand dramatically from 300 pupils in 2009 to over 700 today.

Now, in their latest initiative, staff and students at St Peter’s have sent 1,500 textbooks and over 1,000 items of school uniform to South Africa. The textbooks are from every school department so will enable teachers in Shea to expand what they can teach and the uniform was donated by parents.

Year Nine students at the school packed the boxes ready to be shipped while Louis Spies and Gary Holman of White and Company stepped in to deliver the container to South Africa free of charge.