Aseseeso(E/R), June 9, GNA - The Aseseeso Primary and Junior Secondary School in the Akuapem North District of the Eastern Region, have entered into an exchange and partnership agreement with the Hungerford Primary School and John O'Gaunts Community Teachers College in the United Kingdom.

Mrs Ann Dibble, the Exchange Teacher of the John O'Gaunts College, Hungerford, UK, and Mr Theophilus Opare, Chairman of the School Management Committee, signed the agreement on Wednesday at Aseseeso at the end of a two-week visit by Mrs Dibble and Mrs Kate Regan, Link Co-ordinator of the programme.

The agreement, which was made possible by Aseseeso citizens in the UK, provided for an exchange programme between teachers and pupils of the two schools.

Speaking at the signing ceremony, Mrs Dibble said the agreement would provide the teachers and pupils of the two schools with the opportunity for practical experiences of each other's different cultures and educational systems. It would also help enrich the curricula of the schools in the two countries and improve the teaching and learning and thus raise their standards.

According to Mrs Dibble, the exchange programme would afford the students of both institutions the opportunity to know each other better and help remove the negative perceptions, which had become stereotyped among Europeans about Africans and vice-versa.

Mrs Regan expressed her gratitude to Ghanaians for the hospitality shown them during their stay in the country. She appealed to the community, especially parents, to provide the resources required by the children to learn harder to strengthen the bond of relationship being established between the two schools. Mrs Regan expressed the hope that the agreement would be sustained to ensure that more teachers and pupils benefited from the exchange programme in the future.

The UK delegation presented two laptop computers worth 36 million cedis and sets of various books to the school, while the community and the schools also presented some woodcarvings and some African prints to Mrs Dibble and Mrs Regan and their schools. Mr John Ofori, the headteacher of the Aseseeso JSS who is expected to travel to the UK in September this year as part of the exchange programme, expressed the appreciation of the school to the delegation for concluding the agreement which he hoped would go a long way to improve standards in both schools.