Mother and daughter team help improve teaching skills for backpackers

Tripkits include activities, games and materials for English teaching, as well as information on subjects like lesson-planning and barriers to learning, such as dyslexia and short-sightedness.

They are designed for use by overseas volunteers, gap-year students, project workers, aid workers and travellers who are intending to teach abroad.

Liz and Caz Openshaw, who live in Skelmanthorpe, hit on the idea after Caz returned from stints teaching in India and Malawi, where classroom resources often consisted of little more than a table and chairs.

She said: “Even with about a year of experience, I still found it difficult to teach classes of 30 kids of different ages and abilities. Some might not have been in a classroom before, and others might speak fluent English.

“The schools that volunteers typically teach in often don’t have blackboards, whiteboards, paper or pens. One of the schools I worked in had some donated books, but they were usually at more advanced levels than the children needed.”

Fortuitously, when Caz came back from overseas, her mother, Liz, had just quit her job at Kirklees FE College. As a teacher of foreign languages, English and maths, she has more than 20 years’ experience of teaching various ages, levels and class sizes and has taught at Huddersfield University.

Her pedagogical expertise combined with Caz’s overseas experience helped shape the teaching packs. After a lot of deliberation and experimentation, the pair came up with a collection of things that promise to make the life of a volunteer teacher in a developing country much easier, as well as helping to raise teaching standards and improve attainment levels in poorly resourced settings.

Each pack also contains packs of flashcards on hygiene, food, travel, grammar, transport and time, a whiteboard, marker pens, coloured counters, a tape measure, maps of the world, balloons and various other “extras”, but the whole kit weighs less than a kilogram, to make them easily portable for travellers.

“It provides volunteers with the basics, as well as ideas to feed their imagination,” said Liz.

“Hopefully, it will improve their classroom experience, and they’ll also come back with lots of skills they can use in their lives back home.

“It’s also based on experience – and not just Caz’s; we canvassed the other volunteers who went overseas at the same time as her, and asked them for their input. That’s something we want to keep on doing, so the website includes a section for feedback, which will inform what future kits contain.”

The pair reckon the packs’ potential is considerable, as thousands of young Britons volunteer to teach abroad each year.