I’m not normally in the habit of using this blog to report on the work that Malcolm and I do, but the week we’ve just had has been so extraordinary that I just have to share it with you. If I tell you that it included celebrating Chinese New Year in a UN demilitarised zone, including dragons and lions with ‘camouflaged legs’, and fireworks as well, you might understand why.

We have just returned from a week in Nicosia, the capital and largest city in Cyprus. We were there to work with the teachers, students and parents of Highgate School, an independent school in that city. The Headteacher (principal) had discovered Global Leadership Foundation on the internet and asked us to come and work with them. She wanted to explore how our work in strengthening emotional health and understanding the impact of our behaviour on ourselves and others could be integrated into the curriculum as well as with parents and teachers.

It says something about the openness of the school’s community that our invitation came without them knowing anything about us other than what they had read on our website. They simply had faith that we would be able to bring something useful to them. This community spirit and openness pervaded all the time we had with the school.

It was a very special week in many ways.

For a start, while Malcolm and I both have teaching backgrounds we have not been in classrooms for a very long time. At Highgate we spent time in every class – primary and secondary – as well as with larger groups of students, plus parents and teachers.

It was both validating and inspiring to see the extent to which our work was embraced and being confidently applied both by individuals and in the classroom environment. The opportunity to incorporate the philosophies around emotional health into the entire curriculum is also being discussed and developed.

It was a week in which we gained a new perspective on our own guiding principles, especially collaboration. Here we were in a city which has been divided, on and off, for hundreds of years. Nicosia is the world’s only remaining divided capital city, a ‘green line’ and UN buffer zone separating the southern Greek Cypriot part from the northern Turkish governed part. Yet within the school we found teachers and parents collaborating to ensure the youngsters in their care were given every chance to become more than just great students but ‘great people’ as well. Notably, despite the partition of the city, there are a number of students who travel to and from Highgate every day across the ‘green line’ border, including through passport control.

We were generously welcomed by everyone we came across during the week and experienced such gracious hospitality wherever we were, including travelling to many amazing villages and landmarks on the island. The culmination of all of this was to join families from the school who had been invited by the British Commander of the UN peacekeeping force (UNFICYP), who is a parent at the school, to take part in the somewhat surreal Chinese New Year celebration inside the buffer zone.

There is a lot of enthusiasm for our work at Highgate and we look forward to continuing our collaboration with them in future. This trip has reminded us of the wider potential of our work, geographically and contextually – whether in a school in Cyprus, a boardroom in New York or a remote island in the Solomons.

Gayle