Our International Partner School

The History of Cheleta Primary School
During the 1950's a British man, Mr P. Slater, owned coffee plantations in an area of Kenya called Runda. Unfortunately there were no schools nearby and thus the children of the Kenyans he employed on his plantations received no education. Mr Slater decided to build a school especially for his workers' children.

Twenty years or so later Mr Slater became very ill and had to sell his plantations and return to the UK. The local government in Runda agreed that the school would remain open. Because it had been associated with Mr Slater for so long they decided to name the school after him. Unfortunately ‘Slater' is a difficult word for people who speak the local Kiswahili language to pronounce, so the government decided the school name should be written as they would say ‘Slater' - and that's how Cheleta Primary School came to be named.

Cheleta Primary School Today
Approximately 900 children attend Cheleta Primary School today. Most are from one-parent families and are very poor. They live from day to day, their mothers selling fruit on the roadside to earn a meagre income.

A charity, Food For Thought, provides enough money for each child at Cheleta Primary School to be given a small amount of food each day - it is not government-funded.

The school works hard to provide equipment for the children; in recent years they have installed a computer suite but the computers are very old and there is no Internet access. Nevertheless, in recent years Cheleta Primary School has made huge improvements in its performance tests.

St Paul's Peel C.E. Primary School and Cheleta Primary School
Pupils at our school write regularly to pupils at Cheleta Primary School. We have created African art and sold it to our parents to raise money to help our friends at Cheleta Primary School. We have a special wall display on which we exhibit the photographs and letters we receive from our friends in Kenya.