World Olympic Dreams - the search for schools is on

It’s a month since, Olympic legend Matthew Pinsent and presenter Kate Silverton launched Olympic Dreams School Search on Breakfast on BBC One. 

Live from Park House School in Berkshire, a hundred kids were ready for action at 5am hurdling and playing hockey during the Breakfast broadcast. And they weren’t the only ones who got active… Kate Silverton decided to try trampolining. Live.

Olympic Dreams School Search is an opportunity open to all UK schools for 2012. We are looking for schools like Park House that are excited by the Olympics, but the heart of our project is an opportunity for UK schools to link up with schools around the world attended by World Olympic Dreams athletes. 

From Loktak Christian Model School in north east India, attended by five times world champion boxer MC Mary Kom to Waldensia Primary, Usain Bolt’s school, in Trelawny district, Jamaica, the search is creating a global conversation between schools.

Not all the schools are overseas. Some World Olympic Dreams athletes are British or attended school here, and so some winning schools will twin in the UK. GB basketball super star, Luol Deng was born in southern Sudan and spent time in Cairo before moving to London. The World Class team filmed with young people at Luol’s school in Croydon. They told us they’d love to twin with another British school – and to beat them at basketball!

World Class has teamed up with the British Council to find dozens of primary and secondary schools across the UK to twin with schools all over the world and to take part in a special project in the run-up to the London Olympics in 2012. 

Schools that want to take part register with World Class here and are then given a unique log-in by the British Council team. Our inbox is busy with more than 700 schools signed up but it would be great to reach a thousand.

Olympic Dreams School Search closes 31 October. Spread the word.

Virginia Crompton is Series Producer of BBC World Class