Nick and Carol Pollard, the co-founders of EthosEducation.org, have a long and successful track record of creating educational resources and activities with a particular emphasis on facilitating peer-education.

For example, in 2005, Nick and Carol responded to requests from the Make Poverty History campaign to run a once-off National Sixth Form Conference exploring aid, trade and debt – with the goal that the sixth formers then become peer-educators in their schools. The event was so successful that various NGOs asked Nick and Carol to run more National Sixth Form Conferences over subsequent years, each time exploring a different Millennium Development Goal. So, Nick and Carol Pollard co-founded and ran the Global Student Forum (GSF) from 2005 until 2012, in partnership with NGOs such as Christian Aid, Oxfam, Tearfund, UNICEF and World Vision.

In 2009 Nick and Carol secured a £1m grant from the Department for International Development (DFID) for GSF to expand across the country with the target of reaching 100,000 young people through peer-led activities. At the end of the three-year grant period (also the end of the project), DFID’s Project Completion Review reported that GSF had reached 263,000 young people, awarded an overall A+ (exceeded expectation), and declared that GSF had ‘met expectations of efficiency and economy and exceeded the outputs within budget’.

Perhaps the final cohort of students, in GSF2012, can tell most effectively the impact of GSF: