WINDOWS TO THE WORLD
A Bury school supported by the Glass Sellers Charity is reviving a forgotten twinning tradition, sending children’s stories in glass and ink across the Channel — while building a learning community that is attracting the attention of academics, policymakers, and filmmakers alike.
AT A GLANCE
The Project: Windows to Heritage, led by Mrs Lynn Provoost, Assistant Headteacher at The Derby High School, Bury.
Supported by: The Glass Sellers Charity, the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers of London.
Key dates: World of Glass visit, St Helens — 11 June 2026. Bury Comic Con live art event —
28 June 2026. Documentary film premiere, Manchester — later in 2026.
Partners: Three Bury primary schools; Bury Art Museum; artists from Angoulême, France; Bury’s twinning programme with Angoulême; Greater Manchester Combined Authority; University of Winchester.
There is a particular quality of light that falls through old stained glass — fractured, warm, irreducible. It is the light of the great Lancashire mill towns in their pomp, the light of chapel and counting house, of a community that built things with its hands. It is also, in its way, the light that has illuminated the work of the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers of London for nearly four centuries: the belief that glass is not merely a commodity, but a medium through which communities see and understand themselves.
The Glass Sellers Charity stands behind one of the most quietly remarkable educational projects to have emerged in northern England in recent years. The Derby High School’s Windows to Heritage programme began as an act of imaginative teaching in Bury, Greater Manchester. Supported by the Glass Sellers Charity, it has grown into a cross-Channel collaboration in art and memory, a reinvention of an Anglo-French friendship stretching back to the 1960s — one that is drawing the attention of leading academics, Greater Manchester’s Combined Authority, and an international film festival.
A JOURNEY TO THE WORLD OF GLASS
The project’s most immediate landmark arrives on 11 June, when Mrs Provoost leads pupils from three Bury primary schools on a visit to the World of Glass in St Helens — the museum dedicated to the town once known as the global capital of the glass industry.
There, the children will watch craftsmen at work and have a glass piece made to take home with them, a detail that captures the programme’s philosophy precisely. That piece will be exhibited at Bury Art Museum, the town’s handsome Victorian civic gallery, whose own stained-glass windows have already become an unlikely creative touchstone in the project — referenced as far away as the studios of Angoulême.
Glass, in other words, is not merely a subject of study here. It is a medium, a metaphor, a thread of continuity binding industrial past to artistic present.
REVIVING A FORGOTTEN FRIENDSHIP
Since submitting her original proposal to the Glass Sellers Charity, Mrs Provoost has taken on a second, entirely unexpected commission. She has been asked to help revive Bury’s twinning relationship with Angoulême, a compact city in the Charente department of south-west France.
The twinning was first established in the 1960s by the languages department of The Derby itself; it had, over the decades, faded into institutional memory. Now it is to be reanimated, with Windows to Heritage as the vehicle.
The practical challenge was considerable. Schools can no longer run the homestay exchanges that characterised twinning programmes for half a century — liability, safeguarding, and logistical complexity have seen to that. Mrs Provoost’s solution is characteristic in its directness. Rather than a traditional homestay, she plans to book accommodation at the local scout camp, bringing the children from Angoulême into a shared experience of British life — the walks, the meals together, the kind of unhurried companionship she and her colleagues try to provide when taking their own pupils on weekend residentials.
The thinking behind it reveals something of the school’s wider ethos. Many of the children Mrs Provoost works with rarely share meals or leisure time with their own families; a residential trip, in her view, is itself an act of restoration — an attempt to give children the ordinary textures of a childhood they may not otherwise have. Something quietly radical, quietly moving, lies at the heart of that ambition.
INK AND INDUSTRY: THE ANGOULÊME CONNECTION
Angoulême is not, at first glance, an obvious twin for Bury. A sun-warmed city of pale limestone and Romanesque churches, it feels a world away from the red brick of East Lancashire. The parallels, once drawn, are striking. As Bury built itself on cotton and wool, Angoulême made itself on paper — the mills of the Charente valley supplying much of Europe’s finest writing paper for three centuries. Both towns are, in essence, industrial cities that learned, sometimes painfully, to tell new stories about themselves.
Angoulême’s second identity — as the world capital of the bande dessinée, the graphic novel — provides the project’s most vivid contemporary connection. The city’s annual International Comics Festival is one of the great cultural events of the French calendar. It was through Bury’s own Comic Con that the collaboration with French artists was brokered. The artists in question, David and Lorenzo, had been invited to Bury’s Comic Con when Mrs Provoost approached them with her brief. Their response was immediate and generous:
“The symbolic dimension you develop around stained glass — its historical connection to industry, prosperity and collective identity — resonates closely with the history of Angoulême as well. We could imagine a creation connecting Angoulême and Bury through shared or complementary symbols, reflecting the history and identity of each place. In Angoulême, industry played a major role in the city’s development, particularly through the paper industry, creating a strong thematic resonance that could be explored visually.” — David & Lorenzo, artists, Angoulême, May 2026
They propose to take the stained-glass windows of Bury Art Museum as a compositional model — their format, colour and structure informing a large banner to be created live on stage at Bury’s Comic Con on 28 June. The audience will watch the work take shape in real time, the imagery drawing on the industrial histories of both towns. The finished pieces will be exhibited in both Bury and Angoulême.
The artists describe the ambition as “a visual cross-reading between the two cities” — not a simple celebration of likeness, but a dialogue about how different places, shaped by different forces, might recognise something of themselves in one another.
A SCHOOL IN FULL FLIGHT
The reach of Windows to Heritage extends well beyond the project’s immediate events. All 188 Year 7 students at The Derby will spend a full week with the entire curriculum collapsed and rebuilt around the project. Every subject, every lesson, every discipline reframed through the lens of heritage, identity, and making. For a state school in Greater Manchester, it is an act of considerable pedagogical ambition.
Twenty-two Year 10 students, known as the school’s International Changemakers, will be on work experience in Thailand in June. There, they will run a workshop linked to the project with Burmese migrant children — connected by live feed to David and Lorenzo in Bury — before leading the same art activity that their peers are undertaking at home.
It is, in its quiet way, a remarkable image: students in Thailand guiding students in Lancashire through a project rooted in the stained glass of a Victorian gallery in the north of England.
Year 8 student leaders, whose development has been shaped in part by their work on the project, have already appeared on national television.
WINDSOR CASTLE AND THE WIDER CONVERSATION
The project has begun to attract serious academic attention. Building on decades of partnership with Professor Lynne Bianchi (The University of Manchester) and Professor Bill Lucas (The University of Winchester), Mrs Provoost receives regular invitations to engage in conferences such as ‘Pedagogies for Creativity’ last March.
Here and subsequently at the Comino Foundation’s ‘Consultation on Open Schooling’ at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, she joined with Professor Jose Chambers and colleagues to highlight the school’s progress and impact from building open-schooling learning communities within Bury. Former Director of Curriculum at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Professor Mick Waters, co-chaired the consultation and has sought to attend The Derby High to take a more in-depth review of their work.
The exposure the pupils have to industry and enrichment opportunities stands the school in good stead as one of only seven pilot institutions delivering the MBacc Equalex programme. This modern, progressive work experience model developed by The Careers & Enterprise Company is overseen by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, thereby helping shape Mayor Andy Burnham’s vision for equipping young people with the relevant life and work skills for their future. Windows to Heritage will be used to showcase the curriculum the school has developed, with an open invitation to other schools to adopt and build upon it.
COMING TO A CINEMA NEAR YOU
A documentary film is being made about the project. It will feature in the INTO Film Festival, screening at cinemas in Bury, Manchester, and hopefully in Angoulême. Members of the Glass Sellers will be invited to the premiere at HOME in Manchester later in the year.
A story that began with the quality of light through old glass is now, in every sense, finding a wider screen.
Windows to Heritage · Supported by the Glass Sellers Charity · The Derby High School, Bury
