Possibly Australia's most unconventional priest, John Smith is increasingly taking his message to his country's centres of power. He and his wife, Glena, talk to John Bond.

Joy Weeks asks whether schools can impart the values which undergird free society.

I became disillusioned. When I left the classroom and saw the other side of the education system, I felt that I was on my own. I saw political in-fighting.

Eastern Europe came a little closer for hundreds of British pupils as a result of a chance encounter between Mariana Zaharieva and school-teacher Howard Grace last summer. Mariana and her husband Angel Zahariev from Bulgaria were attending a conference on `Shaping the New Europe' in Caux, Switzerland, when they met Grace. He had been taking a play he had written to schools around Britain, to encourage sixth-formers to think beyond themselves.

New Zealand balances on the edge of old-fashioned maps. But its Maori people can teach the world a thing or two about rediscovering cultural pride and identity. Edward and Elisabeth Peters investigate a renaissance nurtured in 600 pre-schools.

In a child's first six years, it develops two thirds of its adult intelligence. Elizabeth Bradburn is an expert on this all important stage of education. Paul Williams tells her story.

We found that we could lose our rigidity without compromising our fundamental beliefs.

Jamaican social worker Carole-Gene Denham constantly has to deal with her country's problems. But she believes that nobody needs to remain a victim. She talks to Judith 'Robo Ukoko.

My wife, Lyn, and I had just arrived in Fiji, where for the next five and a half years I was to teach physics and maths at a large part-boarding high school run by the Methodist Church.

Maggie Kirk, Pippa Faunce and Caroline Hewitt have now left their schools in Birmingham and the south of England.