Ben Knight Reflects on Project Zulu's Big Year and Looks Ahead to 2026

As 2025 draws to an end, it’s time to reflect on our achievements this year. Plenty has already been said and written about the 2025 Project Zulu (PZ) choir tour, but I would like to reiterate here how proud I am of the choir, their teachers, their support teams and the UWE Bristol PZ team for pulling off such a fantastic tour and raising the bar by setting a new fundraising total of £37,504.04. Tenders are already underway at Sithbelumthetho Primary School and Sipheni Senior Primary School for their development projects in solar energy and digital learning resources and we expect to begin spending tour profits on these projects in 2026.

A few other quick-fire achievements from this year include: 

1. Almost five hundred teachers attending professional development workshops and conferences. 

2. Classrooms, learning resources and designated outdoor spaces previously developed with PZ choir tour funds continue to be actively used by hundreds of teachers and children.

3. More than 50 UWE student volunteers engaged meaningfully in PZ activities.

2025 certainly has been action-packed and full of progress and impact. As we look forward to 2026, there are a few particular highlights.

We’re excited to be welcoming back PZ ambassador and former Springbok rugby player Thinus Delport to lead the PZ rugby volunteer programme ‘Township Rugby’. This project took a break in 2025 and we’re delighted to be reigniting it with fresh faces from UWE’s men’s and women’s rugby union teams, working together with local rugby coaches as they teach PE, coach township school rugby teams and plan and facilitate the annual PZ rugby tournament.

A topic which gets less attention compared to other PZ project areas is our research. As an initiative led and facilitated by various academics and embedded within a university, research is of course central to what PZ does. Collaborating with South African academics to evaluate and better understand the impact of our work is crucial. After our very successful collaboration developing a reading support app for teachers, we have this year we have extended our commitment to collaborate with colleagues from the University of Zululand (UNIZULU) for the next three years. Likely research foci will be entrepreneurship education and behaviour management interventions. Throughout 2026 a masters student will be studying the impact of PZ’s behaviour management interventions, in which hundreds of teachers have attended a workshop series exploring a wide repertoire of management strategies. This impact evaluation will help us to see what has been achieved and what is yet to be achieved in this important area.

In February 2026 we will once again be hosted by our friends and academic colleagues at UNIZULU in Richard’s Bay. This annual gathering has always proved to be a vital source of scholarly knowledge exchange and mutual learning. This year the focus of our discussions will be classroom and behaviour management. We will be sharing details about our work with teachers in the Newcastle area and discussing challenges teachers face in this area in South Africa and the UK. We are hopeful that more ideas for research collaborations will emerge from these discussions. 

One topic we are looking forward to exploring further is the intention for students and staff from UNIZULU to pay a visit to UWE Bristol in the next few years. After several years of UWE students and staff visiting schools in the Richard’s Bay area and being hosted by UNIZULU, we are excited about the prospect of a return visit and the fruitful connections and future collaborations this may unlock.

Altogether, there is much to be excited about for 2026 and we can’t wait to get started on it all.