To follow-up our recent online exhibition, "A Scottish Cemetery in India", access to Scran has been made available to the Scottish Church Collegiate School in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta).

The school's students and staff will be able to use images which form part of the online exhibition and other Scran resources. The project was originally developed for Scottish schools with resources to support Curriculum for Excellence. The exhibition was created in partnership by Scran, the City of Edinburgh Council and the Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust (KSHT). Many of the images originate from the archives of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS); gathered as part of field work carried out under the auspices of the KSHT at the Scottish Cemetery.

The Scottish cemetery itself, once attached to St Andrew's Church in the Kolkata, is the burial place of thousands of Scots who lived, worked and died in India throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Work continues to reclaim the cemetery from jungle and transform it into a green space in the heart of the city.

Training materials to support teaching staff in using Scran were presented to the Scottish Church Collegiate School by Education Secretary, Mike Russell, who recently visited India. The presentation was seen as underlining links between Scotland and India, particularly those with the city of Kolkata.

The Collegiate School, which has about 3,500 pupils, was founded in 1830 by the Reverend Dr Alexander Duff, who was the first Church of Scotland missionary in India. Its headmaster, Bivash Saniel, said: "Alexander Duff, the founder of the school, devised an educational mission in India which became so successful that it completely changed the education policy of the government of India. In a similar way, Mr Russell's visit to Kolkata has the potential to help herald a new era in the educational world of Bengal and India at a time when we are trying to make various changes to our national educational policy."