A FORMER Cirencester College student is to move to Mumbai to teach English to slum children before they travel to Gloucestershire later this year for a football tour.

Max Cooke, 27, had to postpone the final year of his degree in Animal Welfare and Behavioural Science until September after coming down with whooping cough.

Having now recovered, he has decided to put his free time to good use by volunteering for the Oscar Foundation, set up 10 years ago by Indian teenager Ashok Rathod.

The charity encourages slum children to stay in school, and is keen to promote its ethos of linking education and sport across the world.

Ashok, now 28, still lives in the slum he grew up in, in a tiny six-foot square home with his family.

In October, the foundation's under 14 team will play four schools, including Beaudesert Park School in Minchinhampton, in matches over a 10-day tour.

Max, a Bristol University student, met Ashok last year when he was visiting the Cotswolds to drum up sponsors for the scheme with the help of Lucinda Magraw, a freelance publicist from Frampton Mansell.

Max said: “I really wanted to do something productive with my time, and remembered about the foundation, and being friends with Lucinda I always get updates about it, and got in contact.”

After graduating from college at 18 with aspirations of becoming an artist, Max spent four or five years traveling the world, before deciding to go to university.

“Whilst I was away in places like India, I just realised how much I wanted to help,” he said. “Mainly with the animals but the people as well.

“There were so many things that frustrated me that I wanted to try and change. “When I got back, I realised maybe the artistic route wasn't the way I was going to go down.”

The first time Max went to India, he did charity work around Kaziranga National Park in Assam, where David Attenburgh filmed much of Planet Earth II.

“It is a biodiversity hotspot,” he said. “I was very lucky, I got positioned there for two months in the Assamese Jungle, so I know what it's like to be thrown into the deep end and be in somewhere completely alien.

“For two months I ate rice and dell every day and had no electricity, no water, just in a little hut, and I'm actually really excited to be going back to that again.”

Max hopes to incorporate his degree in his teaching and make the slum children aware of the unique wildlife in their homeland.

He said from his previous visit to India, many people from the slums have “this idea that elephants and rhinos and tigers are just wondering everywhere in the world, and I really want to get through the message about how lucky they are to have those animals.”

Visit mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/oscarukschoolstour to donate to the project or contact Lucinda at lucinda@magrawpublicity.co.uk if you would to get involved as a sponsor.

For more information on the Oscar Foundation, go to oscar-foundation.org

See also Indian slum children to play Gloucestershire schools in football tour