Lesley Drake is Director of The Partnership for Child Development at Imperial College, London, which was established in 1992 to undertake operations research on school health programmes. Theoretical analyses had indicated that the health of schoolchildren could be improved at very low cost by a package of simple services, such as anthelmintics, micronutrients and health education, delivered to children through the existing school system. The Partnership set out to test or evaluate this in programmes in several countries at an operationally realistic scale, involving between 50,000 and 3 million children in widely scattered sites throughout the world. The Partnership is supported by: UNDP, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, The James S. McDonnell Foundation, The Wellcome Trust, the World Bank, UNICEF, WHO and DFID. Lesley will shortly being taking up a new post of Executive Secretary of the Global Deworming Programme.