This article investigates the cooperation between schools and development-oriented non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the context of education for sustainable development and global learning. It focuses on the potential and challenges of such partnerships for fostering meaningful social learning in a global context. It also draws on two empirical studies based on the documentary method: one analysing the orientations of NGO professionals involved in school cooperation; the other examining student learning outcomes in charity-based NGO–school settings. The findings highlight how different orientations among NGO professionals shape their approaches to school cooperation, ranging from normative messaging to action-based engagement. On the student side, charity-based learning settings often foster personalised or generalised understandings of global inequalities, which may reproduce asymmetries and hinder reflective engagement with complex global issues. Three key tensions are identified and discussed: the challenge of balancing authenticity with abstraction, the influence of NGO positionality on educational content and the risk of reinforcing simplified, rather than reflective and complex, understandings of global challenges. Based on these findings, the article argues for learning settings that critically contextualise NGO contributions, support abstraction and reflexivity and address power asymmetries to enable more nuanced global social learning. Implications for cooperation practice and future research are discussed.