NSA Education Experiment #1106!

Organisations either grow or decline, but they never stand still. This was one of the first principles I ever learned as a young organisational psychologist and I was never sure whether the original quote came from someone in the Isaac Newton mould (a scientific truth) or from the Buddha himself (one of the Noble Truths). In the end it didn't matter, because it's true; all organisations MUST grow or in fact they will decline, and this is the principle we have applied to NSA from Day One in 2007. Growth is as much about intellectual development as increases in income, resources, and influence, and this is why I must often drive colleagues to the point of insanity by constantly instituting "experiments" in schools, on courses, at events, just to see what will happen and whether we can develop "a better way" or a "new/additional way" of doing something.

We currently have two such experiments underway in Kathmandu, which if successful could make educationalists really sit up in Nepal. Both are being conducted by Babita in two of our partner schools and involve the topics of Phonics and P4C. When she was in the UK recently Babita received a lot of specialist training in these two areas and we are currently running a 12 weeks pilot programme where Babita teaches these two topics for half a day in each school every day.Class 1 & 2 are receiving Phonics lessons to learn to read and speak English, and Classes 3-6 are receiving P4C sessions (renamed by us to V4C,Values For Children). We have conducted perception tests on Classes 3-6 in each school using MALS and QEQ and will retest after 3 months to see if there is any change in the child's perception of their education, the school, their teachers and so on. Separately Babita will continuously assess the children in Class 1 & 2 for progress through Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the UKs Letters & Sounds syllabus. 

Will we see any difference in test scores? Will the children's English speaking ability improve? Will children's behaviour change influenced by regular values-based lessons? We certainly hope so, but this is the sort of experiment we MUST conduct before we have the right to train Nepalese teachers in any depth in these topics. We need evidence we can present to the Ministry of Education if we are to grow to our next stage of development, evidence we take for granted in the UK, but this is not acceptable if you are trying to influence a whole country to change!

We cannot leave this article without acknowledging who set us down this path, and we are very grateful to Dr Sue Palmer at The Phonics Academy for her development of our knowledge and thinking about phonics, to Lizzy Lewis at SAPERE for her encouragement to use P4C in the first place, and finally to Jason Buckley, The Philosophy Man, who patiently trained yours truly in the basics of the P4C technique. We would encourage anyone interested in these subjects to visit their respective websites:

The Phonics Academy  

SAPERE

The Philosophy Man

"The key to quality education..............."

The letter from Barry Hitchcock, Nepal Director at Asia Development Bank has prompted much discussion amongst Trustees and supporters, and one comment is worthy of a full posting. Janice Brockbank is Educational Advisor to NSA and has been much involved in the creation of our teacher training Academy and the provision of volunteer teachers to work and run training programmes in Kathmandu. In essence we are all stakeholders with an interest in developing Nepal's education system and therefore we all hold a piece of the jigsaw which is vital to making up the whole picture. 

Janice says:

"This note is directed towards Mr Hitchcock whose response to NSA demonstrates genuine openess to listen to all who have a desire to improve education in Nepal. 

It is encouraging that ADB recognises that the largest of philanthropic organisations may not necessarily have all the necessary information to create the essential impact required. Support has been supplied in many forms historically with no significant impact so 'doing more of the same' is unlikely to work.

NSA has created a blue print for quality education that is not currently addressed in SSRP. NSAs Academy training programme targets the heart of quality learning which requires skilful and motivated teachers. Bricks and mortar and statistics of increased attendance look impressive providing evidence and data that is simple to collect but it is the interaction between effective teaching and children that will raise standards and the quality of education for the future citizens of Nepal.

Dr Brian and Champa Metters have established a practical, innovative training programme providing a key to open the door to quality education. It is not too great a statement to suggest that NSAs Academy 'blueprint' has the potential to transform learning for children and young people in Nepal should its principles be adopted and supported by Nepal's Ministry of Education and rolled out nationwide." 

We will be following up with our own response to Mr Hitchcock in a few days time.

A positive response from Asia Development Bank

We have had a reply today to the email sent to Asian Development Bank and it is copied in it's entirety below. The letter is from Barry Hitchcock, the Nepal ADB Director, and before we offer a follow up response we would welcome comments from our readers, either sent direct to us or as Comments on the Blog below.

"Thank you very much for your email and we appreciate your concern about the quality of education in Nepal. We do acknowledge that while the education reforms in Nepal have been very successful in improving access and equity, the progress in improving quality has been slower than anticipated. As a result, we are making greater efforts to improve the quality of education. Our new program, School Sector Program (SSP) has been designed to support the Government of Nepal's 7 -year (FY2Q1Q-FY2016) School Sector Reform Program (SSRP) which includes a strong component of need based teachers training programs. Currently the SSRP is supported by ADB and 8 other development partners (Australia, Denmark, European Union, Finland, Nonvay, UNICEF, United Kingdom and World Bank) using a sector-wide approach.
Building on the achievements of the Education for All Program (2004-2009), the SSRP aims to (i) expand access and equity, (ii) improve quality and relevance, and (iii) strengthen the institutional capacity of the entire school education system. As part of the SSRP implementation, the government and development partners have been working collaboratively with different stakeholders such as the associalion of international non-governmental organizations (AlN) and the national federation of non government organizations. Representatrves from these institutions have been participating in our joint consultation missions, annual and quarterly reviews, sharing their concerns and providing  important feedbacks. Further, the members of AIN have also attended regular meetings of development partners. In the upcoming Joint Consultation Mission (1 'l-13 December 2011), the representative from AIN will provide their observations on the implementation of SSRP on 13 December 201 1 at the Ministry of Education. We have been, and will continue to accept insights from non-state and other stakeholders in order to further the quality of education reforms.
ADB welcomes the concerns raised by the stakeholders so that we can all work in partnership towards improving the quality of education in Nepal. ADB is currently the focal point for the development partners. We look foruard to your suggested meeting with us so that we can discuss your concerns and your involvement for improving quality of education in Nepal.
With kind regards,
Barry Hitchcock"

Our own immediate comments are first that we are very grateful for a reply, something we rarely get from our own DFID, second we find the reply to be positive in nature, and third we look forward ourselves to meeting with ADB in the near future.

The usual response?

It is now over a week since we blogged about the large grant from ADB to Nepal's government to spend on education projects and we followed it up by writing to Barry Hitchcock, the Nepal Director of ADB .......... twice. And guess what? No response, just like our own DFID!

So we thought you might like to see what we wrote to him, and if you were so inclined maybe to write to him too by visiting the ADB Nepal website and using the form to contact him here ADB Contact.

Send us a copy too.

"Dear Barry,

I am writing to thank and congratulate you on your recent grant to the Nepal government of $65 million of which $500k is a technical grant towards developing the education system. As a group of people working towards the same goal we are encouraged by ADB's obvious care and concern for Nepal and the education of its children.

We are not so encouraged however by the way the way the government intends to spend the money. It seems to us that they are perpetuating the "same old way" of pouring vast sums into building schools (often in remote areas only), policy development, monitoring and other ethereal tasks that have no direct and immediate benefit. 

In many ways this is like the endless constitution creation that has been going on for several years, occupying the lawmakers time when they should be working on electricity supply, water supply, roads & traffic problems, job creation and of course ..... education development. It is the complete lack of any "customer focused" thinking on their part that infuriates us as we ourselves attempt to train/retrain 400 teachers in Kathmandu every year in some key concepts of quality education and child centred learning techniques at primary school level. Since inception 5 years ago we have developed 7 inner city schools via a programme of School Leadership, Material Aid, Teacher Training to the extent that we have measured evidence of growth and improvement. In fact the proof has been so overwhelming that we are now setting up a teacher training Academy based on UK teaching techniques which we will deliver free to 400 community and government teachers a year, with 300 of these returning annually for advanced training.

Why am I telling you this? NOT because I am seeking money or funding, but because sooner or later the government has to accept that it has NO clear definition of quality education and that however it is defined it will never be achieved by building schools or developing policies and monitoring frameworks. It is teachers who will deliver the goods, trained teachers who have the right techniques (at primary level) and the motivation and tools to deliver them. We have tried to involve our own country's DFID in a dialogue on this as well as the Ministry of Education but it seems our results don't speak loudly enough compared with the size of our wallets! Can we influence ADB to speak with a similar voice (because your wallet is bigger than ours!), can we interest ADB even in meeting with us to discuss the issue?

Regards"

Massive grant from Asian Development Bank

A news report from Kathmandu in the last 24 hours has detailed a massive grant from the Asian Development Bank to fund improvements to Nepal's crumbling education system. The initial paragraph from the report is as follows:

"The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has approved a policy-based grant for the School Sector Program which supports the Government of Nepal’s ongoing education reform initiatives with stronger focus on gender, social inclusion, and quality.

The ADB Board of Directors has approved grant finance totaling $65 million from the Asian Development Fund and Technical Assistance Special Fund grant of $500,000 for the program, according to a release issued by ADB on Thursday."

The good news is the size of the grant and its focus on education. Any grant funding of this magnitude speaks volumes for the organisation making the grant and its obvious care for Nepal and the education of its children.

The bad news is that once again the focus seems wide of the mark with the report mentioning "school buildings, textbooks, quality, policy reforms, incentives, safety issues, management and governance." There is also a wonderful statement in the report which says "It will also strengthen institutional capacity of the government agencies to implement the program effectively, mitigate fiduciary risks, and strengthen monitoring and evaluation systems."

As our supporters and regular readers know we have advocated for 5 long years that the way to develop "Quality Education" in Nepal is to first define it as a set of ingredients and methods (a bit like a recipe making a chicken curry!), then to source and develop these components systematically over a defined time period. We have yet to find such a recipe in Nepal, and educationalists, ministerial officials, teachers, and NGOs, sprinkle their reports and utterances with this term, but nobody can ever answer the question "what IS quality education, how do you define it, what are the components?" 

The report also mentions the School Sector Reform Plan (SSRP) launched at the end of 2009 which attempted to specify what needed to be done to improve the system in the various sectors. We work in the Primary sector, and constantly meet Heads and teachers from government and community schools in Kathmandu who have never heard of the SSRP and are amazed when we tell them of its content. In fact it was our reading of the SSRP two years ago that highlighted its deficiencies and led us to develop a definition of Quality Education for our own development work with 7 schools. The definition has been used to guide our work to improve these schools which have shown remarkable growth in all the variables you would expect such as enrolment rates, completion rates, exam passes. 

However it is in the area of teacher training that we have our biggest gripe. Nowhere in the ADB report is there any mention of learning processes, teaching techniques, child centredness, formative assessment strategies, teacher capability, continuous teacher development. In fact we have seen that THIS is the key to it all, to hell with the buildings, the governance, fiduciary risks, monitoring systems. To hell with policies, institutional capacity. The real issue is CAPABILITY. The capability of the teachers to deliver quality education in a child centred way (at Primary level) to the children of Nepal. We are doing it for 400 teachers a year on a budget of £25,000. Give me the $65 million and I will develop the best teacher training and implement it in the whole of Asia!!

If you want to read the full report go here ADB Report

A handful of beans!

It's only a handful of beans, but the way they are being used makes them much more significant. We are continuing our training of teachers from the 7 schools we have been supporting for 5 years as part of the Consolidation phase of our work, and the picture shows how a group of teachers chose to set up a classroom exercise using beans, marker pens and some home made labels. The teachers were attending one of 4 workshops on Classroom Resources we ran last week in which they experienced a wide range of activities using simple resources to make their lessons more child centred. Maths bingo, number dominoes, flash cards, alphabet beans, number fans, phonemes fans and many more featured across the sessions of these highly practical workshops which we hope have motivated the teachers to apply them all, and more, in their schools.

Certificates of success!

The last day of our first Foundation course is best summed up by one of the delegates, plus a few photos:

"The training ended as a big success and I now understood more about psychology, values and V4C.  It certainly helped me to build my competency and confidence level. Binju and I often talked about the training on the way back to our homes each evening. Babita also  proved herself as a bonafide teacher trainer with all this showing that the future of NSA is bright and it will be true to its name. This afternoon I have already taken a class on V4C in class Eight and they enjoyed it a lot."

Chandra Mohan Joshi

Values for children ....... continued

Day 4 of the Foundation course and the second day of V4C. Today was about using two more kinds of stimuli, objects and stories, and these were each first demonstrated by Babita with a group of 20. Then, two groups were formed and each ran a couple of sessions with object stimuli and a couple with story stimuli.

Tomorrow is the last day, Classroom Resources in the morning and Lesson Planning in the afternoon.

We're on our way home and will summarise in a couple of days.

Values 4 Children-a new technique for Nepal!

Day 3 of the Foundation course and a continuing focus on values with a new technique being introduced which is 100% child centred. Based on the well known P4C process we have adapted some elements so that Nepali teachers can develop a core set of values for their school amongst children AND staff. 

We have been trained in the UK on SAPERE courses and are using the 10-step process of Jason Buckley (The Philosophy Man) who kindly provided us with lots and lots of his booklets for our training last April. The process uses stimuli to initiate a group discussion (on values) which can commonly include pictures, objects and stories.

Our Foundation course dedicates two full days to V4C and works on the three areas of stimuli, 10 steps, values. Today Babita ran two sessions using pictures as stimuli with the course split into one half as students and one half as observers. The session itself and the resulting feedback were both very lively as this type of discussive facilitated process is very new to Nepal and a far cry from sitting in silence and copying stuff from the blackboard. In the afternoon it was the turn of the teachers to have a go and two more full sessions were run using picture stimuli with full debrief reviews held afterwards.

The teachers have gone home very excited with homework to find and bring in an object that could be used as a stimulus, goodness knows what we will get! So, tomorrow, two sessions plus practice using object stimuli, then two sessions plus practice using stories as stimuli. Watch this space for a full report.

Values in education

The second day of our new Foundation course with a shift of focus to values. We first ran this as a one day workshop last April as part of our school management programme and subsequent work and discussions with the schools showed just how important the workshop was. Originally catalysed by Sujeev Shakya's best selling book "Unleashing Nepal" in which he emphasised how Nepali youth had lost many of the country's traditional values we decided to give the subject some prominence in our programme.

Today was all about the teachers understanding values and their influence on our personal behaviour and we conducted a number of activities to help delegates think about their own values and behaviour. From this we examined the issue of organisational values in a school and how this might affect student-teacher relationships.

Tomorrow we use the concepts from today in a new technique V4C (Values For Children) in which teachers will learn how to run practical classroom sessions which stimulate children of all ages to discuss respect, discipline, freedom, cooperation, friendship, achievement, learning, and any other value important to the school.

We must acknowledge the assistance we were given by SAPERE in being trained in their Philosophy For Children process and the flexibility they showed us in using their materials and tools.

Academy first Foundation course kicks off

Six months ago she was a primary school teacher at Bal Bigyan school, Patan, doing some occasional tutoring work for us. Then she decided to give up her job and train to be a full-time Education Consultant working for NSA. Now after three months extensive training in the UK she has just run the opening day of the Academy's Foundation course on .............................. Educational Psychology!

Babita Shrestha took a big chance by giving up her job, but today she probably realises what a good decision it was; and so do the rest of us.

Our Educational Psychology workshop covers three broad areas related to child centred learning; The Child, The Learning, The Methods. More specifically we explore the psychological concepts important to each such as diversity, motivation and development stages of the child, cognitive, social and moral aspects of learning, and finally learning processes, classroom strategies and assessment strategies as part of the teaching method. Quite a lot to fit into one day, but with a mixture of theoretical inputs and activities the message is very clear that child centredness is a MUST for introduction into Nepali primary schools.

Tomorrow is all about Values in the school and ethical standards that should be shown by teachers and developed in the children.

And, oh yes, at 4pm the TV crew from News 24 turned up. But that's another story!

Three Teams set for first Academy programme

Two days to go before we run our first Academy programme and some recent meetings have led to the creation and role clarification of three teams essential to our success. The past month in Kathmandu has shown us just how complex our operation can be with a need to coordinate policy, finances, marketing, delegate bookings, venue organisation, resource materials, course delivery .......... This last item is merely the tip of the iceberg!

The first team is UKNSA and consists of the five Trustees who have responsibility for policy, fundraising, strategy, curriculum development, annual budgets, annual objectives. Most of this is handled in the UK with regular communication to Kathmandu.

The second team is KNSA based in Kathmandu and comprises the Operations Director and two Education Consultants. Their main role is to plan, organise and deliver our schedule of programmes based on annual objectives from UKNSA. Finances are strictly controlled with a monthly reporting system for spending and activities in place.
The third team, SNSA is new and comprises teachers from two selected schools we will continue to support materially and with advice. Lalit Kalyan and Himalaya schools are attempting to be model schools for our methods and techniques and also are places where we can test things out in a Nepali setting. They have provided us with two teachers each, previously trained by us who will act as part time tutors on our courses.

As you might expect it is the interdependence and collaboration across these three teams that will make for a successful Academy and achieving our ultimate goal of influencing the Ministry of Education to change!

Consolidation phase begins with technology

Our five year programme of development for 7 Kathmandu schools has now entered its Consolidation phase which will run for approximately 12 months. The purpose of this phase is to ensure school independence and avoid a complete reliance on our aid. During this time we are actioning the following elements:

1. Re-testing 300 children to assess the impact of our teacher training implementation
2. Formally inspecting those schools that have met our communication and implementation criteria since last April
3. Reducing our material aid of exercise books over the next 6 months
4. Completing the series of Tutor workshops ie Classroom Resources and English Intermediate Teaching
5. Delivering two specialist courses next April 2012 on Values For Children and English Early Learning (Phonics)
6. Providing technology to some schools to be utilised as a teacher resource 

Since last April we have monitored communication and implementation in each school and have selected 3 schools to be provided with "technology" to support teachers rather than for children to learn computer skills. Specifically we have provided up to four fast Core I5 PC systems, plus adsl connection, plus a laserjet multifunction printer, plus an inkjet colour printer with full installation support and four days training to each school. In all cases the systems have been loaded with the Linux operating system and a full suite of open source software.

The main purpose of the technology as already mentioned is as a resource for teachers so as to design, download or create teaching materials for use in child centred learning sessions.

The Academy launched

A few days ago our first marketing meeting was held at the Greenwich Village Hotel, Kathmandu, to introduce the Head Teachers of 15 government/community schools to our teacher training programmes. The initial course, Foundation, is of 5 days duration and covers topics such as Educational Psychology, Values, Lesson Planning, Classroom Resources. Every session is extremely practical and focuses on techniques to make the classroom child centric.

The meeting was run by Dr Champa Metters (Trustee) and Ms Babita Shrestha (Education Consultant) supported by 2 Heads from our supported 7 schools. The background to NSA was highlighted followed by our methods and results since we began delivering teacher training. A Q&A session mostly focused on "how do teachers become motivated to implement the training when they have become set in their ways and have no incentive to change" which is very difficult to answer in a country where teachers have a job for life, cannot be fired, and where Heads have never had any management training in how to handle such situations. Our answer is that we CAN advise on this but by opening up our training to all schools in Kathmandu it will be impossible to work extensively with each registered school as we have done with 7 schools over the past 5 years!

When the meeting was finished 9 of the 15 registered immediately for training and since then the remaining 6 have emailed or delivered their registrations by hand. The first Foundation course will begin on November 6th and our initial plan is to run 5 such courses for 100 teachers by the end of March 2012. This will allow us time to fine tune materials to suit non English speaking teachers before we start to run two courses per month. Before this of course we need to find more schools to register but it seems, according to our two partner schools/Heads, there are now approximately 45 new schools waiting to register!

Not a bad start.

Everest Trek achieves 100% success

A bit like a blockbuster movie, it was 12 months in the making, involved a cast of '000s, made a huge profit and was an all-round mega success!
Five dedicated supporters of NSA led by the Trustee Chairman finally reached Gorak Shep, the end of the Everest trail, on 18th October ready to launch themselves further along the moraine to Base Camp or higher still to the top of Kala Pataar, or both! One day later all objectives had been met and six very satisfied people began the long journey back to Lukla and a flight to Kathmandu.


This short blog cannot do justice to the efforts of these five people who raised over £13,000 for our schools development programme. They prepared for a full year to get to the right levels of fitness required for such a harsh environment. They fundraised in a wide variety of ways to meet personal targets. During the trek they drank up to 6 litres of fluids a day to ward off the dehydration effects of altitude, they stuck to the schedule of altitude gain each day, they readily accepted the cold, the low standards of hygiene, the basic foods, the dust. They kept going on some big hills and some long days, without complaint. (Well, almost!)
They are quite simply the best trekking group I have had the privilege to lead in 10 years. Thank you Gary, Joanna, John, Kate, Marion.

We are delighted to announce the appointment of a further Education Consultant joining our team in Kathmandu. Rashmi Kafle is an experienced teacher trainer having run her own training consultancy, Stepping Stone, and delivered a large programme of training for UNHABITAT in Nepal over a 3 year period.

One area of speciality for Rashmi is human values based education and it was this that she specifically applied to training teachers in how to deliver a programme of Water, Hygiene & Sanitation in over 50 Primary Schools.

Rashmi has a B.Ed., and a Masters in Sociology with her current thoughts aimed at possibly doing a PhD.

However maybe the most impressive thing about Rashmi is that she has founded a small school for 50 "street children" who live in a squatters camp close to a rubbish dump. If you have seen the film Slumdog Millionaire you will understand the term "rag-picker, which is what these children are. From her Stepping Stone fees she has rented a building, furnished offices and three classrooms, pays the salaries of 4 teachers, and ................ gives the children one meal a day! Our initial plan is for Rashmi to work with Babita in marketing and delivering the early new Academy programmes to allow her to learn all our content, processes and techniques. In addition Babita will establish an NSA Office at Rashmi's school so they can work together and in return we will help to create a model/best practice learning resources centre at the school.

I hope everyone will welcome Rashmi to our NSA family and can see the huge potential and mutual benefit of our working together. 

Quality Education: Defined, trained, increased, evidenced!

It is proving to be awfully difficult not to appear smug or say "we told you so" following the results of some repeat tests we have carried out on some 300 children in our seven supported schools. 

Our regular followers will know that in April just before the schools began implementing the training we had delivered we tested a cohort of 300 children across seven schools using the Myself As A Learner Scale and the Quality Education Questionnaire. I will not repeat here the description of these tests, suffice to say they are inventories of self perception and school/education perception by the child and NOT ability tests. What the latter is certainly measuring is the child's view of the education they are receiving in terms of things like involvement, interest, use of resources, teaching style, teacher support etc. All the things you would expect in a child centred learning environment.
The results are summarised below and a simple interpretation would go something like this:

1. In general the children's perception of the "quality of education" (NSA's definition) has increased since we conducted a major training programme in April. This is likely due to changes in teacher behaviour.
2. In general the children's perception of themselves as learners (as much influenced by home life and background) has NOT changed, and would probably take longer and with different interventions to achieve.

On yer bike for Nepal Schools Aid!

When you run a charity and spend all your waking hours wondering where your next donation is coming from it is tempting to only focus on the big fish so to speak, the grants, the corporate donations etc and to lose sight of all the ordinary people in Britain who have a "giving" nature.

Then something happens to shake you up a bit and bring you down to earth such as the sponsored cycle ride done by 17 year old Daniel Richardson who cycled around Kielder Water and raised around £100 for us. We've never met him, he doesn't know us personally, he just wanted to help.

In his own words:

"When I first heard of Nepal Schools Aid, I immediately saw the charity as an excellent way to ensure money donated to disadvantaged individuals in the country actually got to them, rather than it being lost in an assortment of various administrative fees. Since a sum of money normally seen as modest at best in England could do so much good in Nepal, I decided that I should try to raise as much as possible to help out by doing a sponsored bike ride. I talked to almost everyone I knew about doing it, and all of them were more than willing to put their name down to sponsor me. Once I had a good number of sponsors committed, I organised a date for the ride, went out and did it. The ride was around 26 miles, following the shore of Kielder Lake in Northumberland. After a few hours of getting lost repeatedly on very undulating terrain, I had cycled the entirety of the route. It was a very worthwhile effort, which I enjoyed, and I'm glad it raised so much money for Nepal Schools Aid." 

Thanks Daniel, do you know any more like you?

The Academy - an update

Just like a jigsaw the individual pieces of the new NSA Academy are now coming together. Since late June we have been creating the actual content of the Academy which will be in two main parts; The Foundation Programme and The Advanced Programme with both being focused on improving the child centred learning skills of delegate teachers. Further details of each programme can be viewed on our website at www.nepalschoolsaid.co.uk and the materials are now fully prepared including slides, workbooks and take-away resources. The entire Academy is based on a well researched curriculum of teacher training using methods and techniques fully applied by primary school teachers in the UK.

We are currently seeking financial partners for this programme so as to offer it to as wide a population in Kathmandu as possible. Our aim is to make the programme available free of charge to any teacher from any community or government school that registers with us. Registration is free and each school will have the opportunity to send one or two teachers on to a one day introductory seminar so as to get more detailed information should they need it. We will commence our marketing in mid October in Kathmandu and any teacher or Head wanting more information should visit our website and complete the relevant form to contact us. Any possible donor can help us immediately by clicking on the Donate button on the left of this blog or if you are a corporate or Grant Foundation we would be pleased to hear from you too. You should also contact us direct if you would like to make a regular monthly payment to us with a standing order.

The resourcing of the programmes is currently being planned and we need to appoint some full time and part time Tutors and Consultants depending on the finances available to us by the end of the year. We currently have a number of candidates who we will interview and assess during October but if you are reading this blog and are interested then you should contact us using the form on the Contact page of our website.

Values education in Nepal

At the end of last week a Trustee and full time Tutor were trained on SAPERE's Level 1 P4C course in London. The course covers the 10 steps in the P4C process and gives lots of opportunities to practice the necessary skills over the two days. At the end of the course the trainer very generously gave us her slides and materials which we can now use to develop our own programme of workshops in Kathmandu.

Babita and Champa are now "licensed" to run such sessions and this is a very important step in NSA's development. Combining this course with Babita having spent 2 weeks at Haverigg school in Cumbria running P4C sessions daily means that she is probably the best trained person in Nepal and we intend that she will spend a lot of her time passing on her skills to many other teachers in Kathmandu. Our work will focus on using the technique to deliver an understanding of values, ethics and morals to children in primary schools and to this end we are now renaming the technique V4C, Values 4 Children!

Maths teaching in Kathmandu

Continuing our commitment to train another 52 teachers across the summer whose English wasn't strong enough to take part in our April conference, our Tutor Bashu is currently running four Maths Teaching Workshops. Following the same content and format designed by the visiting UK experts a few months back the whole workshop purpose is to give teachers a specific structure for running any maths lesson. Following the PCAME technique, Primary Cognitive Acceleration in Maths Education, the content used to learn the technique has been predominantly focused on improved number work and data handling as example topics.

 All the 52 have to do now is to go back to their schools and to apply it!  

More exam results analysis from Nepal

My last posting gave the results overall of the recent School Leaving Certificate exams from Kathmandu showing that only 55% of students gained a pass. However a report in today's Republica newspaper has shown some analysis which really shows the vast difference between private and government schools:

Private, Public School Gap Widens Further

In summary the report states that only 46% of students passed from government schools with 90% passing from private schools. The reasons given are twofold; the gross politicisation of teachers who are unionised and affiliated to political parties and ................ a lack of training!

Of course it is the responsibility of the government to provide training and they are clearly failing in this respect. And, if you want to know how such training CAN have an impact then our own average pass rate of 67% is quite commendable, but certainly not acceptable to us.

In conclusion this analysis makes our decision to switch our focus away from providing training to only seven schools and making training more widely available to all schools in Kathmandu a good one.

We will need extra funding for this though and we are seeking a partner to help fund this using the expertise, materials and training we have developed in our first four years. We have a proven track record which can be examined by anyone who is interested in working with us.

Is the Ministry listening?

Each year in Nepal, just as in the UK, there are annual school leaving exams. In the UK our GCSE and A Levels pave the way for higher education, and standards have been shown to be improving over the last decade. In Nepal however standards have been falling and in this year's School Leaving Certificate exams only 55% of those tested achieved a pass. This compares with 64% last year and 68% the year previous.

Known across Nepal as "The Iron Gate" the SLC results are also a route exclusively to higher education and there are numerous suicides recorded shortly after the results are published.

This year there has been a clamour of complaint about how poor are the results and the media is full of rationalisations ("it was better policed this year so cheating was not possible!") and implications ("the country is in a mess with a lack of educated youth leading to a grim future") and finally some logical analysis ("it's the education system that needs changing with a low quality of education failing to produce the goods"). Naturally we like and support this final comment and it serves to reinforce NSA's stance and direction especially as we plan our new Academy approach across the next 18 months.

Oh, and by the way, our own community based schools with secondary classes produced an average SLC pass rate of 67% with one of our schools achieving 89%, so are you receiving Dr Awasthi at the Ministry of Education?

Cumbria-Nepal cooperation sets a good example

Our Senior Tutor's training is now progressing at a pace at Haverigg School, our primary educational partner. She has been made exceptionally welcome by teachers and children and her programme has been personally tailored to provide specialist training in general child centred techniques, phonics, and P4C. She has a daily meeting with the Head Teacher Janice Brockbank and a previous retired teacher is acting as her mentor. The pictures give a flavour of "events":

Learning phonics from the master!

Yesterday was a very important day for NSA and Babita as it began the journey towards expertise in phonics, the mainstay of early learning of reading and writing in the UK. The use of phonics is universal in UK primary schools and all primary teachers are expert in it's use, whereas we have not come across it at all in Nepal. Our view is that it SHOULD be introduced to Nepal and we have engaged of the best exponents of the subject in the UK, Sue Palmer, to train Babita up to a standard where she can not only use it herself but can train others. 

Sue has now spent the introductory day with Babita who will now observe and get involved in it's application at Haverigg School, and following this Sue will run her 4-5 day course with her at the end of July so as she can gain full certification.

Observation, observation, observation

Second day of Babita at Fairford Primary School and the level of "bewilderment" is still quite high mostly based on resources but also because of the wide range of types of activity involved in educating very young children. For example one of Babita's key learning points from today arose from the use of drama in a lesson which just wouldn't happen in Nepal with it's complete reliance on chalk-and-talk.

A second example is perhaps more important and that is the realisation of just how acute are the "observation skills" of our teachers, constantly listening and looking for cues and signals to be acted upon  with specific children. But, that's what child centredness is!

A day in the life of ...........

Can you imagine what it must have been like for a young Nepali teacher to arrive in the UK for the first time on Saturday night then on Monday to spend the day in a modern, fully equipped, fully resourced English primary school? This is what Babita our NSA Tutor has just done and it has been an experience she will probably see as life-changing. 

We had tried to prepare her by telling her to "ignore" the physical environment in the school because this is something she can NOT change when she returns to Kathmandu, and to focus on the "psychological environment" such as teaching practices, school ethos etc. 

But this is easier said than done and after a full day at Fairford Primary School in Gloucestershire her senses were reeling from "the technology like video and interactive whiteboard, the resources like paper, crayons, pens, books, and then the space like the play area and even some woods!"

However when this was separated the brain was focusing on all the right things, some of which might surprise, but please a UK teacher such as the level of child centredness, the care and attention shown to each individual child, the link between recent learning on child development stages, diversity, cognitive development motivation all related to teaching methods. In addition she found most noticeable things like the words "please, thank you and excuse me, all seldom heard in a Nepali school.

Not bad for a first day so a big "thank you" to Jane Sparling and her staff at the school.

Like a load of ants ........

Doesn't this picture just make you smile, I can almost feel the excitement of these children as they carry their new furniture into the classroom.

Since our teacher training programme ended we discovered a number of physical barriers preventing the implementation of child centred learning, one of which was furniture and classroom layout. So we have initiated an experiment to refurbish two classrooms in two schools and the picture shows the "arrival" at Lalit Kalyan school.

If anybody would like to help refurbishing one classroom we have initiated The Classroom Project, £450 does the job!

NSA Tutors deliver first education psychology workshop in Kathmandu

Today was a very important day for Nepal Schools Aid, a day in which our two young Tutors began a series of workshops to follow on from the training programme run in April.

Here's the background; April 2011, 4 experienced UK teachers travel to Nepal and over 8 days deliver training for 40 teachers in our 7 schools who can speak English. A brilliant programme, but with two problems; first we have a further 50 teachers who cannot speak English well enough to attend; second after 8 days the UK teachers went back home! 

The overall problem then was "how to train these 50?" The solution? Our two Tutors, Bashu and Babita spend a month learning and converting the workshops into Nepali before launching today the first of these ................ Education Psychology, for 14 teachers.

You have to give these two young people a lot of credit; these were new subjects to them a month ago and they are completely unaccustomed to teaching or training adults and yet they did all the preparation and practice in one month without a word of complaint. They were nervous for sure, but today's feedback from some of the Head teachers received from their returning teachers has been outstanding.

Stand by for Nepal Schools Aid to open it's own Teacher Training Academy in Kathmandu, and if anyone thinks we are joking ........... think again!

The BIG Questions

We have written over many days about the recent work with all our schools in Kathmandu, and now back in the UK, we can reflect on a busy month and recognise the successes, the level of motivation and the energy we have left behind us in 7 schools. Teachers are now genuinely questioning their own competence, skill levels and teaching processes as well as classroom layouts, best use of resources, the curriculum and much more. In organisational psychology terminology we would now say that "there has been a great deal of unfreezing leaving everyone in an advanced state of readiness for personal change".

This has led us to ponder a number of significant BIG questions we need to answer before we move to the next phase of our work so in the true spirit of delegation and ownership we have posed the list below to our newly formed Kathmandu Committee and will post up their considered response when it arrives:

1. What should we do with Sramik school? They are so far behind other schools intellectually, in leadership, in English and in their actions?
2. How can we make sure that all schools understand how strict we will be with our inspections in October to identify who most qualifies for computers? 
3. How do we get the Heads and individual teachers motivated to develop their English language skills themselves through reading clubs, speaking clubs, book clubs? Without it we will have difficulty in delivering more advanced training.
4. How do we get all schools developing their classroom environments physically to become more child centred? Paint, chairs, tables, cushions, chairs?
5. How do we get all schools to understand the application and the benefits of implementing the British Council's Global Schools Partnership programme?
6. Is NSA ready to employ full time Tutors on a good salary who work for us 100% of the time as resource persons and working in ALL schools?

One laptop per child?

Today we visited a small village school in a lovely remote setting several miles outside Patan. Our purpose was to view a class using the laptops we are considering purchasing and we were accompanied by Rajeev from OLE who explained everything to us during the visit. We observed an English lesson on Countable and Uncountable Nouns, whatever they are, but that's the Nepali curriculum for you. Enjoy the pictures:

“It's not the government's responsibility …...”

My headline today is a quote from a report in Sunday's Himalayan Times in Kathmandu. Has Education Become An Industry? It beggars belief that this quote comes from Mahashram Sharma, Joint Secretary of Ministry of Education! The full quote is as follows: “The government is monitoring government schools but has not been effective as it is not only the sole responsibility of the government. Other bodies like schools management, parents and District Education Office are also accountable. Due to the increase in the number of schools and an absence of invigilators it is impossible to monitor it”. 

The report and the quote/response from the Joint Secretary leads me to suggest that he and his department need a little education themselves in the difference between Implementation and Regulation. It is a failure of the latter within and across financial institutions that has led to the economic crises around the world and undoubtedly it is a lack of focused regulation that is partly to blame for the utter mess in which Nepal's education system finds itself. The outstanding requirement is that the school management committees, Head Teachers and indeed the parent groups within communities are accountable for implementing the government's education policies and practices. The accountability for regulation including oversight is solely on the shoulders of government and if Mr Sharma doesn't recognise this then he is no fit person to be in such a lofty position. In a wider sense the article highlights “the battleground” of education in which the combatants are private schools, government schools, teachers, unions, student unions, guardian's association and others, all taking conflicting stands on how the system should be developed or moved forward. Unfortunately “the stakeholders” as they are described are nothing more that groups with unmitigated self interest with no selfless interest in quality education or the children of Nepal. They argue with each other over pay, fees, status, book supply, and a host of other issues absolutely irrelevant to education when the system is riddled with outmoded teaching practices, assessment strategies focused on remembering rather than understanding and applying, and a curriculum which neither flows within subjects nor has much connection with reality. To support my latter assertion today I visited one of the schools assisted by my organisation (Nepal Schools Aid) after just having completed 8 days training in child centred learning for 40 government teachers. One of our best teachers was asking me about improving English Language teaching at class 1 & 2 levels. The curriculum and it's assessment approach drives these teachers to deliver rote classes and I asked her to read me a paragraph from a magazine I had. Her English is exceptionally good and she read it word perfect with no problems of accent or pronunciation. I then asked her to find me three nouns, two pronouns, and two prepositions from the paragraph. To say that she was embarrassed was an understatement, but I told her that I doubted that many people (children and adults) could have analysed the paragraph grammatically either though they can speak perfect English! To me this is the hub of the problem, a complete disconnection between curriculum and the demands of the real world. Until the Ministry understands this and gets some real focused help from the likes of DFID who seem to think that building a school is more important than transformation of the education system, policies, concepts and content, there will be NO improvement in the mess that is Nepal's education system.

The real test begins!

One phase ends, another one starts which in this case is some perception tests on class 4 and class 5 children in our schools. Having completed 8 days of training we are rapidly conducting two perception tests on cohorts of children which focus on their views on learning and quality education. The same cohort will be retested in September to see if changes in teaching style have changed perceptions amongst the children. We have given this work as a project to one of our Tutors, Bashu, and he made a good job today of administering the tests in his own school, Bal Bigyan, before moving on to repeat them in Bal Vinod school. The pictures tell today's story:

They think it's all over ....... it is now!

Once again the pictures can tell the story of the closing ceremony at our teacher training conference. The energy levels and motivation were extraordinarily high after 7 long days of training as we gave some final messages, presented certificates, awarded resources as prizes based on a school's efforts, and finally promoted one of our Tutors to be a Senior Tutor and for all to work towards it or being THE Principal Tutor. The reward? A one month trip to the UK for training.

The audience listens

The Chairman speaks

Certificates for all

Prizes for some

The shock of promotion

The final message

P4C Comes to Kathmandu

The final day of our programme and one of the most important to us. Ever since we read Sujeev Shakya's book Unleashing Nepal, we have searched for and planned for some way to introduce ethics and values into the teaching of our schools. The search ended when we discovered the technique of P4C and met the UK organisation SAPERE. Over a week ago we ran a workshop on Values to introduce the concept at a personal and school level. Yesterday we ran a workshop on P4C to train the teachers in the practical process to use with children. Essentially a non directive facilitation technique P4C uses various stimuli such as images/photos, objects, stories, games to promote a discussion amongst a group of children. The stimuli are chosen to elicit philosophical questions particularly in addition to factual ones. One particular session involved a photo of some garbage/rubbish, a hot topic in Kathmandu and the session developed from the practical aspects of recycling and creating more dumping sites to eventually a REAL P4C session about values such as respect for the environment, personal responsibility, citizenship and more such concepts. At this point the whole tone of the discussion became quite different, much more reflective, more sombre even but not depressing. Just a stark realisation that it was in their own hands to solve! Soon it was time for them to "have a go" at facilitating a session and a combination of Anil and Babita did exceptionally well in being the first volunteers probably to EVER run a P4C session in Nepal.