Early Days In Kathmandu 2011

We have been in Kathmandu 4 days now and been busy from getting off the plane. Those following behind us will be pleased to know that things seem to have changed at the airport it taking less than 10 minutes to get baggage and through security once the visa had been sorted! Most of our time since then has been spent in logistics and organising for the essential elements of our work which starts Wednesday with a meeting of Head Teachers and School Management Committee, continues on Friday with a teacher workshop on Values & Ethics, then the continuation of the main programme on Tuesday 12th April after the UK teachers arrive. On Saturday we met with our two Nepali Tutors and introduced them to the formalities of performance management with their first ever appraisal meetings. This was conducted in the classical way with a balanced combination of performance review and performance planning. We then had a further planning meeting with them and Dr Madan our Operations Director to go through the training programme and it's subsequent follow up and implementation across the year. During this meeting we presented them with their new netbooks which were purchased with donations received from the children of Haverigg School and Len & Hazel Stoneman, the parents of one of Haverigg's teachers. On Sunday we had a long meeting with a freelance journalist who recently wrote an article on the shambolic state of Nepal's education system and we are hopeful he will write some articles on our work and especially the processes we are using to transform our schools. On Monday a training session was run for the Tutors to familiarise them with their new netbooks, especially since they are run on Linux as the operating system instead of Windows. At this time they were also given some materials to read about P4C in advance of the upcoming training next week since we felt they needed a head start before the programme commenced. We gave them a copy of the P4C Pocketbook which was donated in a batch of 40 by Jason Buckley, and also the Level 1 P4C course manual donated by Lizzy Lewis from the SAPERE organisation in the UK. The importance of these two latter donations will become apparent as our programme progresses and we write in more detail. Today is Tuesday and we will be visiting three of our schools to discuss some issues about the Global Schools Partnership links with UK schools. More blogging on Thursday after the management meeting.