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!