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.