Nepal Schools Aid-The NewsBlog

Feedback is the breakfast of champions!

2012-01-19T08:48:00.005Z

An email today from one of the teacher delegates on our Foundation course has given so much positive and useful feedback it just HAS to be transcribed here:

"Today I have learned lots about values and even ran a V4C session myself. Before attending I had no idea about how values could be taught in a professional and practical way, it is so important for us. By using this technique children will learn not only about values but also will develop listening, questioning, language and other cognitive skills.

I have never seen or heard of this running in any school in Nepal. But with young children being at a specific development stage can learn to be more creative, can become more disciplined, cooperate more etc. In my opinion V4C will be the best technique to use with primary children and should be used in all our schools as it is so child centred and makes us better facilitators as teachers. "
This tells us exactly what we need to know from our 4th Foundation course since launching our Academy programme. It gives us the courage to continue on this path and to rebuff the doubters who snipe at our syllabus. This sort of feedback will also reinforce our case with grant foundations and potential donors who ask us if we have conducted needs-analysis or how we know we are doing the right thing. Feedback is the breakfast of champions, and ....... the most important meal of the day!

Ridiculous Ministry comment!

2012-01-16T09:02:00.001Z

A short report in today's Himalayan Times has almost sent us into orbit with its muddle headed pathetic thinking, which is just plain WRONG. Read it for yourselves and judge whether this man has ever been anywhere near a school in the last decade and how he concludes that embracing new technology and digital methods is the way forward. It's like building a roof of a house before the foundations and walls have been built! How about improving teaching standards first, how about some simple training in child centred learning for existing teachers, how about getting teachers to discover and use basic resources readily available first ...... ??? What planet is he on!!!

HIMALAYAN NEWS SERVICE

KATHMANDU: Education Secretary Kishor Thapa has vowed to innovate classrooms of schools and universities in Nepal after coming back from a three-day conference in London.

Thapa said educational programmes should be aimed at embracing new technology and digital methods to upgrade standards in Nepal.

The focus of annual conference, organised by UK’s Education Ministry, was on classrooms changes due to technological innovation of this decade.

Secretary, along with Nepali Education Minister, had attended the gathering of ministers of 60 countries and other 10 representatives.

“Children and teachers are using smart boards in the classrooms in developing countries. Teachers can take many classes at the same time, eBooks can be the reading materials and exams can be of internet-based,” said Thapa, talking to this daily.

Keeping our feet on the ground

2012-01-09T08:54:00.002Z

The third Foundation course in our initial series of five has just been completed with another 21 attendees, five days spread over 6 days because of a break in the middle caused by yet another national strike!

This course was exceptionally pleasing because we had 5 Head Teachers attending who now realise that in order to motivate their staff through the programme and to implement some changes, they need to know the content themselves. There was some reluctance at first; "I don't need this I'm already trained, I don't need this I don't do any teaching etc" but with more of their teachers returning from our courses they seem to be getting the message. So, that's 9 of the 15 registered school's Heads now having attended, let's hope we can get the remaining 6 trained this month on the next two Foundations.

The courses are going well from a content and organisation point of view too, no major adjustments needed and all the delegates enjoying and buying in to our view of the concepts and skills needed to develop the Nepal education system and Nepal schools.

Word of our programme is spreading too with some renewed interest from the Ministry of Education who want to talk to us again about spreading the programme even wider (!) and a stream of enquiries from other schools not currently registered and NGO's or agencies asking about a "partnership" with us.(whatever that means) Keeping our feet on the ground is our motto for the week/month/year/5 years!

NSA Education Experiment #1106!

2011-12-22T10:12:00.003Z

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..............."

2011-12-15T10:09:00.002Z

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

2011-12-13T10:04:00.001Z

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?

2011-12-06T10:12:00.001Z

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

2011-11-26T06:49:00.001Z

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!

2011-11-20T05:46:00.001Z

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!

2011-11-11T17:22:00.001Z

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

2011-11-09T15:33:00.001Z

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!

2011-11-08T13:24:00.003Z

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

2011-11-07T12:51:00.000Z

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

2011-11-06T11:56:00.003Z

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

2011-11-04T01:58:00.002Z

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

2011-11-02T12:22:00.001Z

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:

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

2011-10-27T03:13:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-26T11:11:00.001+01:00

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.

2011-10-07T07:10:00.000+01:00

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!

2011-10-01T07:53:00.001+01:00

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:

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.
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!

2011-09-12T17:25:00.001+01:00

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

2011-09-05T11:09:00.001+01:00

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

2011-07-10T19:51:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-09T14:38:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-04T10:23:00.000+01:00

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?

2011-06-24T07:23:00.000+01:00

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

2011-06-23T14:17:00.000+01:00

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!

2011-06-17T07:08:00.000+01:00

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

2011-06-14T18:02:00.000+01:00

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 ...........

2011-06-13T17:31:00.000+01:00

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 ........

2011-06-02T14:05:00.000+01:00

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

2011-06-01T18:05:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-30T19:31:00.000+01:00

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:

What should we do with Sramik school? They are so far behind other schools intellectually, in leadership, in English and in their actions?
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?
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.
How do we get all schools developing their classroom environments physically to become more child centred? Paint, chairs, tables, cushions, chairs?
How do we get all schools to understand the application and the benefits of implementing the British Council's Global Schools Partnership programme?
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?

2011-04-26T09:34:00.001+01:00

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 …...”

2011-04-24T10:03:00.002+01:00

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!

2011-04-24T09:45:00.001+01:00

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!

2011-04-21T02:23:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-20T01:53:00.001+01:00

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.

Stone, paper, scissors across a fun day

2011-04-19T02:13:00.000+01:00

If I have to walk into a classroom in one of our schools once more to find bare walls, no posters, mobiles, learning aids I will scream so loud you will hear me in Cumbria! Yesterday's workshop on learning resources was interesting, informative, practical and fun and well run by Mel and Jen. So, all you Nepali teachers ..... just go and DO IT!

Problem solving skills for Nepal Government Ministers launched!

2011-04-19T02:06:00.000+01:00

The photos tell the story of a hilarious workshop run by Pete and Chris, mostly outdoors. Fun, yes, but extremely important too and well linked to many concepts in educational psychology.

Making connections

2011-04-17T17:30:00.002+01:00

We are now five days into the programme with two to go, today was a pair of whole days workshops on English Language and Maths. It was also a day in which there was a change in tone, tempo and activity. The English workshop got the delegates early into practical sessions based on speaking and listening in English using stories and the message/moral of the story as discussion points. In the Maths workshop the whole day was based around the PCAME technique with lots and lots of practical sessions for the classroom including playing fizz buzz, throwing dice, analysing the Premiership Football league table and lots more. And at a really practical level in the Maths workshop the delegates were introduced to using a simple laminated sheet of white A4 paper with a felt tip pen as a personal whiteboard. High technology indeed! One of the most pleasing things though was the connections that are starting to be made such as delegates talking about the structure of potential lesson plans during the English session and Maths delegates using the Constructivist pyramid (Bloom's Taxonomy) to identify steps such as remembering, understanding, and applying. I think we are starting to get somewhere!

Is there anybody there?

2011-04-16T02:40:00.000+01:00

Despite the hard work and efforts of everyone concerned with our programme in Kathmandu we don't seem to be getting many (any!) comments except from The Big Miss. We all need a bit of response and motivation from time to time, so do post up any comments or messages, we would really appreciate it whether you are back in the UK, here in Kathmandu, or somewhere else in the galaxy.

Teaching Techniques programme begins

2011-04-16T02:24:00.001+01:00

After the well earned rest of Nepal's New Year's day in which our merry band toured central Kathmandu streets and Thamel, the teacher training programme started again with a new focus on Teaching Tools & Techniques. The day comprised two half day workshops on Lesson Planning and Thinking Skills, neither being "natural topics" for Nepalese teachers. Thinking Skills is virtually something that they seem to expect children to park at home while they are talked at for 40 min sessions at a time each day in school! On the other hand Lesson Planning is a totally alien concept since it requires looking ahead! The importance of Lesson Planning to NSA was outlined by Janice our Educational Advisor several months ago when she pointed out that it was the main tool that could be used to focus everything else being learned on a daily basis. In other words provided we designed a lesson plan pro forma in a way that required teachers to THINK about lesson objectives, startup, activities, (including resources), a plenary to summarise and assessment then there could be no escape from doing things in a child centred way. Jenny and Chris delivered exactly this message with two groups of 20 teachers, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, practicing the building of a lesson plan across the session. Head teachers have now been tasked with implementing lesson planning thoroughly in their schools and this will be inspected in September as part of the decision making process as to which schools "win" the computers.

Educational Psychology Rules OK!

2011-04-13T16:24:00.001+01:00

Two days of educational psychology training concluded today and have given our teachers a basic understanding of some of the concepts associated with child development. These concepts have included development stages, child diversity, learning processes, motivation, assessment strategies all of which should underpin teaching at primary level.

We now have a one day break before launching the two day programme on Teaching Tools & Techniques on Friday. Tomorrow is Nepal's New Years Day with the date being Baisak 1, 2068.

Teacher Capability programme 2011 formally opens

2011-04-12T14:55:00.001+01:00

Well, after much preparation and organisation the Educational Psychology course within our programme kicked off on Tuesday morning. The pictures can tell the story, more details on Wednesday:

Alien Adventures in Kathmandu

2011-04-09T05:07:00.000+01:00

There are times to laugh and times to cry and I spent a few minutes laughing at a group of Nepali teachers participating in a p4c session during yesterday's workshop on Values. Based on Jason Buckley's alien adventures series all they had to do was to cooperate and lower the tent pole to the floor.

Click to view video

Today I'm wondering what I have let myself in for!!!

The NSA Academy kicks off with a Values focus

2011-04-08T15:36:00.001+01:00

Today was the first day of our teacher training programme although the grand opening is not until Tuesday. “Values” was the workshop topic and overall is the theme for the NSA 2011 programme. Our framework of Quality Education has Ethics & Values at it's core since we strongly believe that Nepalese education at primary level needs a strong dose of “morality” in the light of recent political events across the nation. The basis of the workshop was a classical psychologist's view that values drives behaviour as well as the reverse that inferences about values can be made from observed behaviour. Across the day, as well as a number of inputs on values definitions and types there were lots of exercises and activities in which our teachers identified their own values, associated behaviours, identified components of citizenship in their schools and the values they wish to teach. One extremely funny exercise was an episode from Jason Buckley's series of Alien Adventures based on a crash landed spaceship and the use of a helium pipe to breathe in a threatening atmosphere. I am grateful to Jason for sharing this activity with me and for teaching me all I know about P4C! In general this was an excellent day and is showing just how much progress our schools have made. The thought of trying to have run this session three years or even two years ago is quite frightening, but the Head teachers have gone away today with an enthusiasm and commitment to repeat all the exercises with their non English speaking staff immediately. The follow up to this session will occur on 19th April when everyone will be taught the process of P4C to begin introducing Values education in their schools.

NSA meeting sets the tone for 2011

2011-04-07T12:03:00.001+01:00

We had been planning, re-planning and re-re-planning this meeting for months. The purpose was always clear; “Clarify the year's objectives, communicate the details of the training programme, motivate sufficiently to encourage implementation over the next 6 months.” The means to achieve that purpose was being adapted right up to the last minute on Wednesday afternoon with agenda changes, discussion point changes and who says what changes. It was finalised by 2.30pm as the meeting began at 3.00pm! Champa opened the meeting which was attended by Head Teachers, School Committee chairmen, teachers and our tutors. She set the scene as to the meetings direction and the issues facing us for 2011. Brian then took over and guided the meeting in smaller groups through the forthcoming training programme, the tutor workshops schedule for the summer, the student testing schedule, the implementation of lesson planning, child centred teaching and the P4C process. The key message was that the time has come for evidence of progress in each school and that a serious schools inspection will be carried out in September to determine future and continuing membership of NSA. This should not be misread, we will not punish any lack of achievement, only a lack of effort. The rewards could be VERY high, but the consequences of non implementation of some key action points could be very serious. They HAVE to understand that we have now reached the point where no progress equals no donors equals no money equals no programme. Simples! Overall the response was very positive both as to the content of this years programme over the next 6 months as well as all the implementation plans and inspections. I think we have reached a stage where there is a high degree of trust and faith in what we do which is very motivational for us too. Tomorrow is the first day of the full programme with a workshop of Values in education. The rest of the programme continues on Tuesday with a two day course on educational psychology. More tomorrow.

Early Days In Kathmandu 2011

2011-04-05T02:51:00.003+01:00

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.

It could only happen in Nepal!

2011-03-30T14:00:00.001+01:00

This is what we are up against folks. It's hard enough persuading people to change or to accept new skills, but when they don't know the difference between right and wrong ....... This article taken from the web today!

"Parents, teachers demand right for children to cheat in Nepal exams"

"Kathmandu - A group of parents and teachers demonstrated outside a school exam centre in Chappani in central Nepal, demanding that their children be allowed to cheat in crucial year-end exams.

In a separate incident, Constituent Assembly member Kiran Kumari Ray was detained after her daughter allegedly took her place during the first two exams. The daughter, who was not named, was reportedly caught at the weekend as she was about to take the third paper.

Ray was back at the exam centre Monday, accompanied by a group of supporters from the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist-Leninist, which she represents in the assembly.

The politician has already been disqualified from the exams by the Comptroller of Examinations, the government body that conducts the school-leaving certificate exams, but she still sat the fourth paper at the Barathawa exam centre in the south-central district of Sarlahi.

Ray has dismissed as 'rumours' the allegations that someone else was taking the exams for her.

Many parents are prepared to go to any length to get their children through the exams and into higher education.

Fighting has reportedly broken out between police and students and parents miffed at their offspring being barred from cheating since the exams started Thursday. There have also been cases of invigilators being attacked for not allowing cheats into the classroom and of impostors taking exams."

Hot News!!

2011-03-28T14:20:00.000+01:00

Earlier this afternoon an investment company we have an existing relationship with agreed to partly fund a pilot programme to computerise ONE of our schools in Kathmandu. Pilot outcomes will be monitored and could lead to a number of our remaining schools receiving computers.

More to follow

Challenges and solutions to Nepal's education problems!

2011-03-20T11:17:00.004Z

An article in My Republica yesterday has raised just about every question you would want about the pathetic attempts to improve Nepal's education system. Written by Ram Sharan Sedhai it is initially based on Nepal attaining one of the essential Millennium Development Goals, "Universal Primary Education", and the fact that this is highly unlikely by 2015 as proscribed. Mr Sedhai has pulled no punches and speaks out against poor leadership, a lack of teacher training, incorrect pedagogies applied, budget mismanagement and inadequate policies, poor resources, and a distinct lack of coordination between government, charities, INGOs, NGOs, businesses etc.

I have summarised his key points below and it is heartening to note that he has offered solutions as well as being critical. I have extended an invitation to meet up with him during April and will post again when I hear from him.

If you want to read the article in full click Republica and you can email the author at ramsharan.sedhai@gmail.com

The Challenges

A lack of visionary leaders which in turn leads to insufficient budget to meet the growing needs, absence of pragmatic policies and programs to enrol and retain children in school, a lack of teachers’ management, and the government’s failure to stem inflation among others force school-going aged children to stay out of school.
Poverty has multiple impacts on education. A family which cannot afford even two meals a day hardly sends its children to schools that do not provide a day meal. Children suffering from malnutrition, chronic hunger, and having witnessed the siblings die from hunger and of easily treatable diseases like cholera and diarrhea are most unlikely to attend school.
A lack of coordination among the government agencies and the national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). There has been a huge misuse of financial and human resources due to duplication in work resultant of such non coordination. Hence, the literacy campaigns carried out by the successive governments has failed to deliver.
Incompetent school management committees (SMCs) resulting in a lack of monitoring and evaluation or school governance.
Teachers are most critical but they are largely unaccountable. Teachers absenteeism is one of the biggest problems, many are untrained and most are not motivated to put into practice what they have learned.Most of them are politically active.
A lack of child-friendly pedagogy or child centred learning methods applied.
Token representation of women in SMCs, few female teachers though mandatory, a lack of proper sanitation, violence against girls in, to and from schools.
Waiving children's fee alone does not render basic education free. The associated costs are manifold and very high. The opportunity cost has riddled primary education since there are no policies for enabling the poor parents to educate their children and no legal provision for taking action against those who do not educate.
A lack of teaching in mother tongues at primary level, limited textbooks available in native languages, and absence of trained or native speaker teachers are other reasons behind low enrolment, high repetition and drop-out rates. Similarly, incentives like day meal and cooking oil are confined to a very few places, and scholarships are discriminatory.

Solutions & Ways Forward

The government should formulate long-term policies and development plans to give impetus to its painfully slow and disrupted development process. There should be legal provisions for ensured annual incomes of the poor parents to enable them to educate their children compulsorily.

Special outreach programs for the children with disabilities, religious and ethnic minorities, Dalits, conflict victims, street children, trafficked, domestic helpers and HIV and AIDS-infected and -affected should be introduced. Similarly, the government should allocate 20 percent of the national budget and 6 percent of the GDP for education, end the lengthy and cumbersome process of releasing budget to schools, make education completely free, increase school opening days from 220 to 260 days and run schools in the Tarai during the day in summer.
Bring an end to extreme poverty and hunger, providing special care, treatment and diet to the HIV and AIDS-infected and -affected people, and special provisions for children with disabilities, religious and ethnic minorities and Dalits should be introduced.
There should be a strong mechanism for holding teachers, SMCs, parents-teachers’ associations and the stakeholders accountable for enrolment and retention of children, and a competent monitoring and evaluation body needs forming to weed out the ills of the whole school education system.
There should be complete coordination and collaboration between government agencies, national and international NGOs, public-private partnerships, to avoid duplication in work, to channel funding directly to education, to pool resources and invest productively. There is a strong need for founding a National Civil Society Education Fund.

The Caste system and education

2011-03-16T14:39:00.002Z

A quite relevant and topical article has just appeared in Republica newspaper in Nepal. Entitled Caste System and Pedagogy it describes the roots and history of the case system and attempts to debunk a lot of the popular beliefs about it being rooted in the Hindu religion.

"The Caste system is interpreted as having been validated by the Hindu religion and scriptures. Fundamentalists have it that caste is in religion. But none of the Hindu scriptures seem to have stood for this system. In Ramayana lord Rama advocates the end of discrimination by taking bayar (jujube fruit) from Saubari, a woman ostracized by the sages for being untouchable and who then lives in isolation at the edge of a forest, and by liberating her. And in Bhagwat Gita Lord Krishna ordains that “elephant, cow, dogs, and Brahmins are the same for a wise man,” thus, speaking against discrimination. School education of this era must teach such realities and history to its children. And the products of this education will hopefully be able to eliminate caste based discrimination."

Read the full article at Republica

The article goes on to assert that there is a distinct lack of teaching about the caste system in Nepal's education curriculum which he believes is perpetuating the system to the advantage of Brahmins and Chettris for example and to the detriment of Dalits in particular. We would tend to agree with this and are trying to do something about it but at times it is a lonely battle. For example we have no influence whatsoever on the curriculum and it would be wrong of us to try and manipulate it in individual schools. But there may be a way! The government has just introduced "values" as a curriculum topic and we intend to introduce the technique of P4C to 120 teachers from 6 Dalit community schools in April. It shouldn't be too difficult to have groups of teachers and children discussing diversity and discrimination for example in philosophy based sessions.

If you agree then please post a comment below.

Probably the best email in the world!

2011-03-14T09:48:00.000Z

We all have good days and bad days. We all have days with bits of bad and bits of good. Some days are a mixture of VERY bad and VERY good, hopefully in that order, and we seem to be having one! Having heard that we were not to receive the £72,000 grant we had applied for to computerise our schools we received an email from Chiri Babu Maharjan in Kathmandu. Chiri is the chairman of the Bal Bigyan school management committee and we had recently written to the Principal of his school asking if they had any knowledge of formalised literacy tests we could use to seek evidence of our progress. Chiri replied on behalf of the school as follows:

"Dear Brian,

We believe that we do not have any method in practice for measurement of literacy tests in Nepal. However, we firmly believe that there have been many improvements noticeably seen in our community school, particularly after we have received good support from Nepal Schools Aid (UK). They are many, however the following are the main ones:

Currently we have a total of 301 students from pre-primary to Grade 8. This number is so far the highest over the school's history of more than 50 years. Recently, the District Education Office had forcefully merged quite a few contemporary schools of Patan due to lack of students. But, Bal Bigyan enjoys a comfortable position
Girl students have been increased tremendously over the period of last 3 years.
Bal Bigyan has been able to provide quality education at free of cost. Most of the students are also receiving books, stationery and uniforms freely. Parents have been relaxed from economic burden. One can see big smiles on the students and parents.
Drop-outs and absenteeism have been substantially less.
Parents liked adoption of English as teaching method and have shown their interests in enrollment of their children in the school. It was not like that previously.
We expect that over a priod of next 3-4 years, our students will be able to compete with other students from the renowned and expensive schools.
Renowned schools of the adjoining areas have now shown their interest for enrollment in higher classes of the graduates of this school. Indeed these days they visit in person for that purpose.
Local community and NGOs/INGOs have also extended their cooperation in providing potable water system in the school that includes digging a deep well, installation of an expensive filtration plant, and providing overhead tanks. A nice student friendly library has also been established in the school recently. Lay down of school infrastructures will be continued in days to come.
These days Bal Bigyan has been popularly known by other schools for its Tutors who are providing excellent trainings to teachers from other local schools.

On behalf of the students, SMC and teachers, I take this opportunity to thank you and your team for the great support that Bal Bigyan is receiving from NSA."

I don't think I need to add anything to this unedited section of his email.

UK Minister increases aid to Nepal

2011-03-10T08:37:00.001Z

Just like London buses you wait for ages then TWO turn up, UK Minister of State For Overseas Development makes TWO visits to Nepal within 9 months of being appointed. I can't remember his Labour Party predecessor visiting at all! Good news all round too as he increases UK aid to Nepal by around 50% rising to a 90% increase within a couple of years.

A report in today's Himalayan Times states:

"With an allocation of £331 million, the UK government has committed to support Nepal over the next four years (2011-2015) in the plan in various sectors including the country’s peace process.

According to a DFID statement, the money will be used to support the peace process, help strengthen governance and improve security and access to justice; help poor and excluded people benefit from economic growth; help deliver better health and education services; help Nepal adapt to climate change; reduce risk from disasters, including earthquake; and to Improve the lives of women and girls."

We don't always agree with DFID's allocation of funds for development in Nepal, too much being spent on "the peace process", whatever that means, or on building a school in one area that costs millions. We do write to them and try to bear influence but UK civil servants plus Nepali politicians are a powerful bureaucratic force!

Trustee Chairman slams Nepal education statistics!

2011-02-18T13:43:00.003Z

We all probably know the quote about " .... lies, damn lies and statistics" and this can certainly be applied to some of the general statistics floating around about Nepal's educational performance at the moment. As initial background Nepal has signed up to the UN's Millenium Development Goals one of which is Universal Primary Education by 2015. This means that the country is supposed to achieve 100% of children taking (and completing) primary education by 2015. The figures put out by the government over the past couple of years has shown a steady increase where last year it was quoted as 94.9%, a long way forward from the initial 80% or so. The problem however is that this overall figure hides some disturbing facts and here are a few:

Nepal female literacy 54%, male literacy 81%
Secondary education female 29%, male secondary education 53%
Tarai region Dalit caste female literacy 17%, male literacy 48%
Tarai region Dalit caste female secondary education 5%, male secondary education 19%

So, when you analyse deeper the overall progress figure of 94.9% this probably means nothing more than that this is the % of children who enrol at primary school. Of course it tells us nothing about the ever present male-female divide, regional differences or most importantly the serious disadvantage felt by Dalits as a caste group. We are interested in these figures for two reasons. Firstly the children attending our 6 schools in Kathmandu are mostly Dalits and we are therefore strengthened in our resolve to help this massively underprivileged group of children, born into poverty and discrimination, destined for nothing and nowhere. Secondly the Nepalese government's so called strategy to assist this group is so short sighted to be laughable. They seem to think that scholarships for boys and girls is the answer, pay them all around £3 or so each to buy a school uniform and stationery and this will solve the problem. I don't think I have ever heard anything so outrageous and destined to fail. Put £3 in a Dalit's hand and most of them will buy milk and food for their infant children! Can you blame them? Why can't the government just supply the schools with stationery just as we at Nepal Schools Aid do? What is the point of a school uniform when you don't have a pen, a pencil, a textbook? Why bother to come to school at all when it's so mind numbingly boring sitting rigidly at a desk listening to a teacher drone on about Pythagoras, Queen Victoria or English past tense verbs? Where is the child centred learning, where is the creativity, the play? When will this blasted government and the foreign aid agencies start listening to a different strategy to transform the education system instead of pouring money down the drain?

A little local publicity

2011-02-15T11:20:00.001Z

In the last three years since foundation Nepal Schools Aid has sought very little publicity in it's "home area" preferring most of the media attention to be wherever volunteer work was being done, such as in South Cumbria or Kathmandu itself. However the local press in Gloucestershire got wind of our work and asked for an interview and article describing our background and work and today this has been published in the Wiltshire & Gloucestershire Standard newspaper. The full article is available on the web here so just click on the link to read. The article describes our history, Champa's background, our objective and our regular work so if you are interested in an "archaeological piece" just click on the link.

Himalaya School Goes Environmental!

2011-02-14T09:29:00.001Z

A group of Year 7 students and teachers from Himalaya Secondary School recently took part in a field trip to the temple of Ichangu Narayan. This temple is situated about 3km from Swayambhu just outside the Ring Road from the Buddha Park. The existing temple was built in the 1700's as far as I can establish but stands on a site where the original shrine dates back to around 1200 AD.

The main purpose of the trip seems to have been related to the environment which is a very good topic for schools in Kathmandu with the extremely poor standards of water, hygiene and sanitation everywhere to be seen. The children and staff took part in a clean-up of the temple area and also provided some food and drinks for the young orphaned children in the local Children's Development Centre.

The photographs show some of their activities and we are pleased to see the teachers involved in the cleaning too which is not so common in Nepal. Too often many will stand back and let others do the work and this is a good example of some of the values we will be trying to promote in our April programme of training. (Respect and Cooperation).

Teacher training in Nepal …... ready to go!

2011-02-02T10:25:00.000Z

Only two months to go now before the 2011 NSA Academy programme of teacher training is launched in Kathmandu. All materials are ready after months of preparation by volunteer teachers from South Cumbria and NSA staff and have been sent to Nepal for the lengthy process of printing and binding, which considering they are currently experiencing 14 hours per day of power cuts will take some time!

The 2011 programme has four key elements to it which are:

Two days of training on Educational Psychology
Two days of training on Teaching Tools & Techniques
Two days of training on Subject Teaching (Maths and English)
Two days of training on Values & Ethics

As many of you will know our approach is initially to train the 40 best English speaking teachers from our 6 schools on this programme, which is then followed up by our Nepalese Tutors who convert the programme into Nepali and deliver it to the remaining 80 or so teachers over a 6 month period. In addition each year we invite delegates from Nepal's Ministry of Education to attend as part of our agreement at national level to help them develop teacher training nationwide.

If anyone would like to know more about our programme or how you might help with donations please contact us info@nepalschoolsaid.co.uk or visit our main website www.nepalschoolsaid.co.uk

English Language: News from Kathmandu #6

2010-12-22T15:39:00.000Z

"Reporting on the head teacher's workshop that just finished earlier today. We thought the workshop went really well. The head teachers and teachers worked really well together, as did the schools. We asked schools to work

together for the first group work session to discuss ideas for school improvement. The second session was done in two big groups – one of head teachers and one of teachers. Both groups brainstormed the qualities of a good headteacher – the results were quite interesting! It seemed like the teachers really enjoyed making their list, they

even used a mind map! The reactions of the head teachers were very positive and appreciative. The feedback from both groups about this activity was positive and goodhearted.

The school improvement plans were quite impressive. Each group filled up an entire A3 sheet, or two! They mentioned many ideas that we had already thought of, but also brought up some very innovative suggestions.

In the afternoon, the school groups got back together and brainstormed about "Problems and Priorities" regarding their move to English Medium. We all realize this is going to be a slow and steady process. This filled up another A3 sheet, and the headteachers took all of their sheets back with them, with assigned homework: they have to make a mindmap which shows school improvement in combination with a plan for moving into English Medium (a long term plan). We felt that everybody worked hard and were focused during all group work activities.

After our experience today, we feel that Janak and Anil would make excellent tutors. We learned that there was actually a lot going on already in terms of school improvement – some of our ideas are already up and happening at Lalit Kalyan and Himalaya.

To finish off the afternoon, we showed a few activities that could be used in English workshops of their own . These were well received and at times produced very funny and entertaining results. Our favourite was Janak's dramatic reenactment of a scene from the famous Nepali poem, Muna Madan! We were so pleased that we managed to get all the participants to act! It was great to see everyone break away from the grammatical analytical learning that they are accustomed to. We see that there is definitely a possibility for change in both learning and teaching practices in Nepal.

We were presented with a token of love from Chiri Babu and Parsuram from Bal Bigyan. We were touched! Earlier in the week, we received a token of love from Ramesh at Lalit Kalyan. We will treasure these gifts as a reminder of the great time we had in Kathmandu!

Tomorrow we are going to visit one last school, Sree Sramik and then we're off! We feel we have put an enormous amount of energy into these two weeks – more than we thought we would! However, we really enjoyed
working with these teachers and headteachers. We feel we have made a positive impact here in Patan. Thank you for those who commented on the blog so far – it's nice to know there is interest in what we've been doing."

Namaste.

M&M (two tired smarties :) )

English Language: News from Kathmandu #5

2010-12-19T17:00:00.000Z

Today the focus of our process changed. Previous days had been based in-school and used observation and demonstration as the vehicle for development, but today it was time for a teacher training workshop. Based at the Greenwich Hotel in Patan M&M put the Heads and teachers from Bal Vinod and Bal Bigyan schools through their paces. A very important lesson here for our volunteers of 2011: Run part of the session as if in-school with the teachers as pupils!

"Overall, we felt the workshop was a success. We thought the teachers picked up a lot of useful tips and new activities that they can use in their own classrooms. The practical component worked really well - we used the teachers as pupils, thereby letting them experience this "new" method of language teaching from the pupil's point of view. We made an effort to explain how each activity worked: which learner type was targeted, how the activity could be used at different levels, and speaking/reading/writing/listening were also highlighted in the course of each activity. All the activities were theme based around a unit concerning Sports. We wanted to show how they could transition from their current grammar-based system to a theme-based approach to language teaching. The practical section was very well received and we could see some light bulbs going off.

As foreseen, there was indeed a bit of language barrier between us and the teachers who attended the workshop today. This was more apparent in the morning, when we were focusing on the theory behind different learning types and styles. We are wondering if this is a result of different pronunciations (us versus Nepali pronunciation) or whether it is actual language. Some basic culture differences emerged during the course of the workshop as well. We found many similarities between the pupils we had observed in the schools, and the teachers who came to the workshop. It is apparent that they are accustomed and trained to copy - they were constantly picking up their pens to write something down, even when it wasn't part of the activity! They were hesitant to challenge or question concepts or information we were presenting (again, this may be a language issue). It's apparent that the role of the teacher is respected - which is great on one hand, but on the other hand, it made the feedback forms we received at the end of the workshop not very useful. The feedback forms simply repeated the questions back to us, with some affirmative answers. During the course of some of the auditory activities, it was clear the teachers were not listening to each other. We saw this in the schools, where pupils were talking or writing while other members of the class were answering the teacher's questions. After this workshop, we realize that the most important thing to concentrate on in the future of this project is language training for the teachers. As the teachers learn more English, they can transfer that knowledge to the pupils. This will take some time.

We are altering a few things for tomorrow's workshop, as some of the school participating have very little knowledge of English. Wish us luck!"

Until then,
M&M

The Kathmandu Post-"Moral education in middle schools"

2010-12-19T10:20:00.000Z

Would you believe it, the article below has just appeared in today's Kathmandu post and at least tells us we are on the right lines with our plans for this next year, including the teaching of P4C techniques. On the one hand it's gratifying, but on the other hand we can't help but feel like we have been visionary and right all along!

KATHMANDU, DEC 18 -
Concluding that the new breed of students are exhibiting an ever diminishing level of morality in the absence of moral teaching, the Curriculum Development Centre (CDC) is endorsing moral education as a separate and compulsory subject in the school-level curriculum.

The reform comes almost one-and-a-half decades after the government dropped the “Naitik Sikshya” [moral education] course from its old curriculum. The CDC believes the course will infuse students with morality. The syllabus that has been approved by the Ministry of Education will get an entry as a compulsory course —Moral Education—in grades six to eight. The course will have 50 marks in the annual examination. Chitra Prasad Devkota, Director General of the CDC, said, “If the work goes as planned, the course will be incorporated in the curriculum from the upcoming session.” The textbook will give students a ready set of values, rights and wrongs that helps them to fortify their faculty of judgment in the long run.

The CDC took the step as teachers and intellectuals suggested the necessity of moral education to reverse the dropping standards of morality in students.

Education experts hold exposure of children to violent films and decade-long conflict in the country responsible for the violent activities today’s kids have internalised. “Moral lessons in schools can play a crucial role in mitigating such types of problem,” Bidhya Nath Koirala, an education expert, said. “It will help develop a sense of rights, duty, honour, non violence and humanity.” According to Devkota, the book will deal mainly with six topics. It will include the norms and values the world has adopted as well as individuals’ responsibility and duty. The book will also comprise lessons on peace, truth, good behaviour and non-violence.

“The moral education imparted during the Panchayat era intended to promote the partyless regime and religion,” said Devkota. “But, the new syllabus will teach students self-discipline.”
Click HERE for the actual article

Posted on: 2010-12-19 09:18

English Language: News from Kathmandu 4

2010-12-18T06:57:00.001Z

Here we go, the comments are getting funnier!

Greetings!

I taught my second lesson this morning at Lalit Kalyan. This was a grade 4 class that we had observed doing a lesson with storytelling two days previous. I wanted to also do a lesson that involved storytelling and showing different methods of helping students to recall and retell a story. I did, however, underestimate the English level of the students! Perhaps because both lessons we delivered yesterday were so well received, we were left with the impression that we were underestimating the ability level of the students – so we planned this lesson to be a little bit more complex. Halfway through the lesson, I realized the students' ability was not high enough to comprehend the full content of the lesson we had planned.

The lesson progressed in stages, from me telling the story with pictures, to reviewing the story with the pictures on the wall, to the students putting the pictures in the correct order. We then moved to trying to sequence the bits of dialogue from the story in order as well. After some repetition of the instructions in Nepali from the teachers who were present, the students caught on fast enough and understood the dialogue. The next stage of retelling and recalling was where the lesson plan got too complex. It was clear to me as I was teaching, and if it had been my regular class, I would have known when I was pushing them, and when I was losing them. I think it was good, however, for the teachers to see the gradual sequence of activities, and how it might progress to more complex tasks – all of them, however, still based around a very simple story! In any case, not every lesson goes over perfectly, and as teachers, we are all too familiar with how seemingly random this can be. We might teach the exact same lesson to two different classes and get two completely different responses. In any case, the students did learn some new words, learned a new story, and were eager to learn more. I am constantly impressed by how attentive and adaptable the students here are.

In the afternoon, we visited a school we had not yet been to. As we were driving there, we crossed the river for the first time. A cow was grazing on garbage along the riverbank. Plastic bags, orange peels, rubble, dead birds, everything was everywhere. I started to think that the garbage truck we had seen around town simply came to the river and dumped everything there. There were definitely no tourists in this part of town. If you didn't know where the school was, you would walk right past it. Amidst a bunch of ramshackle houses (I'm guessing they were once temporarily houses), there is a very narrow three story concrete building that houses the school. I have never seen classrooms so small! Martine already mentioned the grade 1 class we observed, but we also went downstairs to observe a grade 5 class.

The grade 5 class took place in the narrowest classroom I have ever seen. There was an aisle down the left hand wall, barely wide enough for one body, and 5 rows of long benches and desks down the right side of the room. For purely logistical reasons, many of our teaching techniques and ideas would be simply impossible to do in a setting like this. The class was working from a textbook on a chapter called “Famous People”. The teacher read the text out loud in English, sentence by sentence, pausing after each sentence and explaining it in Nepali. The text was about Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Raleigh. I turned around and looked at the tin roofs held down by old rubber tires. I couldn't help but think, who cares about Hamlet when there is nothing to eat? Is Queen Elizabeth really relevant when you are sleeping next to a pig pen inside your house?

I am certain that it is just as easy to teach the simple past tense with Nepali heroes and celebrities, as it is with 16^th century English monarchs. The students would gain so much more from their language learning if it applied to their daily lives and fuelled their imaginations about their own country and heritage. I truly felt like I had stepped back in time to colonial days – and yet Nepal has remained fiercely independent. This is visible everywhere, except in the educational resources – why?

We are looking forward to a productive day tomorrow, perfecting the workshop content for Sunday's presentation. I wish we had more opportunity to spend time in the schools; alas, exams are ongoing and then holidays begin.

Until Sunday!

Monika

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Namaste,

Today was quite a different day from the others as we went to visit Bal Kalyan school in the afternoon.

It is situated much further north about ½ hour's drive in the taxi. As the journey progressed, my mood changed. The area we drove through was very poor and all along the river rubbish was dumped in great big piles, animal carcasses amongst the rubble,...almost a typical Nepal scene, but several degrees higher.

We walked the last leg through a narrow street where children played in the dirt with their ever present smile.

The teachers were very welcoming and we observed a Grade 1 class: they were learning the vowels of the English alphabet. The teacher showed them the letters on bits of paper and the children pronounced them individually. She was very lovely with these deprived kids. The first teacher this week I noticed actually smiling at the children, encouraging their learning and praising them!!They all looked really happy to be there and to be learning.

However she kept up the same pattern for a bit too long I found. Reading a simple story to the children and letting them find vowels in a different context would have kept their attention a bit longer.

I taught them a short lesson, new words to do with sporting activities. I used a lot of actions to go with the pronunciation to help them remember the words later. They loved that and theyalmost got overexcited, but I managed to calm them down with another activity.

We did a couple of team games and that went down well! I was amazed at how quickly they picked up and adopted these activities. Their hands shot up to have a go and they didn't shy away from repeating the words individually.

Afterwards in the staffroom the feedback was limited due to the fact that the teachers don't speak much English. And why should they I wondered. Here they are doing a brilliant job teaching children who have less than nothing, who would play in the dirt if they didn't come to school, and they manage to give them some sort of education! The children come to school...what an achievement and hat off to those teachers. The rooms in which they have to deliver the lessons are very small...one can hardly move in them. I left with a feeling I can't quite describe...and also with the thought that we can't approach this school the same way we are approaching the others.

More tomorrow,

Martine

English Language: News from Kathmandu #3

2010-12-16T17:05:00.000Z

More news from Martine and Monika:

"Hello everyone! Yesterday we spent most of the afternoon on a rooftop cafe preparing lessons for today: our first day of teaching. Monika taught at Bal Vinod and I delivered a lesson at Bal Bigyan.

It was a great experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The children had come in specially to be taught by us. Something that would never happen in England! There were 24 pupils and they couldn't wait to enter the classroom whilst I was preparing it.
Once we started I could not quite believe how adaptable the pupils were. They are so used to shouting out answers ad hoc and repeating after the teacher in a very haphazard way, but after a few times of me demonstrating how I preferred them to answer in unison, they very quickly adapted their behaviour. Their enthusiasm was amazing and they loved the action based teaching. The boys in particular were participating well and very excited to win the competitions.
One thing that really amused me was the fact that the pupils stand up to answer a question and don't sit down unless told to do so. At times I noticed pupils just standing behind their desksa and wondered why...they were just waiting for me to say they could sit down again.
It is fantastic to teach such keen pupils. Their English comprehension is very good. All credit to the teachers. The pupils are also happy in the school, they want to be there and that is lovely to see.
At the end of the lesson I was almost mobbed and showered with questions, in particular “Do you like Nepal?” They are very proud of their country and want us to like it as well. They also asked for my autograph before they left and for a moment I almost felt like a famous star!
I will always remember this lesson, especially the smiles and above all the keenness of the boys!
Tea and biscuits were duly served and lots of teachers joined us in the classroom to chat about the lesson.
I am looking forward to the lesson at the school we were unable to reach yesterday.
Until then.
Martine

------------------------------------------------------------------------

So today was our first teaching day at the schools here. I taught in the morning at Bal Vinod. It was the same class we observed two days ago, and I decided to make this class a follow-up to what they had learned on Tuesday. Before class began, two girls came into the room and were surprised to see me there, setting up. I asked them if they wanted to help and they assisted me in posting vocabulary words on the walls of the room. All the students stand up when the teacher enters the room, and they wait for you to give them permission to sit down. On the one hand, such formalities are nice, and on the other hand - so unfamiliar! The lesson continued on the theme of "introductions", giving students the vocabulary and the sentence structure to be able to introduce themselves as well as other people. I tried to make the class as interactive as possible - mixing in strategies for visual, kinesthetic and auditory learners. The students seemed to enjoy the class, and I received positive feedback from the teachers as well as the headteacher who observed the class. After both Martine's class and my class, someone would always approach me and comment about how good it was, and at the same time, how they see how much planning it takes!! This is very true - to make lessons work for all the different learning types, and also to incorporate all the language skills in each lesson DOES take a tremendous amount of planning. The smiles on the students' faces, and their improved pronunciation is a great pay-off though!

Both Martine and I were impressed with how quickly the students caught on to our requests. We taught them to raise their hands instead of shouting out, and within 2 tries, everyone seemed to get it. We could not, however, stop them from jumping to their feet when they were called upon. And of course, as Martine mentioned, we would forget to ask them to sit, and 2 minutes later, might find them still standing, rooted to their spot! It's a joy to teach such eager learners. I still can't believe they voluntarily came to school on their day off - nowhere in North America would that happen! I could see that the boys especially were happy to be up and out of their seats for some of the activities, and the girls took the speed/competition exercises very seriously. Overall, I think the methods and exercises we tried out today were successful. There will be an adjustment period, but the students adapt far more quickly than we would have imagined. I look forward to tomorrow's lesson. Each class is always different, and it will be another great experiment to see how these students take to our ideas.

Wishing you a pleasant evening, or day, or whatever time zone you're in - enjoy!"

Monika

English Language: News from Kathmandu #2

2010-12-15T10:07:00.002Z

Another post from Martine and Monika in Kathmandu.

"Today we observed another class in Lalit Kalyan, and again we were welcomed in the usual friendly Nepali way with tea and biscuits and plenty of smiles.

The teacher had written the objectives on the blackboard and topic, so it looked promising.

She also had written words and sentences on paper for the pupils to read while she was telling a story. Unfortunately I could not understand the story, as she told it very quickly. She made the pupils repeat words over and over again and made them spell the words individually. It was hard to give feedback as the Head told us she was a very good teacher, who had taught at the school for quite some time. The teacher herself asked us for feedback immediately after the lesson (in front of the children) and we told her how enthusiastic the children were and how impressed we were with the resources she was using...

I was mobbed by the children after the lesson! They are very excited.

We are very much aware of how different both teachers and pupils are re learning. We have spent all morning on a rooftop reviewing the workshop for the teachers. we have kept most of my original plan, but altered a few approaches as now we have a better idea of how they work and how their English is. We want it to go really well with plenty of practical stuff.

We can not observe this afternoon as we can't reach the school due to demonstrations all over Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur. The government has put up oil prices and people are very angry...

The only big down side here is the pollution. I had to buy a mask to protect me a bit from all those toxic fumes.My lungs are used to the healthy mountain air...Hopefully we can escape to the country side again on our free day?

We have taken loads of pictures and will try to send some, but the internet connection in the cybercafe is VERY slow. It takes me around 20 minutes before I can even read my mail!

But no complaints.

One thing I had forgotten since my last visit was how Nepali people don't like to say 'no'. So when we went walking the other day a conversation would go like this:

"To the temple, 15 minutes?" Reply: "yes"

"Or 30 minutes?" Reply: "yes"

"Or 1 hour?" reply: "may be"

A supposedly 1 1/2 hour walk took us about 4 hours, but who cares in such a friendly place?"

More soon

Martine
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"We saw one more lesson this morning (unfortunately the afternoon was canceled due to a political protest caused by rising oil prices). This lesson used more resources than the others we have seen so far. It was a Grade 4 class with approximately 15 students present. The class started off with a quiet meditation/blessing which the students took very seriously. The objective was clear on the board, though both Martine and I were confused by the end of the lesson. It was not clear that the objective had been met, nor were the students made aware of the objective. I think just a little bit more lesson plan structure would be a simple and highly productive addition - by using a starter (or introductory activity) and a short plenary (or quick review) at the end of the lesson, students would find their language learning more grounded, and not just random words floating through their minds for 40 minutes.
The teacher made quite an effort using visuals to tell a story to the students. Once the story was finished, students were asked to pronounce and spell out vocabulary words from the story. This went on for quite some time. Students are asked to rise from their seats, and once they are standing, they say the word, spell it, and then say the word again, spelling bee style. Later, the students were asked to come to the front of the room and do a similar activity. This time the whole class repeated back what the student at the front had said. This caused some rather erroneous pronunciation of many of the words.
After observing three classes, there are some recurring elements coming up. Drills are popular - asking the students to repeat words over and over again, or spell them over and over again. Individual work is most common - we have not seen any group work and just a small element of partner work. What perhaps is most different from the way we teach languages in the UK (and Canada) is the lack of context in the learning here. Each lessons seems separate from the rest. I'm not sure if this is a factor of us arriving during exam time, and thus seeing "unreal" lessons in an isolated fashion, but even the way the textbook is structured, there is no overarching theme that the students can hold onto. They move from grammar to spelling to another grammar point, perhaps to a small game, and then a written drill. The topics and the vocabulary do not hang together as a coherent whole.
We are a bit hesitant offering negative feedback or "constructive criticism" at this stage. After all, what is being done is not "wrong" per se, it is just a different style of teaching. We hope that by attending the workshop, the teachers will be able to gather some fresh ideas and methods that they can apply in their classrooms. Changing from the "old fashioned" system to what he have now in the UK (and North America) was a gradual change that took over 50 years, so we certainly can't expect overnight results here! I feel that more resources would certainly be helpful - flashcards, vocabulary packs, laminated short story boards, etc. But at the same time, through the workshop, Martine and I hope we have can show the teachers that even with minimal resources, there are different approaches that can be taken.
Tomorrow I teach in the morning, and Martine in the afternoon - it should make for an interesting report!

Monika :)

English Language: News from Kathmandu #1

2010-12-14T17:39:00.002Z

Today begins our programme of English Language coaching for teachers in Kathmandu which includes a mixture of observation, demonstration, workshops and a strategic workshop for head teachers. Our two intrepid volunteers out there are two friends, Martine from Cumbria, UK and Monika from Canada. They seem to be having a great time of it, here is their first report:

"Sorry I haven't written before this or replied to your text message Champa, but I thought it would cost too much to send.

We escaped the pollution for 1 day and night in Nagarkot. We walked for about 6 hours in the countryside on our way back to Bakhtapur via Chang Narayan.

Today was our first day of observing. Babita took us to visit Bal Vinod in the morning where we observed a class 5 taught by Janak. We were welcomed in the usual friendly Nepal way and it is difficult to comment on the teaching as it is so 'different' and so much how I do not teach. It was also hard to give any feedback without being too critical.The pupils are well behaved but, as you warned us, taught in a very old fashioned way.

In the afternoon we went to Bal Bigyan and were welcomed by the head master and we also met a lot of teachers. We were offered tea and biscuits and had a chance to chat to all in the staffroom which was great. We also admired the library and I had a chance to set up a future exchange/correspondence with a secondary school in Dalton which showed interest before I left. We observed another class 5 and noticed the same method.

I will leave space for Monika to write some more and we'll be in touch (that is if we can catch a time when the electricity is on!!)

Martine

----------------------------------------------------------

I have had a great time in Nepal so far - my bag was delayed in Delhi and both Madan and Bashu kindly waited an extra hour for me while I waited for my bag inside. They we both friendly and gracious and made me feel very welcome in Kathmandu. The taxi ride to the hotel was a visual adventure. I was in northern India 4 years ago and many of the sights and sounds were familiar.

As Martine mentioned, we managed to escape up to Nagarkot for one night and take in the beautiful vistas of the Himalayas. Not only did we walk all the way to Chang Narayan, we also walked 5km to the army base's viewing tower to see the sunrise - and we barely made it in time! It was good to get some fresh air and stretch our legs before returning to Patan.
The guest house is lovely and friendly people are always on hand to answer our questions or at least mime some answers. Today was our first visit to the schools and I thought it was very insightful. Both Martine and I were hesitant in finalizing our thoughts and plans before seeing how things really WERE, and we definitely learned a lot today. The teaching methods and the book seem familiar to me because I was taught French in a similar manner during my elementary and secondary education in Canada. I am hoping that Martine and I together can give the teachers many alternative ideas and methods for language teaching. We hope to offer less focus on copying and book-work and more interactive learning strategies. I am a little bit apprehensive about the workshop, only because I foresee a bit of a language barrier between us and the teachers. I am confident though that by demonstrating and actually having the teachers do the activities they might do with the students, that we will give them some food for thought about their approach to English language teaching.
In any case, tomorrow is a new day and I'm looking forward to observing two more lessons. The students have all been incredibly friendly and polite. There are certainly no classroom management issues here, what a relief!

I trust you are well. We will be writing again tomorrow, if electricity and internet connectivity are on our side!

Monika"

Guardians call on education minister

2010-12-13T10:37:00.004Z

Amplify’d from www.thehimalayantimes.com

The Himalayan Times - Saved Articles(s)

KATHMANDU: The new executive committee elected by the fourth national convention of Nepal National Guardians’ Association (NNGA) today submitted a memorandum to Minister for Education Sarbendra Nath Shukla.
NNGA General Secretary Bam Dev Gautam said the 14-member delegation today handed over a 31-point charter of demand to the education minister.
Gautam said, “Though the constitution has guaranteed education as a basic right of all children, it is yet be institutionalised; therefore, the government must institutionalise this right. We have demanded that the government provide quality education with appropriate infrastructure for community school students.”
NNGA has also demanded quotas for teachers and school staff in places that lack them.
He said, “At a time when criminal activities such as abduction and murder of children are rife, the government should control these and severely punish criminals.”
Likewise, the government should also implement past agreements reached with teachers, students and others concerned, said Gautam.
Transparency in scholarship in private and community schools, action against schools running without permission, proper management of Tribhuvan University and Higher Secondary Education Board and guardians’ participation in parents teachers association are some of their demands.
The minister assured he would fulfil the demands.
Read more at www.thehimalayantimes.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/ia4n

Message from Chairman of SMC at Bal Bigyan

2010-12-11T07:09:00.000Z

We all need motivation, and the communication received below via email from Chiri Babu, the chairman of the school management committee at Bal Bigyan school has certainly given us a much needed boost. If only the other Chairman and Heads would do the same!

Being chairman of SMC, I heartily acknowledge your valuable support to this school. I thank you and your team for this, which we could not manage without. Enrolment of students has been increasing every year, drop-outs almost negligible, and poor parents are quite happy with the school. This has been possible due to you and your team's efforts.

You are aware that our school did receive a potable water project, which includes a filtration plant as well as installation of water distribution system. A deep well has been dug in the school premises as the source of water, and two elevated water tanks have been provided. The system works nicely and the students have been benefitted greatly. The project was sponsored jointly by the Japanese Rotary Club (Kandenko!) and the Kasthamandap Rotary Club.

Similarly, the Room to Read (an INGO) has provided a nice library in the school. All the students including teachers have been benefitted greatly.

Your potential upcoming school computer scheme is a great thought. Hopefully it will implement nicely. I guess our school is one of the potential but strong candidates for this scheme. Since our school does not have any computers so far, it would be an added advantage to the students, teachers and the school. The SMC will upgrade the school security to safeguard the investment. The SMC probably would need to construct infrastructure for a computer lab. The students, teachers and SMC are eager to hear from you the good news. It will definately bring big smiles on the students, teachers and SMC as well.

Please do not hesitate to contact to me in case I can be of any help.

With regards,

200,000 Child Workers in Kathmandu Valley

2010-12-04T05:04:00.001Z

A report in the Kathmandu Post today highlights the level of Child Labour in the country and shows nearly a quarter of a million children being exploited in Kathmandu alone. Once again this demonstrates the importance of our work in developing quality education in 7 schools in the inner city.

KATHMANDU, DEC 02 -

The fragile economic condition and the failure to enforce legal provisions have put a large number of children on the brink of risk. The report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) released on Thursday paints a gloomy picture of child labour in Nepal.

The country report reveals that of total 7.77 million children in the age group 5 to 7 years, 40.4 percent (3.14 million) are in some sort of child labour. The situation is more serious in the rural areas where 2.94 million children are involved in labour while it is 1.93 million in urban areas and 0.20 million in Kathmandu valley.

“About 19.7 percent of the working children are engaged in hazardous condition which is likely to harm their health, safety and morals,” said Shengjie Li, ILO Country Director. “Of them, majority are girls, which is a serious problem.” The report shows that a majority of children work in agriculture, followed by domestic, services and manufacturing sectors. The children working as porters, rag pickers, working in carpet and other factories, restaurants and in the transport sector are living a pathetic life. “Such labour force even suffers from mental and physical tortures and sexual abuse,” Bishnu Dev Pant, ILO-International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) consultant, said.

Everest Trek launched

2010-12-02T10:53:00.001Z

We are pleased to announce the launch of our 2011 trek to Everest Base Camp taking place during October 2011. The trek is in collaboration with the management consultancy, Enterprise Learning, who have invited a number of people to participate. We now have a full team of trekkers who still need sponsoring. All sponsorship monies are being focused on funding our potential computerisation project at a number of schools in Kathmandu.

If you would like to read more then please visit our trek blog by clicking on the link below:

Enterprise Learning Everest Trek

More developments at Bal Bigyan

2010-11-02T17:27:00.001Z

Bal Bigyan opens new library

2010-10-10T18:30:00.002+01:00

Our previous posting reported on the good work of our two Tutors at Bal Bigyan schoool, Babita and Bashu who are constantly working to develp the school as a child centred institution. None of this would be possible without a progressive Head teacher and Parsuram Baral certainly qualifies in this respect.
About one year ago we came across a rather sorry looking room in the school with one small bookcase and only one of it’s shelves half full of books. So, we set Parsuram a challenge which was to create a well equipped library room that would contain reference materials for both children and teachers alike. We gave him funding to select and purchase around 50 books at that time and the top photo shows Champa handing the delivery over to him.
Now, one year on, the chairman of governors has just inaugurated the new library and you can see a room now with more books and educational posters all round the room
Another example of leadership and UK fundraising creating an environment of quality education!

Bal Bigyan becomes “child centred”

2010-10-07T16:15:00.001+01:00

Last April we began our teacher development programme in Kathmandu which aims to increase the “child centredness” of teaching in each of our seven supported schools. As part of this programme we appointed three paid Tutors to work as almost full time teachers in a school AND to work at developing skills in teachers around all seven schools. Two of these Tutors, Babita and Bashu work at the Bal Bigyan school in Patan teaching English and maths/Science respectively. Each month they write a report for us to outline their own learning, the development of others, and developments in their school.

Looking back over the last couple of months reports it is clear that some changes are occurring at Bal Bigyan slowly but surely.

When they write about their personal learning we see phrases like “this month I have been learning about child friendly classrooms and the different factors affecting it”, “the most important thing I have learned this month is in the area of emotional development”, “this month my learning has focused on language development”. Now don’t forget, this is coming from teachers who work in an environment which we in Western Europe would describe as Dickensian and Victorian, so major personal steps are being made here.

Next, when you read about the personal change these young Tutors are going through you come across statements like “I now speak English in the classroom all the time”, “I realise that my strict actions and hard rules were suppressing creativity”, “I have tried hard to become more tolerant and to be more questioning in class”, you realise again the personal efforts being made.

Next, we read about how they are using these skills to develop others and their school overall such as leading discussions about “generic/grade teaching instead of subject teaching”, “encouraging everyone to create child friendly classrooms”, “apply multiple intelligences to all their lessons”.

We are very proud of and encouraged by the efforts of Babita and Bashu, they have applied themselves well to personal learning as well as taking responsibility for development of their colleagues and their school. Nepal as a nation needs more teachers like them, and so do we at Nepal Schools Aid.

UK Teachers adopt “Tiger” as mascot!

2010-10-02T10:12:00.002+01:00

Across the past couple of weeks our team of five teachers from Haverigg Primary and Black Combe Primary schools have been working on turning The Big Curriculum into a 6 day programme of teacher training for next April. We will report in the next few days on the final schedule.
The team, led by Head teacher Helen Webber, comprises Mel, Jen, Chris and Pete and one of them recently decided to spice up their meetings a little by turning up dressed as something associated with Nepal! She could have chosen to come dressed as a mountaineer, a yak, or even the mythical yeti ……….. but in the end her choice was …….. a tiger, an endangered species in the Terai plains of southern Nepal. Very appropriate!

P4C.com supports Nepal Schools Aid

2010-09-17T15:50:00.001+01:00

We are currently in full swing now preparing for next year’s teacher training conference programme in Kathmandu which will cover three specific areas, Educational Psychology, Teaching Tools & Techniques, and Subject Teaching (English & Maths). In addition however we will have another programme for Head Teachers initially to build on the skills and tools we gave them this year to create a vision for their schools and an improvement plan to meet the new government directives. This programme will focus on Values in an attempt to influence them even further about becoming more child centred in their approaches.
The Values Programme will begin with teaching and discussion about values and their impact on attitudes and behaviour generally before exploring the need for values based education within their schools. At this point we will introduce them to the techniques of P4C using the expertise of our UK teachers who are expert practitioners.
To extend the implementation of P4C in our 7 schools we have been searching for a source of materials which are accessible and appropriate for use by our Nepali teachers. This search led us to the website P4C.com and after an exchange of emails we were offered free access to all the materials for use in our schools (worth hundreds of £££) by Steve Williams which is a magnificent gesture.
So, a big thank you to Steve and P4C.com

Bath school conquer Everest for Nepal Schools Aid

2010-09-16T12:28:00.000+01:00

A report in the Bath Chronicle today describes how Beechen Cliff School organised a fundraising event to raise money for us which must rank as one of the strangest ways ever to "conquer Everest". Organised by House master Lee Sumsion, one of our late son's closest friends the event involved 23 laps of the Alexandra Park school completed by 120 boys of Shakespeare House, at one stage carrying an egg on a spoon, with nutritional needs catered for by burgers at "base camp". Sounds like it was fun and you can read the full story here

Nepal education to benefit from "The Big Curriculum"

2010-09-11T18:20:00.000+01:00

There are times when we create or stumble across something that really excites us or motivates us, and one of those times has just arrived. Since our pilot training programme in Kathmandu last April we had been scratching around trying to get assistance to develop a comprehensive curriculum for delivery over three years, and sometimes the best help is sitting right under your nose. In this case it was Janice, the Head Teacher at Haverigg Primary school, who worked with us over a couple of weeks to create what we now refer to as The Big Curriculum!

The Big Curriculum is organised into two major sections, one for Head Teacher Training and one for Teacher Training. The overall goal is to improve the quality of education in our supported schools and this is underpinned by a philosophy of child centred learning approaches.

The Head Teacher programme focuses on a number of aspects of leadership including Vision, Values and Performance Management. Delivery will be via short workshops and action learning to ensure implementation.

The Teacher programme is organised into three sections with delivery being extremely varied and ranging from courses and short workshops to in-school coaching:

Educational Psychology-Concepts & Theories
Teaching Tools and Techniques
Subject Teaching (mostly English, Maths, Science)

Obviously these headings are broken down into topics and this now leads us to the next stage; dividing the whole thing up into a syllabus for each of three years beginning in April 2011. We are close to achieving this now which will allow us to begin planning logistics in Kathmandu such as venues, delegate nominations and a detailed timetable and schedule.

In the last few days we have had meetings with our groups of volunteers from Haverigg and Black Combe schools in South Cumbria to match individuals to the first year's syllabus which now enables them to begin their preparatory work to deliver "The Big Capability Programme" next April!

The drama unfolds ………

2010-08-20T14:10:00.001+01:00

I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Patan, Kathmandu, exhausted after spending the whole afternoon in Bal Vinod, a government school just round the corner from here. My name is James Lewis and I am one of two tour managers of BackPact, a theatre-education initiative run by students from the University of Cambridge. Today was our last day working in Nepal. We have been here for about 10 days. During that time we have twice visited Bal Bygan and Bal Vinod, two of the schools supported by Nepal School's Aid. We have been moving around North India and Nepal since July and have experienced a whole range of different educational environments. I think I speak for everybody in the team when I say that these two schools have been among the best we have visited. On the whole, the children we have worked with have been bright, enthusiastic and creative. We have also been delighted to encounter teachers eager to participate in and learn about the activities we have presented. Bashu, a NSA funded teacher at Bal Bigyan, was especially keen, and attended three of our four sessions. I am working on a resume of all the work we did with the children which I will send him in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully he will be able to continue to use some of the methods and activities that we have been experimenting with over the last few days.

So what exactly do we do? In the NSA schools, our workshops have run from 1.15 in the afternoon to about 5pm in the evening. The workshop starts with a 20 minute play performed by all members of the group. Our play is a simple story about a Prince who is abducted by a wicked music-hating witch. His princess, in a reversal of the fairy tale stereotype, sets off on a journey to save him. After some hiccups, she eventually achieves her goal, kills the witch (with a song) and returns home with the (traumatised) prince to live happily ever after. It is a light-hearted piece and it is patched together with various different theatrical techniques (song, tableau, sound-scape, rap, slap-stick, mime). In short, the rest of the afternoon is devoted to exploring these techniques.

We start with a few simple call and response games, which get gradually harder as the calls start to contradict the expected response. So if the caller shouts 'Walk!', the rest are expected to run. If the caller shouts 'Stop!', the rest are expected to go. You can imagine the confusions. Eventually, the caller is not one of us but a student, we step out and the game progresses independently. After this, we divide into four groups. Two of us taking approximately 20 children and we introduce increasingly more difficult activities and games. Often, the odd song gets exchanged one way or the other. After a mid afternoon cup of tea, the workshop becomes almost entirely led by the children, as we introduce tasks that encourage their own ideas. If there is time, the students perform some of what they have learnt to each other.

A highlight for us was this afternoon when a mini-performance was arranged for us at Bal Vinod. Two students from year 10 performed a short drama about a disagreement between a father and son. They had written the piece themselves, it was tense and dramatic and we enjoyed it very much. After that we were treated to a Nepali song, some impressive dance moves from a couple of younger students and some music-hall style physical comedy from the very talented school caretaker. A great moment to cap off what has been a fantastic few days. Thanks very much to both schools and everybody at NSA for facilitating this, it has been a great pleasure.

Cambridge students act the part!

2010-08-14T07:09:00.004+01:00

Eight students from St Catherine's College, Cambridge University, work in a couple of our schools to introduce pupils and teachers to drama.

Tutors give "added value"

2010-08-06T08:56:00.001+01:00

Though we say it ourselves, converting some of our salaried Nepali teachers in Kathmandu into NSA Tutors has been a masterstroke! Now, instead of working as teachers solely in their own schools, they do other work to spread our methods and learning for other teachers around all seven schools too. In addition we have gained extra trust from their respective communities who fund 50% of their salaries alongside us so as to continue their employment as in-school teachers.
They each have a three fold focus on Personal Development, Training Workshops, NSA Projects, with a major emphasis on the first of these. We are extra encouraging about their own personal learning in all sorts of areas such as teaching methods, child psychology, assessment strategies, English language learning, managing & reporting ............. Each month they write a monthly report to advise us of their work and achievements which in turn helps us to do a summary with a few examples on this blog.
Their Personal Development is a bit scattered at the moment, quite naturally, as nobody has ever placed so much emphasis on it with them. Perhaps the best example is of Babita who is focusing on various aspects of child psychology. This month she has examined the stages of child development in three different age bands across physical, social, emotional and cognitive aspects. All valuable stuff showing how age banded children should be approached differently.
They each have 2-3 projects: Bashu's current projects are aimed at helping us to prepare for next year's teacher development week and include sorting holiday schedules, identifying specific needs and getting nominations for various workshops from all seven schools. An additional topic requires him to become our expert on Global Schools Partnerships. Krishna's projects are subject specific and are related to the English and Maths curricula as well as creating advisory notes on setting up English language clubs in school. Babita's projects relate to teacher training and identifying the current national training curriculum in Nepal together with what the teachers in our seven schools think they need more of.
In the last few days they have collectively run another one day workshop on Child Centred Learning which follows on from the longer workshops run by our UK volunteers from Cumbria last April. The workshop was run for teachers from our two central Kathmandu schools, Kesh Chandra and Himalaya schools and the photo is of one of the sessions. As you can imagine, this is REAL added value work as they spread their skills across maybe 100 Nepali speaking teachers who could not attend our English medium workshops. Priceless!!

No learning without change.

2010-08-04T15:27:00.001+01:00

The headline is a virtual motto for the technique of action learning, commonly applied to develop management skills in semi-experienced individuals. The basis of the technique is that individuals work on a project then meet regularly to share progress and learning, but also to subject themselves to intense questioning. There are often casualties too!
The reason for highlighting this is that we have just kicked off an action learning programme for the Head Teachers of our seven schools, all of whom are working on a project to create a five year Vision for their respective schools which is accepted with their staff, their management committee and their communities, and ....... meets the requirements of the government's School Sector Reform Plan! Not too much to ask then!!
We are fortunate to have a friend in Kathmandu, Professor Rajendra Suwal who is facilitating this programme for us and we have high hopes of completing it by December before we embark on the next project ........ values and ethics which in turn continues the development of leadership in our Head Teachers individually and schools generally.

Schedule for schools development

2010-07-25T09:21:00.002+01:00

Our recent successes in funding and organisation have now placed us in a far better position to plan and schedule the next 8 months or so work in Kathmandu. For example, without the recently awarded grant funding we were a little uncertain as to the scope and nature of next April’s annual Capability Programme. Likewise the volunteering of a number of Cumbrian secondary school teachers now enables us to start planning for some in-school elements to the programme we have not been previously able to consider.
This has also now enabled us to focus more on how best to get added value from our three salaried Nepali Tutors beyond their day to day teaching and occasional running of workshops. There is much planning, organising and background research to be done in Kathmandu that could help us to optimise our efforts and our funding. For example we are still relatively in the dark about the content of the current national teacher training programme in Nepal! Likewise we have found it difficult in short discussions and via email to ascertain what would most benefit the 7 schools in terms of teacher training. Also, how can we stimulate more activity on the British Council’s Global Schools Partnership programme? These are all projects we have allocated to our Tutors and we will be reporting on their findings here in the coming months.
You can view a full outline of our calendar of events in Kathmandu on our main website at http://www.nepalschoolsaid.co.uk/id27.html

Good news always comes in 3's ……….

2010-07-17T09:25:00.002+01:00

What a week this has been, almost everything we have been working for coming to fruition in a way that makes it all worthwhile! Of course all of the items listed below have been worked on for weeks and months in some cases, it’s just that they all were finalised this week.

1. Millom School (Cumbria) Partnership:
The Head Teacher at this Cumbria secondary school has agreed to work with us in a number of different ways including a Global Schools Partnership with Himalaya School, pupils learning about Nepal across their normal curriculum, and …… a supply of teachers volunteering to visit Nepal as part of our annual Teacher Development Programme. So far a total of 7 have volunteered to go in April 2011. Brilliant, and we will be working with them this autumn to slot into our schedule and curriculum.

2. Cambridge University-BackPact Education Project:
This is a group of students from St Catherine’s College, Cambridge who visit a range of countries each year with an aim as follows: “ Simply put, we use theatrical play educationally. We do not intend to teach children ‘about the theatre’, but rather, we are interested in using theatre and performance as a way for young children, many of whom live in difficult circumstances, to build confidence, express their individuality, and have lots of fun.”
We are arranging for them to spend a week across two of our schools, Bal Bigyan and Bal Vinod in mid August. Exciting stuff and a reward for these two schools who have worked well with us since April to action some of the management training they received in April.

3. Maitri Trust Financial Backing:
We are MORE than pleased to announce that we have been awarded funding by the Maitri Trust to finance the majority of our teacher training programme for the next three years. This will cover expenses of a number of teachers travelling to Nepal each year (but not all), venue costs, material costs etc etc in Kathmandu across a 2 week programme each year.
The Maitri Trust are the charitable foundation of an investment company who want minimal publicity so we are doing our best to respect that here in not revealing too much about them.

So, good news all round from a work and financial standpoint. However we still need the continuing support of our regular donors to maintain the material aspect of our programme such as exercise books, textbooks, school bags. And of course the Maitri Trust have funded about 2/3 of the programme cost, meaning we still need to find another £4000 or so each year.

Wanted: Major sponsor for NSA Capability Programme

2010-05-04T10:22:00.001+01:00

The headline says it all with NSA seeking a sponsor who will underwrite our annual teacher training programme in Nepal in exchange for all the features of exclusive branding with a progressive charity.
The 2010 programme was a major success as judged by the feedback from the 50 teacher and head teacher delegates AND the recognition from Nepal’s Ministry of Education in seeking to work with us on the design and evaluation of the programme in future years. This is therefore a great opportunity for recognition and marketing on a NATIONAL scale either in the UK or Nepal.
The programme is dependent on receiving sustainable support to fund flights and accommodation for UK tutors travelling to Nepal plus the running costs of the week long programme to include venue, equipment, delegate materials and delegate subsistence.
Our lowest estimate of the potential costs are in the order of £7,500 to £10,000 and we would like to hear from any individuals or corporates who would be interested in discussing a partnership with us.

info@nepalschoolsaid.co.uk

Next UK overseas development minister (?) provides the final piece of the jigsaw

2010-05-01T13:51:00.002+01:00

Naturally as a UK registered charity we are completely apolitical, but that doesn’t stop us wanting the Conservative party to win the general election on May 6th! Strategically this could provide us with direct access to the “new” Minister for Overseas Development, Geoffrey Clifton Brown who just happens to be also our local MP/representative. Geoffrey has been an outstanding local MP for many years and as our MP we receive direct access to him through his regular “surgeries”. So should the Conservative Party win next Thursday the new Minister becomes instantly accessible.

Today, Geoffrey just happened to be in our village campaigning for votes and we took the opportunity to have a chat with him about our work at Nepal Schools Aid and ………. surprise surprise he seemed to know about us! He also seemed well aware of current political conditions in Nepal and invited us to come and see him to discuss our work further.

So, the jigsaw is almost completed where we now have a working agreement with a partner NGO in Nepal, we await a similar agreement from Nepal’s Ministry of Education, and have the opportunity to discuss the role of DFID in Nepal and it’s over-focus on capital projects as opposed to capability based legacy projects in the education sector.

You never know who you are talking to …

2010-04-22T09:10:00.002+01:00

“You never know who you are talking to” is an expression I have used many times in my personal life as well as business, whether you are in a pub, a shop, a train …….. or an airport. And to add to this, that’s why you should always give ‘em a business card!
Now been back from our Kathmandu trip for about 10 hours after a very lucky lifting of the airspace closure which coincided with our scheduled flight home. As usual couldn’t sleep even after getting home at 1am so did the usual and sifted through the mountain of post, to find a nice surprise from someone we last spoke to at Kathmandu/Doha airports exactly one year ago during our flight home after our daughter’s wedding. Marion Macpherson and Aileen Taylor were returning from a working trip to Nepal in which they had spent time teaching dermatology to local medics in Pokhara. We were both interested in each other’s work and approaches and we have to give them both credit for sowing a small seed in our minds which this year grew into a very large plant! It was through their trip that we realised how good it would be to take UK teachers/teaching experts to Nepal NOT to teach children, but to teach teachers, just as they were teaching medics as opposed to practicing medicine on patients themselves. Sounds blindingly obvious, but so was the invention of the light bulb and this led to our Teacher Development programme earlier this month.
So, back to the post, and we found two letters and two cheques from Marion/Aileen and their friend Dorothy in which they had raised some money for us which equates to the purchase of about 2000 exercise books or 100 textbooks or 50 school bags. Not only that, but that today they are flying back to Nepal to do more teaching work at Green pastures in Pokhara and would have wanted to meet up with us and visit our schools.
Anyway, good luck ladies, have a great trip, enjoy your “pensioners trek” and we know that your work at Green Pastures is a wonderful support for Nepal overall. Hope to meet up on your return.

Tutors rise to the challenge, will YOU?

2010-04-18T09:54:00.002+01:00

The adventure begins for our three newly appointed Nepali Tutors, three young people with potential who deserve a chance to rise above the daily teaching of children in their respective schools. Babita (pictured) and Bashu are from Bal Bigyan school in Patan. Krishna is from Bal Kalyan school in Balaju. All are keen to learn, to improve, to develop what they do in the classroom.
Having received the full training from our UK teachers a couple of weeks ago they were issued with the challenge of repeating the workshop over a day from a dozen or so teachers from their respective schools who don't speak English. Saturday, they rose to that challenge and spent a day on child centred learning in a classroom at Bal Bigyan school. Their enthusiasm and courage in giving it a go were most humbling and if we could find another hundred or so like them we could transform teaching styles in the Kathmandu valley. Now there's a thought, anybody got the funding, because we CAN do it!!!!

Need a bit more humility ourselves

2010-04-17T04:36:00.001+01:00

An article in this morning's Kathmandu Post has prompted a response from the NSA Chairman to remind the Nepal government that they should make no apology for asking aid agencies to seek guidance on delivering aid and not to work direct with local communities.We agree, and it supports and strengthens the way we have and will always work, despite the frustrations.

Dear Sir,
Your article outlining the government’s stance towards aid agencies and donors being requested to “respect the official channels” and to avoid working directly with local communities is a timely reminder at all levels that we must work together and in a coordinated way for maximum effect.

However we must seriously question why such a meeting was even necessary with the likes of DFID from my own country (UK) when we had always been led to believe that DFID’s business plan was developed in conjunction with Nepal’s government focusing on sector priorities! Surely the focus of such a meeting should have been on the proliferation of mid to small level agencies such as ourselves who can be uncontrolled and uncoordinated to an extent that inputs and achievements are diluted and unevaluated.

For three years we at Nepal Schools Aid have provided educational materials and teachers for 5 community schools in Kathmandu with probably no need for government guidance, but this year for the first time we were in a position to offer teacher training which DOES require sanction and immediately sought Education Ministry guidance and advice. We have found them to be reasonable people, helpful, and encouraging towards us. But why, oh why, does it all have to take so long to process needs, take decisions, create registrations and so on which can be a serious barrier to the enthusiasm of respectful volunteers.

Finally, in ALL cases whatever the donor/agency level Nepal’s government should not have to make “Humble suggestion: First deal with central government before reaching out to people”. We, the agencies, should have a bit more respect and common sense to be humble ourselves!

Yes Minister .... that will do nicely!

2010-04-12T02:56:00.001+01:00

Who would have thought that when we began three years ago that today, Nepal's Ministry of Education would want to talk about a deal with us to be a special scheme for them in developing teaching skills. In fact the deal is wider than this in that they want to work with us on developing the "software aspects" of quality education in a number of schools which can be properly evaluated.
So, we drove up to this large white building which is the Ministry where we met with Dr Lava Deo Awasthi, Joint Secretary, Planning Division; Dr Lekha Nath Poudel, Under Secretary; Mukunda Mani Khanal, Section Head, Foreign Aid Division. It's the closest we've ever felt to being in the presence of the British Raj!
The meeting began with the classic exchange of who does what in our respective organisations, the vision and strategy of NSA and specifically our capability programme. Without writing up the full minutes of the meeting the key points made by the Ministry were as follows:
1. "We want to find a mechanism to institutionalise your valued work, it's a treasure to us"
2. "We should work together on selecting schools to be in your programme so they can be the centre of our attention. We need a rationale which specifies which schools, where, why etc so we can make the case for your approach even stronger"
3. "You could help us to understand the greater needs if you are prepared to work outside the Kathmandu Valley in areas such as Humla, Karnali, Tarai so we include the extremely poor areas in the experiment"

The meeting concluded with four specific action points:
1. The Ministry will create a draft Memorandum of Understanding of how we will work together and in which areas.
2. The Ministry and ECCA will investigate any administrative hurdles we may have to negotiate especially registration with the Nepal Social Council.
3. The Ministry with ECCA input will specify needs for next year's training syllabus
4. The Ministry will investigate the teacher staffing needs of our current five schools to see if we can be relieved of funding extra teachers, thereby releasing funds for more effective use elsewhere.

Now, THIS is the type of post meeting action list I like, one where I have no actions personally!
Off to celebrate.

Feedback to the future

2010-04-11T02:25:00.001+01:00

Friday afternoon saw teachers and Heads from our five schools meeting to discuss the recent training programmes and our plans for the coming year.
We had collated the feedback forms completed at the end of each course, all generally positive about content, relevance, delivery methods and pace. This helped us to focus a discussion on future programmes although we did have a feeling of " not knowing what they don't know about". However the main requests about future training were as follows:
Teacher training should keep it's focus on techniques but to also consider wrapping the techniques around the specific subjects of maths, science, literacy, life/social skills. Being helped with ideas about creating teaching materials would also be useful. Finally in a different area there were some requests for training at a secondary level since some of our schools are lower/secondary year 8/10.
The management training requests are more confused, partly because the Heads have also to give around 50% of their time to teaching as well as managing the school. Specifically they mentioned training in motivation, vision, leadership, developing younger teachers, managing older teachers (who have in many cases little or no interest in changing or learning and are in a union/government protected job).
This feedback is a reasonable start but the essential ingredient is the views or blessing of the Nepal Ministry of Education. We have a meeting with them today.

"School Sector Reform Plan a dismal failure"

2010-04-07T09:40:00.001+01:00

A report in yesterday's Kathmandu Post editorial column entitled "Back to school" has strongly criticised the School Sector Reform Plan. Regular readers of this blog will know that we have become very familiar with the SSRP since it was first published in January and in fact based a lot of our recent training programmes on it's content.
The editorial has highlighted several problems specifically:
1. A pilot programme in three districts has been an unmitigated disaster
2. No statute has been passed to turn the SSRP into a formalised government project with all the necessary powers
3. No educationalists or academics were involved in it's creation

We can add to the evidence.
First when introducing the teacher development programme for Heads, teachers and guests, NOT ONE person out of around 75 present had even heard of the SSRP, despite the fact that it puts low standard schools and teachers at risk of closure and removal.
Second, the SSRP itself is quite far reaching for Nepal, but it focuses exclusively on what we have termed the HARDWARE of schools such as buildings, amenities, class size, school management processes, standards and measures. What is missing is an attempt to define reforms in school SOFTWARE, in particular the curriculum, school values & ethics, teaching practices, assessment strategies. In fact it is only when the hardware and software are combined that one can get anywhere near a definition of quality education. THIS is what needs reform in Nepal.
Is anybody out there listening?

A "cunning plan" takes shape

2010-04-05T09:44:00.001+01:00

For some time now we have begun to believe that part of our strategy involving the payment of teacher salaries is wrong. Certainly this helps a specific school, but only one. Pay the salaries of four teachers and that helps four schools.

But instead, imagine we pay the salaries of say, only two "tutors", skilled Nepali teachers who can absorb the training given by teachers from the UK and then repeat the training for more and more teachers in any number of schools.
Our immediate need then is to find a few young Nepali teachers who are keen to learn, flexible, will rise to the challenge and can speak reasonable English. So, initially we have selected Krishna from Bal Kalyan school and Bashu and Babita from Bal Bigyan school to take part in a small experiment. In this experiment we have asked them to prepare a ONE day workshop based on the recent two days training they have been given in Child Centred Techniques and to deliver it to 9 delegates on April 17th. We will observe, assess, then judge waht to do next.
All three have accepted the challenge!

Rotary Club success

2010-04-04T09:41:00.000+01:00

Sunday morning we had an appointment with the Rajadhani Rotary Club in Kathmandu, at the Annapurna Hotel. Arranged by our good friend Ummed there are a number of members who know Champa from her past, but mostly they chose to stay away! Anyway the overall focus of our presentation to them was "The vision, values and governance of running a UK charity" as applied to Nepal Schools Aid with the obvious goal on our part to persuade them to support us, either in helping with the management of Kesh Chandra school or with making a regular contribution towards our material support to that school. Twenty minutes later they had offered to supply 2100 exercise books as a Rotary with several members agreeing to make donations.
Result!

They think it's all over ..........

2010-04-02T10:04:00.001+01:00

Second teachers development course completed with a different "feel" from the first and that's all down to the delegates. The previous post mentioned the issue of English language which is an obvious barrier if attendees don't match the required standard, but the delegates this time were much more accomplished and confident.
However they were also in a younger age bracket and more participative, livelier, and much more creative. It just goes to show about the danger of jumping to conclusions too soon as in yesterday's post we were thinking of running programmes to improve English speaking.
A number of the delegates were Programme Officers and Counsellors from ECCA and they said that they now intend to adapt our programmes and to run them around their 400 schools. So, we have asked them specifically to give us feedback on what we should deliver next to add to some of the topics they mentioned such as lesson planning, classroom management.

Now it's time to relax: Barbecue at Dwarikas, Everest Mountain Flight, parties in two Nepali homes, three days in the mountain resort at Dulikhel.

First courses .......

2010-04-01T01:20:00.003+01:00

First two courses now completed successfully, according to all the feedback we've received anyway. The real proof of the pudding though will be in the application of the management skills and the teaching skills. Another teaching skills course begins today for a different 16 delegates.
I think we have "suffered" on both courses as a result of the varied level of spoken English skill amongst the participants. This is a big problem and we are already thinking that we may have to take a step backwards to go forward again. Specifically, should we be arranging training in English at these early stages as opposed to teaching or management skills? Any advice out there?

Personal Message No. 1

2010-03-29T16:59:00.001+01:00

"Hi mum & dad, got here safely, all Buddha'd out after today! Love you, Jenny."

All four teachers from Haverigg safely last night in Kathmandu and were up at the crack of dawn this morning for a full schedule which included a trip to Swayambhu Buddhist temple, a ceremony with our family priest for education and teachers, a breakfast in Patan Durbar Square, a visit to Bal Bigyan school, followed by a sudden strike called by Maoist groups which led to gridlock across Kathmandu and our being unable to reach the Vice President of Nepal's residence for an afternoon tea party! Bugger.

The big stuff starts tomorrow with the launch of our teacher development programmes.

Meetings, meetings, meetings.

2010-03-27T12:57:00.001Z

It's all starting to feel like work again, more breakfast meetings, presentations in board rooms, phone calls in taxis fixing yet more meetings ..... Oh dear!
This morning we had a presentation to make at 8.30am to the Chandragiri Rotary Club in Patan at which we were asked to give an overview of who we are, what we do, and what makes us different. Fairly straightforward, but they are extremely wary of all charities and NGOs here mainly concerning corruption, and we don't blame them. So much of our presentation focused on the governance issues from the UK Charity Commission for both Trustees and any charity overall so they can see the rigorous imposed as well as the high degree of self regulation. As usual such a group are quite stunned at how much we achieve with so little money and we are starting to think that they might trust us more if we said it all cost more. Anyway they are now intending to prepare a proposal of some sort as to how we might work together.
Another Rotary meeting fixed for central Kathmandu 8.00am Sunday 4th April.

Yesterday was also extremely busy and included a 2 hour meeting at the British Council offices with Vaishali Pradhan, Country Manager for Nepal's Global Schools Partnership programme. We got on extremely well and shared a great deal of information about each other's work. We are especially encouraged about how we can help each other to bring together UK schools and Nepali schools into the GSP which includes applying for grants to assist curriculum development and teacher exchange.
Tomorrow is potentially our biggest day with a meeting at 5pm with the directors of Chaudhary Group, the largest industrial conglomerate in Nepal! All the early signs are that we each have something the other wants which is a good way to start any first meeting. Keep reading for a report Sunday evening!

No such thing as a free breakfast?

2010-03-24T04:47:00.001Z

Today is a public holiday in Nepal, Ram Naumi. Not sure what it's for except that it's one of the 120 days public holiday or so in Nepal each year!
Anyway, this didn't prevent our meeting this morning over a breakfast with Sujeev Shakya. This man is so famous globally we are surprised he would even reply to our emails, never mind meet with us to discuss our work in Nepal. But when you meet him you immediately see part of the reason for his success is his warmth, focused interest and empathy.
The purpose of this first meeting was simply to share our connected interests and to brief him on the opening presentation he will make next Tuesday at the inauguration of our teacher development week. The key points we discussed are all from his book, Unleashing Nepal, and include the overall concept of globalisation, reducing aid dependency, including values in primary education and spending aid money on capability development as opposed to buildings and infrastructure.
Generally we connected on many different levels relating to business and aid work and it was very interesting to discuss his approach to running his own consultancy business after many years employed in large corporations. More specifically we seem to share similar views on DFID (The UK's overseas aid department) which are not necessarily positive but I wouldn't want to misquote him here publically.
Next!

Nostalgia & cheeseballs!

2010-03-23T16:25:00.002Z

Our first day in Kathmandu this visit and already I'm "spaced out"!
I suppose it began well enough with the teacher's hotel booking at Kathmandu Guest House being re-confirmed and a breakfast meeting set up with Sujeev Shakya at the Summit Hotel for Wednesday morning.Since reading his book and an exchange of numerous emails over the last 6 months this is our first chance to get down to brass tacks with him regarding his opening of our programme next week. We also intend to discuss with him the vexing issue of our schools being dislocated from their communities and how to bring them together.

As far as the nostalgia bit is concerned we ventured for a light lunch into Freak Street to call into the Monumental Palace hotel with it's rooftop bar. For the non cognoscenti amongst you Freak Street was the original hippie tourist street with bars, restaurants and general drug dens from the 60's and 70's. Not that I ever went there (much) but I have a strong memory of getting my first fish & chips lunch in Freak Street over 30 years ago! Today we went to the rooftop bar to find the views completely blocked by high rise houses with water tanks and an order for a fanta and tuborg somehow getting translated into pancake and cheeseballs! Buddha help me but Champa and I still can't stop laughing 4 hours later ...... welcome to Nepal!
Now the photo. This is the inside of a brilliant tea shop close to Bishal Bazaar called Himalaya Tea Corner and run by Navin Maharjan and his wife.It is a brilliant tea shop for several reasons; firstly the variety of loose teas they sell from Nepal, India, Japan, China. Second the all round friendliness and helpfulness of the owners. Third ....... they will brew ANY tea for you to taste!! If you are interested in tea or this sort of experience this is a place well worth a visit, cheap too.

Regarding general progress this week, visiting the venue for our training programmes on Thursday morning, meeting with British Council on Friday afternoon, presentation to Chandagiri Rotary on Saturday morning and waiting for a date/time to meet people from the Nepal Economic Forum. Keep reading.

A personal message to all our supporters

2010-03-19T18:30:00.003Z

In one weeks time Nepal Schools Aid will begin it's most ambitious programme of work in Kathmandu. Many of you will already know about it, the "Teacher Development Programme" in which we, together with a group of four teachers from Haverigg Primary School in Cumbria, UK will run a series of teaching skills and management courses. This would be ambitious enough if we were doing it only for the teachers from our five schools in Kathmandu, but we're not. We have invited delegates from a Nepali organisation which supports 400 schools and even more delegates from Nepal's Ministry of Education.
Why would we do this you might ask, putting ourselves under extra pressure? Well firstly we are more than happy to spread our "capability message" as wide as possible to try and influence the masses of aid which is spent on maintaining dependence on the donor rather than creating a state of independence. But secondly we are being selfish in trying to influence corporate Kathmandu to back our approach financially so that future groups of UK teachers will visit Nepal to spread their skills without having to pay for it themselves!
So, on to our message to all our supporters in the UK, from the company that funds almost 50% of our work to the child at the primary school who sold a few cakes or put a few pennies in a pot:

THANK YOU from all of us at Nepal Schools Aid and on behalf of the 700 disadvantaged children who within a week or so will be getting lessons from better equipped teachers.