Teaching days increased

Nepal's Ministry of Education has recently announced that the minimum number of days mandatory classes is to be set at 220. This is against a background level of between 100-150 which is so low mostly due to a range of political activities including teacher strikes and national political strikes. It is the national strikes, or bandhas, as they are known in Nepal which cause the most chaos. On such days enforcement is usually comprehensive and violent.

Overall this is a good national decision and it now gives us "licence" to state a specific contractual requirement of our sponsored teachers. In fact this was on the cards anyway after we discovered one teacher taking time out of his teaching duties to spend a few days helping with the "harvest"!

A working partnership

During our recent visit to Kathmandu we reported many times on our growing partnership with ECCA, the NGO that supports schools through it’s environment programme. At this time each of our five schools was tasked with setting up nature clubs with ECCA help and the first two schools have just completed the first phase. This involved a one day workshop for students from Bal Bigyan and Himalaya schools and the photo shows a discussion amongst the participants.
The next stage will be for these children who form the Executive Committee of their respective Clubs to start a specific programme at their schools and we will report on this as we receive news.
For those of you wondering where this fits in with Nepal Schools Aid strategy it is a part of our curriculum development stage and follows on from the teacher training on “Hygiene, water and sanitation” we provided last may.

A tale of two schools

Our final two school visits today before flying home for a well earned rest. One was more pleasant than the other and involved Bal Bigyan school. The visit to Sramik school was altogether different and included a bit of laying down the law about school hygiene and cleanliness as well as wanting to see a bit more effort on THEIR part to bring about school improvements. Unless we see some tangible efforts it could be curtains for further support from us.
The Bal Bigyan visit was to give them a start with their new library via a gift of around 75 books, mostly reading books for the children but also a small number of reference books for the teachers. The photo shows Champa handing over a selection to Parashu Baral the Head Teacher.
Once that had been done I managed to get myself persuaded to run a class for a while, my fame is spreading after the science lesson I gave last week! This time it was about the UK and I had a class discussion about the differences between the UK and Nepal, physical, cultural, religion etc. All in English thankfully.

Something for us, something for you.

Well that's just about the end of our month's work here and we are leaving with a new partner in ECCA, a better understanding of our schools and their needs, and with each school now understanding Nepal Schools Aid's focus and approach. We have had numerous meetings with Head Teachers, Staff, Management Committees, mostly amiable, sometimes "inter-planetary"!
Our next visit will be in April 2010, hopefully with some UK teachers running some skills workshops over several days. In anticipation of these visits we are leaving each school with some specific improvement objectives we would like them to work on. All are action based rather than outcome based so they are all within the means of each school provided they motivate themselves, which is quite a problem in Nepal anyway.
Firstly each school has two common objectives, first to develop a working relationship with ECCA as a means to influence their local communities to support and contribute to any improvement plans, and second to create a Nature Club within the school as part of the Water, Hygiene & Sanitation curriculum.In addition each school has some objectives specific to that school such as Bal Bigyan and Bal Kalyan creating a UK studies syllabus and space for a library which we will fund. If anyone would like to know more details then please email us.
In summary the schools know that we are now entering a phase of self development where we expect to see signs of self improvement as a condition of continuing and growing support from ourselves.