It’s been an incredibly difficult 18 months. But throughout it all we have stayed focussed on keeping our students learning.

Now, with the pandemic receding in Nepal, our schools are fully open again. We are back on track.

We currently manage six public schools in the Kathmandu Valley, in partnership with the local government and the existing teachers.

We have more students than ever before, with over 1200 enrolled in the six schools. In one school, student enrolment has tripled in a year. In another we have gone from 15 to 240 students in the past five years. This reflects the immense work we have done to turn these schools around and get the word out to the local community that things have changed.

We are lazer-focused on teaching and learning. It is very easy to get distracted in Nepal government schools – there is always a meeting you are expected to attend, an unannounced visitor or a long-list of administrative tasks – but we follow a simple mantra: good teaching = good school. Over the past five years we have written over 1000 lesson plans with support material and student workbooks to help teachers teach high quality lessons with the support of our School Leaders.

The pandemic created an opportunity to start a number of major infrastructure improvement projects in our schools, which are about to be completed. Our partnership model means the costs are all born by the government, while our funding can go directly towards improving teaching and learning.

We are now planning for the new academic year, when we hope to roll out our lesson plans and curriculum support materials to a dozen local schools, benefiting hundreds more students.

None of this is easy. We work in an extremely challenging education context and our progress is a credit to the resilience of our team and its determination to live up to our motto: We put students first.