School Management

We manage existing public schools in Nepal and transform the quality of education they provide to some of the country’s poorest children.

We achieve this through a unique partnership agreement with local government – the first of its kind in the country – which gives us the authority to manage all the day-to-day operations of our schools. Local government pays for up to 50% of our costs in each school.

Two of our team are appointed as ‘School Leaders’, who work in each school as full-time members of staff. School Leaders teach, coach, and lead a school improvement plan alongside the existing teachers and school principal.

The plan has four priorities: improving the quality of teaching, management, community relations and infrastructure. Here are some examples of what we do in our schools:

We focus on primary level education so that students have a strong education foundation.

Our model achieves systemic, scalable and sustainable change because we work within the existing public education system, alongside government and at a low cost.

Curriculum and Coaching.

Teachers in Nepal’s public schools follow the government-issued textbook line by line. But due to the poor quality if these textbooks, and the use of rote teaching methods, many students are not learning.

Our solution is to give teachers something better to follow.

We have written over 1000 lesson plans, along with support material and student workbooks, which provide teachers with high quality step-by-step instructions to follow. We call this project LEAP.

The lesson plans are closely aligned with the government textbooks so teachers feel comfortable and confident using them.

But just handing over curriculum material is not enough. We, and our partners, also provide on-going coaching to help teachers us the lesson plans consistently and effectively.

This method of teacher improvement is supported by a number of studies, including a report by the World Bank, which concluded, “where primary school teaching is focused on rote learning, and teacher knowledge is low, step-by-step lesson guides as part of multi-faceted instructional programs can help improve pedagogy.”

Our lesson plans are currently used by education organisations and local government in 14 municipalities across Nepal, benefitting almost 4000 students.

We are outraged by the chronic failure of public education in Nepal, and are driven by a simple motto:

We put students first.