The stench from the open toilet almost overwhelmed me as we entered the school and its ground floor classroom; I looked round and saw that my Nepali wife was similarly affected, so it wasn't a case of Western Weakness on my part then!
This was the first impression of one of our five supported schools in Kathmandu and it gave me cause to reflect over the next month as to whether an organisational psychologist had anything to offer these children and their teachers.
We had founded Nepal Schools Aid(UK) two years earlier upon our retirement and, from the beginning, applied the business principles that had helped one of us to run a successful organisational change consultancy for 10 years. Specifically we believed that having a vision, creating small but sustainable income streams, using a strategic development process, and a set of values based on developing core competence would help us to achieve more in the medium term as opposed to throwing money at every request for land, buildings, toilets, water etc.
We envisioned a school's effectiveness being built on the four pillars of 1. quality educational materials, 2. a developing curriculum, 3. appropriate and modern teaching practices and skills, and 4. clear directional leadership. Our development process to be applied to these four pillars was a "systems thinking" approach and a particular framework created by David Nadler in the US in the late 1980's in which all organisations were viewed as a set of connected and interdependent components. Allow one component to get out of sync and the organisation would at best mis-function, at worst collapse. I had used an adapted version of Nadler's framework for more than 20 years working on transformations of varying size and complexity, mostly in large financial organisations such as banks, insurance firms, building societies etc., where the four systems components were the organisation's strategy, it's structure (including architecture and processes), the people/capability within the organisation, and lastly the organisational culture. Clearly, should any one of these components change without the others changing too........ the organisation becomes stressed, sometimes to breaking point.
Applying this to five schools in Kathmandu was a challenge both intellectually and emotionally. Intellectually the four components became Direction, Resources, Learning Structures, External Environment. Emotionally, engaging with Head Teachers and Management Committees to conduct a fact-find was extremely draining, especially since the process itself is meant to be influencing and directional as well as investigative. However, we persevered and after two or three meetings per school we started to get not only quality information for our purposes but also good dialogue and a gradual understanding on the part of teachers and managers. So what did we discover?
Firstly, at a process level.... it works. Comprehensive information is gained and gaps as well as dysfunction can be easily spotted. Also the process is influential. As each meeting progressed we could see those on the receiving end of the questions making connections themselves, and in between meetings they had been sufficiently disturbed to think about the discussion and what should happen next.
Secondly, at a content level, the framework provides detail and exposes the issues of most concern. For example at a detailed level we learned lots about the State Education System of which we previously had little or no knowledge, as well as teacher qualifications and pupil demographics.
Thirdly, by rising above the detail we have been able to use the framework holistically to identify three major issues which we need to address in the short term but progressively on a long term basis:
1. Learning Structures: There is a need to develop teaching skills and practices if the children are to move beyond the rote reproduction of facts with classes becoming child centred as opposed to teacher or obedience centred.
2. The External Environment: All of our supported schools are heavily populated by the children of migrant workers, street vendors, Dalits, servants, who are effectively dislocated from the normal local community. This means that in some cases, but not all, the management committees are weak, even powerless to develop the school infrastructure such as land, buildings, utilities.
3. Direction: In two of the five schools leadership is virtually non existent with no vision or plans to develop the schools or even engage with parents or the local community.
Where do we go from here? Well, the easy way out is to continue with our baseline support of exercise books, textbooks, school bags and teacher salaries and stop worrying about the more difficult stuff. But that doesn't sit well with OUR vision and values! So, new priorities emerge for 2010:
1. Organise a group of UK teachers to run a series of teacher training programmes in Kathmandu, April 2010, to include attendees from the National Centre For Education Development
2. Organise local support and encouragement for the schools to engage with their local communities
3. Advise and develop the Head Teachers and Management Committees in their leadership,skills and processes
In this way we hope to keep the "ownership" of each school and its problems in the right place and to develop the necessary competencies of teachers and management so that they are better able to deal with future problems.
If anyone would like a copy of David Nadler's framework and our adapted version please email me
(The author, Dr Brian Metters is Chairman of the UK charity, Nepal Schools Aid, and can be contacted at
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