With the re-opening of schools, many children are facing two significant challenges. Firstly, the need to adapt to a new physical and social environment, to ensure their complete safety and protection against the continued threat of Coronavirus. Secondly many children have been out of full-time education for months, and now need to play catch up as they enter the next academic year.
However, some educational focused organisations have not put their pupils through the challenge of playing catch up; ensuring safe, continued and full-time education for their children throughout the last few months.
Once such organisation is the charity World Villages for Children. Their focus is on educating the world’s poorest children; ensuring they have the necessary skills to get out of, and remain out of poverty.
- With education being the only means for thousands of the charity’s children to permanently escape their lives of poverty; it was absolutely crucial that the schools remained capable of continuing to educate the children and keep them safe.
- During the last few months, the charity has achieved a remarkable feat by ensuring that over 20,000 of its children in over 13 schools have continued to have a full-time education in a 100% safe environment.
- Not a single child or staff member during this time has been affected by Covid nor taken ill and this is completely down to the environment that has been created within the schools. As a result, all the children from the ages of 11-18 have been able to carry on with their full-time studies and recreational activities safely.
Measures that World Villages for Children have supported at the Sisters of Mary schools include:
- The use of efficient technology and proficient co-ordination to ensure that all 20,000 children have continued their lessons via conference call with their teachers
- Utilising the skills of the most senior students as ‘student teachers’ to not only boost their skills but also keep the younger year groups on track with the curriculum
- Running exams as usual with the help of exam texts set by the teachers remotely and marked by them remotely
- The few teachers who have come back into the schools (mainly in the Philippines) have been temperature checked daily to check the state of their health
- Regular temperature testing of children within the school
- Family grouping of the children at school and comprehensive mask use over the last five months so children have had a chance to get used to the process
If you are interested to find out more, the Head of the U.K. World Villages for Children, Nicola Lawson is able to discuss with you:
- Why it is crucial that the charity keeps its schools open – as this is the children’s only means of getting themselves educated and out of poverty
- How they have continued to run all 13 schools with zero risk during this crisis
- How they will continue to ensure the children’s education is not disrupted moving forwards (should we have another significant global outbreak)
- How they have minimised disruption to the children’s social and physical interactions
- How the pupils themselves have rallied together within the schools to make hundreds of face masks for their community members at large