The Halcrow Foundation has completed its three-year funding support of the Katha Lab Schools (KLS) in Delhi, helping to provide quality education to thousands of disadvantaged children.

Nearly half of New Delhi’s 18 million population are living in slums and unauthorised colonies. In these communities, one million children under the age of four have no access to pre-school education, and less than 15 per cent of children complete school. Half of all eight year-olds in New Delhi cannot even read or write a simple paragraph.

David Kerr, Chair of the Halcrow Foundation says: “The Halcrow Foundation, as part of a consortium led by the British Asian Trust, has helped address these problems by supporting Katha to reach out to more communities. Thanks to the consortium’s support, the Katha teaching model has been developed and strengthened over the past three years, resulting in a huge 93 per cent annual growth rate of schools engaging in Katha’s work.”

The model is now so successful that it is preparing for use in mainstream government schools.

Katha’s highly successful approach includes empowering children to solve real-life problems by bringing community challenges into the classroom, such as water and sanitation, health and the environment.

Katha schools also support children to overcome social and environmental challenges to ensure they stay in school, and uses activity-based learning to help improve their studies in core subjects. The organisation also encourages integrated learning across schools and trains teachers in a variety of skills to engage the children and make learning a fun experience, while raising literacy levels in Hindi and English.

Highlights of the last three years’ support by Halcrow Foundation and other partners include the introduction of self-defence classes for girls, sports events for disabled students, and a new state-of-the-art science lab.