“By education, I mean an all-round drawing of the best in child and man in body, mind and spirit”- Mahatma Gandhi.

Navi Disha Schools (NDS)

The Foundation identified Education as a key tool and instrument for social change and development. To transform the education environment and promote academic excellence, the foundation established five primary schools, called Navi Disha Schools (NDS) in Nabha. These schools aim to improve the overall educational landscape of Nabha by providing free, equitable and quality education to children belonging to disadvantaged groups, who are often deprived of education due to poverty or socio-economic constraints. Based on the principles of child centered pedagogy and inclusive learning, NDS focuses on encouraging cooperative learning, creating meaningful learning opportunities and acknowledging child’s voice as central to the learning experience.

Special emphasis is laid on nurturing and developing interest in extracurricular activities such as art, music, sports and dance. Through these schools, local community participation in the learning process is also encouraged so that the whole community is responsible for an enabling education environment.

Over a period of time, NDS have shown remarkable progress and have established themselves as model resource schools in the region. Owing to their notable growth, both in terms of academic excellence and extracurricular activities, children from other sections of the society are eagerly taking admission in these schools.

Therefore, through these schools, the foundation has established a process of continuous academic improvement for schools and teachers and created an education model to improve the local education environment.

The Learning model of Navi Disha Schools has four distinct features:

  • Breaking Invisible Barriers: NDS aims at breaking all invisible barriers to learning by encouraging students to ask questions and enabling dialogue between school and community. Active engagement with all the relevant stakeholders such as teachers, parents and community is ensured so that each one is contributing towards creating an atmosphere of learning.
  • An environment conducive for learning: Learning is stimulated by visual aids and a positive classroom environment.
  • Zero tolerance for any form of violence: Violence or any other fear can hinder a child’s growth and development and can result in trauma. Therefore, NDS have zero tolerance for any adult imposed violence. Teachers as well as parents are made to understand that no form of violence is normal and the importance of creating a healthy and happy environment for a child.
  • Learning to be a constant for teachers: NDS aim at working on the capacity building of the teachers and constantly engaging with them to enhance their teaching skills and improving the learning material. Teachers participate in regular capacity building workshops which train them to deal with subjective situations. Apart from this, teachers also engage with students on a personal level to recognize any disturbing patterns and counsel the children when required.

Our continued effort is to improve and widen the below impact:

  • This model has been very successful in making these schools as centres of innovative, progressive and equitable learning. This intervention has not just impacted the academic excellence of students, but also improved community participation in creating an enabling environment for sustainable social progress.
  • Owing to the excellent performance of NDS students, teachers from government schools make regular visits to NDS so as to convince these students to enrol in their respective schools for their further studies.
  • Seeing the tremendous growth of NDS, government schools have started adopting the same model of education. Since government schools are most appropriate channels to implement large scale transformation, therefore teachers from NDS often conduct learning enhancement programs in these schools to improve their quality of education.

Maharani Gurcharan Kaur Euro Group Preparatory School

Maharani Gurcharan Kaur Euro Group Preparatory school was established in 2017 at Nabha, spearheading the Foundation’s dual vision of providing world class progressive education to the girl children in Nabha and equipping them with a modern world view and an equally strong set of values rooted in Indian tradition. The mission of the school is to provide an inspiring, nurturing and safe environment with high quality education to international standards that is culture and value-based, diverse and rigorous. The aim is to empower girls with a strong sense of personal integrity and fundamental human values, in an environment that fosters respect, compassion, wisdom and a quest for excellence.

The school envisions to provide value – based international quality education with state of the art infrastructure to nurture and educate girls to develop into most compassionate and confident global citizens and leaders that they can be, skilful in problem solving, capable of critical thinking and deeply rooted in ethics and altruism.

The school through its architecture and curriculum also emphasizes on inculcating principles of eco-friendliness amongst its students. The uniquely designed school is an example of a green building and incorporates special features such as natural cooling through air circulation, compressed mud bricks, abundance of natural light and so forth. The school initiated with primary grades will gradually evolve as a senior secondary girl’s school in the region, following the CBSE pattern.

Gratitude Journal