The lower school runs in the afternoon: ten to one until twenty past five, Sunday to Thursday, twenty eight classes averaging thirty children.
What is taught: Dhivehi, English, mathematics, environmental studies, Islam, and the practical, art and physical periods. Reading is timetabled daily in grades one to three and every child is heard aloud by an adult twice a week, which in a class of thirty is what the timetable actually allows and is less than we would like.
The session time is the hard part of this school for a young family and we will not pretend otherwise. A seven year old finishing at twenty past five goes home in the dark for two months of the year.
What we do about it. Clubs for these grades run in the morning, from eleven until half past twelve, supervised, and three hundred and ten children come. Walking groups are organised by street at home time and are staffed by teachers for the first fortnight of every term until the route is habit. A child may wait in the covered courtyard until six with a member of staff present, every day, and about forty do.
And in admission, a household with an older child in the morning session may ask for the younger one to be placed in the morning session too, once there is a place, so that one family is not making two journeys at opposite ends of the day. Sixty families are in that arrangement.