Four rooms, a hall, a garden and a gate
An honest description of a small island school, including the parts that are difficult.
The teacher shortage, said out loud
This school has six teaching posts and in nine of the last eleven years it has started the year with five or fewer people in them.
That is the central fact about a school this size and no description of us is honest without it. A teacher posted to an island of four hundred people, two boats a week from anywhere, is often in their first year of teaching and very often leaves after two. We have had four English teachers in six years. One year we began in January with two grades sharing a teacher who taught both at once for a whole term, and the children in that room lost something we could not give back.
So the school is built to survive it rather than to pretend it away. Every teacher here can teach every subject to grade six, which is not ideal and is what a school with five teachers and seven grades requires. The timetable is written so that one absence rearranges rather than collapses. We share an English teacher with two other small schools over a video link, which is described on this site. And the reading work, which is the thing that matters most, is done by every adult in the building including the office and the principal.
What we ask of families is patience with the changes and honesty in return. A teacher who leaves is not something the school chose, and the school will always tell you who is teaching your child and why it has changed.
What has not changed in eleven years is this. Ninety four children, six adults who know all of them, and a gate where any parent may say anything to anybody twice a day.
Everybody who works here
Hussain Naahil
Eleven years on this island. Teaches the oldest class for most of the week, stands at the gate twice a day, and hears four children read eve...
Mariyam Shahula
Wrote the third version of the multi grade timetable after visiting a school in another atoll for three days. The reason every child in this...
Ibrahim Rushdhee
Teaches mathematics and science across the middle grades, runs the garden club, and sits in every video English lesson and writes the note a...
Aishath Liusha
Runs the preschool room in the morning and the office in the afternoon, which is what a school of six adults looks like. Handles admission,...
Moving to the school on the next island
What happens at the end of grade six?
Every child leaves for the school on the next island, which has grades seven upwards, and the journey is about twenty five minutes on the school boat.
From the second term of grade six there is a period a week preparing for it, and we take the whole class over twice to sit in lessons. It is the biggest change that happens to a child from this island and a child who arrives unprepared has a hard first term.
Does our child have to board there?
Not from this island. The boat runs daily and the children travel each morning and home each afternoon.
Families whose children later go on to grades eleven and twelve elsewhere may face a boarding arrangement, and that is a conversation for grade ten rather than now. The school on the next island holds meetings about it and we will tell you when they are.
Will our child be behind when they get there?
In some subjects, sometimes, and the honest answer depends on the subject. Reading and mathematics from this school stand up well and we work hardest on both.
Where our children have arrived behind, it is most often in science, because we teach it without a laboratory, and in spoken English, because a shared teacher over a video link cannot do speaking practice properly. We tell the receiving school exactly this for every child we send, in writing, rather than letting them find out.
The gate, twice a day
Quarter to eight and quarter to one. The principal is there and so is every class teacher.