Looking ahead towards 2024

It’s been well over a year since September 2018, when I left my life in England. For 6 years, I had been comfortably settled in a spacious, high-ceiling apartment in the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral. I decided to take a new direction in my life, and sold up, or gave away, most of my possessions, and came to India, to work on a project that had stirred a passion in me a couple of years earlier. 

First, a word about education in India . . .

The best way to get a good education in India, is to enter an English-medium school at the age of 6. This path leads on to basic qualifications at age 16 and can continue as the natural route to further or higher education. The admissions process, at the age of six, requires an initial degree of English numeracy and literacy, which can only be acquired by starting education at the age of 3 years, at a fee-paying pre-school. Such establishments thrive in the middle-class suburbs of Bangalore, but there is no Government alternative for the children of those parents whose meagre earnings cover little more than the basic necessities of food and shelter.

James Ambat is an Indian national, and is a man-with-a-mission who challenged the shortfall in the system by founding Building Blocks preschools, a network of 7 teaching centres located around the thriving city of Bangalore, with 3 pilot projects in Goa, Coorg and Hyderabad. These centres provide 3 years of free education for children living in squalid slum conditions, giving them a real opportunity to break out of the cycle of poverty that their parents and forebears had endured for generations. 91% of children leaving a Building Blocks preschool at the age of 6, and then continue their education in the fast-track of a good English-medium school.

I was captivated by this project during a holiday in India 3 years ago, and when I met James, I offered to set up a charity in England to raise funds to support Building Blocks. www.EscapefromPoverty.org.uk was launched with the support of a Devon-based charitable foundation, and in a very short time, I realised that there was work to be done in planning the future development of the Building Blocks idea. After a further visit to Bangalore in the Spring of 2018, I took the decision to move to India and was granted an Employment Visa as an unpaid long-term volunteer.

I was sad to part with most of my possessions, especially the artworks and all the trimmings of a comfortable lifestyle, – like my collection of malt whiskies displayed in fine cut-glass decanters, – but the loss was strangely liberating. I gladly accepted friends’ offers of storage space for some of my winter clothes and one or two treasured objets d’art, while bedding and various household goods went to charities serving the homeless, and dozens of books, pictures and artefacts went to charity shops, while other items raised a modest amount at auction.

My apartment in India will never have the same ambience of my former home in Lincoln. There, my life revolved around entertaining my friends and enjoying semi-retirement. Each year, I delivered two or three training projects for major companies and these boosted my modest pension, thus allowing travel and occasional luxuries.

In India today, the work on the future of Building Blocks is as intensive as we choose to make it, and James and I both seem to work at least 6 days a week.

One major challenge is to expand the After-School Programme that we run for some of the children after they leave Building Blocks. While over 90% of BB graduates continue their education from the age of 6 in English-medium schools, we are unable to provide an After-School Programme for more than a small proportion of them. Our goal is to develop a range of non-academic extra-curricular cultural and sporting activities, but we need premises . . .

I am constantly exploring new contacts and looking for opportunities to work with major corporations, (which are all legally obliged to donate 2% of their annual profits to charitable projects.) Over the past months I have developed new networking opportunities through an international networking group, in addition to the BB involvement with the Bangalore Effective Education Task Force (BEETforce - Indians love acronyms).  James is working on the Zinnia Project  - our own Primary/Secondary School for which we have both the land and guarantees of substantial initial funding. It has always been James’ dream to run a school that was much more than an examination factory, where children could explore and develop their full and varied potential.

In day-to-day matters over the past months, I have produced a Children’s Charter and Safeguarding Policy for the organisation, designed and written many pieces of publicity material and adapted and modified a musical play that our older children will perform at our Indian National Children’s Day concert next month. From January, I am planning to get into the After-School Programme classrooms myself to organise conversation, poetry-reading and debates that will improve our children’s conversational English

 My timetable is crowded and I am working all hours, but it is all very satisfying. There is always a new project dropping into my Inbox, ( - holidays notwithstanding,) and the variety is stimulating, from a constant flow of bid proposals to blue-sky thinking about the way forward.

I now live a very simple life, and with careful budgeting I think I will be able to put aside enough to make a trip to Britain at least every 18 months, to keep in touch with friends, families and those generous people in Britain who support our children’s education and back some of our new projects.

Successful small businesses can grow and reach a lift-off point at which they become self-sustaining. Sadly, education doesn’t work like that, and although in the long-term I am hopeful of raising revenue through our alumni, the short-term prospect is that there will be a constant requirement for a steady and reliable income of regular donations.

My dream is to see 12 preschools around Bangalore, and I want to generate long-term corporate sponsorships that will give these schools stability. I would like to see British schools, communities and businesses build strong ties with particular Building Blocks schools in India, so that the Building Blocks school feels connected to the sponsor and the sponsor can identify with the Building Blocks school.

I have given myself a target to reduce my involvement with Building Blocks in April, 2024, shortly after my 80^th birthday. I have no idea to what extent I shall “retire,” ( James says I never will.) I love this work far too much to start thinking about that. I would like to spend some time in Europe to enjoy the languages and the culture, and I would very much like to be close to friends and family England, but James says I will probably stay living in India, and he may well prove to be right.

I’m not going to start crossing off the days on the calendar. 

There is too much work to be done, and the children want another musical play writing . . .

How many people my age have such a marvellous opportunity handed to them? 

Let me know if you want to join me; there’s plenty of work to be done.

The path out of the slums is education