A year at a learning assistance centre

The Center for Learning Assistance exists to raise children’s educational levels and to support the practical side of their development. It began in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when schooling had stopped for almost everybody.

I am Nensy Gangadiya, and I work as a centre assistant. This is what a year looks like.

Before the classes start

We begin by meeting parents — the parents of every child who might join. We want to understand what the family’s situation is and what they are hoping for, and they want to know what we actually do. Enrolment follows those conversations, not the other way round.

Then every child sits a baseline assessment. Not to grade them, and not for a file: to find out where each one actually is, which is often a long way from where their school register says they are. A child can be enrolled in a class three years ahead of what they can read.

Building from where the child is

Once we know the starting point, we plan from there.

For a child who needs foundational work, that means beginning with the Gujarati alphabet, simple words, the English alphabet and numbers — whatever the school year nominally says. The first objective is not the syllabus. It is a fear-free room. A child who has been behind for years has usually been told so, and will not attempt anything until being wrong stops being dangerous.

So we teach through games, activities and teaching-learning materials. Visual aids, interactive games, story sessions. Number recognition, counting, then addition and subtraction. Later, multiplication and division; writing words with conjunctions, forming sentences, odd and even numbers, translating Gujarati words into English; short essays.

What we look for beyond the exercises is whether a child can stand up and speak without fear — about kindness to animals, about why trees matter, about whatever they have been thinking. That is usually the change parents notice first, before any of the academic ones.

Keeping parents in it

We meet parents regularly through the year, not only at the start. They track what their child is doing and we hear what they are seeing at home. A post-assessment at the end of the year shows what has moved.

None of it works without all three parts: the centre, the family, and the child’s own willingness to keep turning up. We are grateful to the families who trust us with it.