A girl standing to read from a worksheet in a school auditorium while classmates follow on their own papers, three facilitators at the back

Bridge the Gap

Between a hundred and a hundred and fifty Delhi schools every year. Land, water, air, waste, climate change — and who gets left out of all five.

What we do

A module-based curriculum on land, water and air — five to sixteen sessions, plus exposure trips and action projects.

Schools in Delhi 100–150

0150

3M⁺ Children and young people reached cumulative · since 2000 100–150 Schools in Delhi every year 50,000⁺ Students through the curriculum over fifteen years 250⁺ Schools in Delhi NCR over fifteen years

The rest of the figures

200⁺ Schools on year-long curricula in 2019–20

What it sets out to do

A place in the year, not a visit

Success is a slot on next year's timetable that nobody has to argue for. An assembly is far easier to get and it changes nothing.

Be affordable in time as well as money

The programme has to survive a school that can spare one period a fortnight, because that is most schools. A curriculum only the generous can take is a pilot.

Hand over the last session

The target is a class doing something in its own building without us. If we have to be in the room for it, we have built a performance.

Be replaceable

What we want to leave behind is somebody on the staff who can run it next year. Here the exit is the objective rather than the risk.

Teenagers standing on stone ghat steps above an informal riverside settlement while a facilitator addresses them

Five sessions, or sixteen. The school decides.

The wide end is the point. The same material has to hold for a fortnight and for a year without quietly becoming two different programmes.

Strategy and activities

Modules, not a syllabus

Five sessions, or sixteen. On land, water and air. A school takes the depth it can actually timetable, which is why the range is that wide.

Two leadership journeys ran inside it

CineGreen and Ride the Van ran alongside the year-long curricula in 2019–20, across over two hundred schools.

Who it is for

Delhi school students

The class is the unit. It runs in a school that gives us five sessions and in one that gives us sixteen.

Their teachers

Training comes with the curriculum, so the second audience is the person who has to stand up and teach land, water and air after we have gone.

Schools that want a year, and schools that want a fortnight

The module structure exists so that a school does not have to choose between all of it and none of it. Depth is a timetable decision and we let the timetable win.

Whoever gets left out of all five subjects

Land, water, air, waste, climate — and who carries the cost of each. Inclusive ecology is in the curriculum because a class that never asks who pays has not finished the module.

Impact

3M⁺

Children and young people reached

cumulative · since 2000

100–150

Schools in Delhi

every year

50,000⁺

Students through the curriculum

over fifteen years

250⁺

Schools in Delhi NCR

over fifteen years

Three million children reached

The outreach count: a hundred to a hundred and fifty Delhi schools a year since 2000. It counts children in a school the programme entered — a different and far larger population than the fifty thousand who sat the sessions.

A hundred to a hundred and fifty schools a year

That is the current annual reach in Delhi, and the figure the programme is planned against rather than the one it is advertised with.

The rest of the record

Fifty thousand students in fifteen years

Over 250 schools across Delhi NCR and over 50,000 students, cumulative.

Who has funded it

Bupa Foundation and Acuity Knowledge Partners fund it now. Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Nokia Siemens Networks, American Express, National Geographic and Adobe have funded it before.