About the Foundation
The Helga Todd Teachers’ Education Foundation (HTTEF) is an educational charity registered in England with the UK Charities Commission (Registration No.1123512). It was founded in 2008 by Ram Todd in memory of his late wife Helga in order to return something to society in the five countries where they had worked and lived.
The Helga Todd Teachers’ Education Foundation, working in partnership with established educational bodies and other educational charities in our target countries, is committed to making a difference to society.
Our Purpose
The Helga Todd Foundation is committed to making a difference to society in partnership with established educational bodies and other educational charities in our target countries. The Foundation’s chief objective is to advance education and teacher education by the promotion of high quality teaching through the provision of financial support, expertise and assistance and seeks to support colleges, other institutions and charities.
Since its establishment in 2008, the Foundation’s trustees have embraced a number of initiatives and have explored different avenues in order to find out the best way of achieving the Foundation’s aims through practical experience. Our initial focus has been on developing links and projects in India, working with English medium schools to support the education and training of women students and teachers.
The two, very successful, starter projects were:
2008 to 2013 – The Helga Todd Award for newly qualified teachers (NQTA) in partnership with the Cambridge University Faculty of Education.
2011 to 2014 – The Helga Todd Early Years’ Teacher Training Course, run in partnership with the Kalgidhar Trust India (Akal Academy schools) and based in Chandigarh, Punjab.
Trustees want to put structures in place that allow individual volunteer education professionals to pass on their expertise, experience and knowledge to others, to advance education and in particular, teacher education. We intend that this process will allow the Foundation to pass on best practice in teaching and learning.
Our Aims
We are committed to a child-centred, creative approach to education and to the education of women. We aim to support communities, frequently, though not exclusively, in rural areas, through empowering local women to enhance their own life chances whilst developing sustainable education locally through becoming qualified teachers and educating young people.
We are also concerned that our work should support the development of education more broadly and to that end, we work with practising teachers in a variety of contexts. We intend that our training programmes should encourage participants to pursue their aspirations for example through working towards valid qualifications. To date, this has meant that many of our trainee early years teachers have subsequently and successfully embarked on distance learning degree courses and some have progressed to the next, MEd step.
Our long-term vision – how we will fulfil our core charitable purpose:
“To advance education by the promotion of teaching in India, Nigeria, Indonesia, United Kingdom and Germany through the provision of financial support and assistance, firstly to women students and teachers and secondly to colleges, other institutions and charities.” (Declaration of Trust)
Trustees and associates meet regularly to plan and direct the Foundation’s work and the education professionals meet as an education sub-committee to both advise trustees and manage initiatives. To date we have:
- Trained young women candidates from rural areas with the minimum qualifications of 16+ matriculation to become early years and primary class teachers.
- Provided short and part-time courses to help practising teachers develop their pedagogical skills so that they can teach and communicate more effectively with the children in their classrooms.
- Conducted skills enhancement workshops and programmes to help practising teachers to improve their pedagogical skills. Workshops are generally school based and planned to run at weekends, in vacation and other off-peak times.
- Sought to embed, sustain and build on ITT and CPD programmes through mentor development and training and other school-based developments.
- Provided opportunities for individual practising teachers from the UK and India to learn from each other, contribute at an individual level and to develop understanding of each other’s culture and education systems.