From adult literacy classes to an inclusive centre

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A teacher who began with those the system had missed

Syed Majeed Gilani began his working life in Taleem-e-Balighan, the government's adult literacy programme — sitting with grown men and women who had never been given the chance to read, and teaching them their first words on a page. It is unglamorous work. It is also the work that tells you, very quickly, what happens to a person when education passes them by.

That conviction — that no one should be left outside the classroom — became the thread running through everything that followed.

If a child cannot come to the lesson in the usual way, the lesson has to learn to come to the child.

In 1990 he founded his own educational institute in Faisalabad, offering general education to children in the surrounding community. For two decades it did what good neighbourhood schools do: taught, examined, and sent children on their way.

But some children arrived who did not fit the usual shape of a classroom. Children who did not speak on time. Children who could not hear the lesson. Children whose behaviour was read as disobedience when it was, in fact, a difficulty nobody had named. In most schools, these children quietly stopped coming.

In 2010, rather than let that happen, the institute changed its own shape. It became an inclusive education programme — and took the name Embosom: to hold close, to take into one's care. Special education, speech and language therapy, and behavioural support were built in alongside academics, so that a child with additional needs would not have to be sent elsewhere, or sent home.

Today the Centre continues that work under the same principle it started with. Every child who comes through the door is assessed carefully, taught individually, and treated as capable of more than they arrived with.