By Umer NangianaThe stage was set for them and they owned it. Dressed in elaborate costumes, they re-enacted prominent inspirational roles from history and sang songs of hope.With their power-packed performances and their heartfelt messages, the students of The Next Generation (TNG) School demonstrated that the younger generation is prepared to take their future into their own hands.Through skits, theatre plays, poetry, songs and dances, the girls and boys of the school sent out a message of peace, love and harmony and urged the world to preserve and protect the earth they inhabit.It was their day, the Annual Day of the school, and they demonstrated all the leadership skills they had learnt over the year. The students showcased why the extra-curricular activities form an integral part of a child’s personality development at school. “Annual Day function is the demonstration of the leadership qualities of the students. It is their chance to showcase those qualities in front of a large audience comprising their teachers, parents, fellow students and other observers,” Riyaz Ahmed Bakali, the Director of TNG, told Community.At the school, they say, they place emphasis on imparting leadership skills to their students. And it starts right from Kindergarten to Grade 8. It was the kindergarten tots who set the stage at the Annual Day with their colourful performance for their seniors to follow with a brilliant display of acting and singing skills.The kindergarten students performed a song titled Healthy Food, where they highlighted the importance of eating fruits and vegetables. The Water Cycle and Heal the World performed by the Primary section students stressed on the vitality of Earth’s water cycle and how we must take preventive actions to protect the Earth from pollution.The kindergarten performance was followed by Arabic and Pakistani cultural dances. The students re-enacted a role from the life of Sufi Saint Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jillani, to give a message of peace and harmony. Grade 7 and 8 students presented Shakespeare’s Macbeth.The colourful evening function culminated with a performance based on the depiction of famous Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.“The basis of TNG is not just normal education. We have embedded soft skills into our technical education. We want to teach students how to communicate effectively, we want our students to learn how to build a team, how to do time management, how to resolve problems, how to make decisions and all these things are nothing but soft skills,” said Bakali.By working on different projects for the annual day, Bakali added, the students collaborate with each other and thus they build a team in the process and learn how to do it. Similarly, if they are stuck somewhere, they learn how to solve problems with team work.“You must have noticed that at some instances, some of the students were stuck with the microphones, however, with the confidence and with their problem solving skills they immediately rectified those issues,” said director.The grooming focuses on five themes: environment and climate change, healthy eating habits, patriotic theme, poetry and drama and Islamic values.Bakali said at TNG, they hold faculty as an integral part of their institution. “We say teacher is the leader. Like a leader, a teacher is the one who inspires his students and has followers,” he added.It was the teachers who had selected and prepared the students for the performances that impressed the large audience.The school employs different strategies to continuously improve the quality of their faculty. They have hired training partners and established training programmes, both technical and non-technical, for the faculty.“We believe that if we need to improve we need to train our faculty with latest trends and wherever we feel they have some lacking,” said Bakali.Career counselling of the students, he added, is one of aspect that they take very seriously at the school.“Today, we are in a position from where our students will be sitting for O’ Level exams next year. And we have started this exercise from now where we are chalking out a plan about subjects so that they can choose according to their career preferences,” he said.They map the thinking of students and their parents and match it with the capabilities of the students to ascertain the type of counselling required for the children to find their career choices. “I always want to see students to come on that stage and speak fluently with confidence. I have seen some students they are three-year-old and they speak sensible and fluent English for example,” said Bakali.“However, their control is limited but then a child of 3-5 has an attention span of not more than 5 minutes. So from next time, we plan to bring them on the stage and let them speak extempore for at least five minutes in order to build their confidence and stamina,” he added.The director of the school said the institution was not aiming to expand exponentially rather in a controlled manner. They want to first make sure that quality is maintained. Filling the seats, he said, is very easy but that is not expansion.However, they intend to expand vertically and horizontally by coming up with two more campuses for 2015-16 sessions and moving to grade 9 from next year.The students who performed different activities at the show were selected after a consultation process with their parents, Shagufta Bakali, the CEO TNG School, told Community.“Our aim was help the students sharpen their skills by giving them an opportunity to face the audience and demonstrate what they have learnt at the school,” she said, adding that a consent form was sent to the parents, in which, they opted whether they wanted their children to participate or not.The teachers then selected the students according to their capabilities in performing different activities on stage.“Besides, we have at our school every day one lesson on skills development. It is a 50-minute session, where children learn soft skills, sports, do their projects and the teachers spend time with their students to develop their skills other than just academics,” said the CEO.About the parents involvement in their children’s education, Shagufta said that she has noticed that there is a difference between the parents who are paying fee from their pockets and the ones whose companies are paying.“The former, I have observed, are very serious. Among others, there may be some who expect that the school should do everything. Among these too, there are many who take their children’s education very seriously of course,” said the CEO. The school tries to engage parents with the help of parents-teacher meetings that are held eight times a year. The school administration, she added, is open to anyone at any time to discuss with them whatever issues they might be facing about their child’s educational development.The school has a multicultural setting with children from 18 different nationalities including Indians, Filipinos, Indonesians, Somalis, Egyptians and Pakistanis.The prominent guests at the Annual Day of TNG were Anas Kaseem Al Onazi, Director of PR and Communications Qatar Heritage and Identity Centre; Khalid Sayed al-Sheaibi, Vice Chairmen friends of Environment Qatar; General Hassan Ali al-Sheaibi; Fahad Isamail Hassan Zaial, Chief Administrative Office at Qatar Financial Centre; Hamad Mohammed al-Ghali, Director Private School at Supreme Education Council; Mohammed Sarfaraz Khanzada, former ambassador of Pakistan to Qatar; Commodore Masood Akram, Defense Attaché at the Embassy of Pakistan; and Chief Guest Rashid Nizam, Community Welfare Attaché at the Embassy of Pakistan.