The recommendations were made in an October report — the contents of which were made public Tuesday — under project SATH-E (Sustainable Action for Transforming Human Capital — Education), an initiative started by the NITI Aayog in 2017 to help states improve the quality of education at local schools.
While 16 states had responded to the NITI Aayog’s project proposal, and officials from 14 states went on to make presentations on the condition of the education sector in their respective states, according to the report, Jharkhand, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh were eventually selected for the implementation of the project.
The latest report builds on the outcomes observed in these three states to make recommendations for overall improvement in the quality of public school education across the country.
It highlights issues like sub-scale and inadequately resourced schools, large-scale teacher vacancies, education and training to improve teacher quality, accountability towards learning outcomes via competency-based assessment reforms of schools, early childhood education (ECE), contextualised mother tongue-based multilingual education (MLE), and strengthening the governance structures in education departments, as some of the challenges faced by public schools, and also suggests a possible way forward.
Interventions have been suggested at the structural, academic, governance and accountability levels.
“The interventions of Project SATH-E are in synchronisation with NEP [Nation Education Policy]-2020. The state governments of Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha have been resiliently working on the NEP-2020 implementation roadmaps as the SATH-E states are pioneering contextualised interventions for it, which will help in attaining grade-level learning competencies,” B.V.R. Subrahmanyam, CEO of NITI Aayog said in the report.
Subrahmanyam added: “The NEP-2020 aims to address the growing educational development imperatives of our country. The States/UTs [union territories] now need to adapt and pivot their strategies aligning to NEP-2020 in order to achieve its targets in a time-bound manner. This will ensure that each student in India gets quality education that enables them to be agents of change in our society. Project SATH-E is a landmark contribution of NITI Aayog in this direction.”
ThePrint has also reached the Education Ministry for comment over WhatsApp, the article will be updated once a response is received.
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Structural Interventions
The first suggestion made as part of structural intervention includes school consolidation, including the merger of sub-scale schools. The report goes on to explain that these are schools with less than 50 students and just one or two teachers. The challenges faced by these schools, the report adds, were lack of individual attention to students owing to multi-grade and multi-level teaching (one teacher teaching multiple classes), limited time for teaching and inadequate learning infrastructure.
In Jharkhand, for instance, 4,380 schools were merged in 2017-18, says the report.
“Stakeholders agreed that there was improvement in teaching quality and classroom interaction among students [following the merger],” reads the report, adding that an improvement in quality of mid-day meals, delivery of cycles [given as part of government schemes], computer laboratory facilities, library, availability of drinking water, playgrounds and toilets were observed in the impact assessment.
The second suggestion pertains to the development of a subset of schools as exemplary or leader schools, with a set of disproportionate investments made toward those schools in order to create new momentum in the public education system. This would also involve drawing in students from other sub-scale public, as well as private schools, to these exemplary schools.
The report also suggests focussing on building a high-performance organisation as part of the state education department, that is well-staffed and has oversight over all academic and administrative matters, in order to manage the academic and administrative responsibilities.
It also recommends optimising teacher allocation, to address the acute shortages of teachers in schools, especially at the secondary and higher secondary levels.
Academic Interventions
This section focuses on bridging the learning gap — what a student knows, as compared to what he or she is expected to know as a student of a particular class. According to the report, this gap can be bridged by innovative in-class interventions and engaging students in activities.
One of the ways to do this, according to the report, is through foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN), which involves skills and strategies focusing on reading, speaking, writing and interpreting a student’s thoughts and numeracy is the ability to reason and to apply simple numerical concepts.
This suggestion was implied in Odisha where 60,000 teachers were appointed and trained to improve FLN skills of students, states the report.
The report also suggests innovations in teacher assessment to improve instructional design. This includes certification of the teaching staff based on unbiased assessments and rewards and incentives to keep teachers motivated.
In Madhya Pradesh, “the state focused on the ‘Teaching at the Right Level’ approach under
Dakshata Unnayan which encouraged teachers to conduct lessons appropriate for the actual learning levels of their students, rather than focusing on completing a standard curriculum as mandated by the grade and age,” said MP’s principal secretary, Department of School Education, Rashmi Arun Shami.
Shami added: “Over 67 lakh students were supported by 2 lakh trained teachers under the project. It resulted in a 20%-30% improvement in learning outcomes in AY [academic year] 2018-2019. Similarly, the ‘Ek Shala Ek Parisar’ intervention resulted in improved teacher and school leader availability, better-resourced schools, enhanced attendance, and reduced dropouts.”
Governance and Accountability Interventions
The suggestions in this section include building a strong management information system (MIS) for data-driven decision-making in schools and administrative offices.
Jharkhand, according to the report, has been instrumental in developing a comprehensive integrated education MIS platform called e-Vidya Vahini, which incorporates all the multiple aspects of information gathering, processing, validation in the education department and facilitates data-backed decision-making at state, district, block, and school level.
The report also suggests driving accountability to ensure systemic outcomes at state, district and block levels. “In the context of education, we need to create a system where teachers feel accountable for students’ learning and well-being… and senior management at headquarters feels accountable for continuously improving the overall state of the education system,” states the report.
Talking about the interventions made under the SATH-E project, Odisha’s School and Mass Education commissioner-cum-secretary, Aswathy S. said, “In 2018, Odisha launched district scorecards as a tool to improve outcomes in the education sector. Scorecards give a holistic view of the district’s performance in education, support the identification and prioritisation of weak areas, drive timely actions, and enable effective tracking of progress.
She added: “Odisha School Monitoring App (OSMA) is a unique initiative taken by the State of Odisha with the result of better monitoring and management of the education system in the state under the SATH-E programme, which helped the State build up in-house capabilities to monitor and sustain the transformation. Monthly district review meetings and block review meetings were also conducted regularly to assess gaps and accelerate achievements.
The last suggestion in this section highlights strengthening school management committees (SMC) for improved service delivery.
The drop-out rate in India, according to the report, stands at 16 percent at the secondary level, with transition rates from primary to upper primary being 93 percent and primary to secondary, 91 percent. The role of SMCs includes organising parent-teacher meetings, organising events such as annual day and creating SMC grievance cells.
Expressing hope that the report may help states and union territories across the country in improving the quality of public school education in their areas, Rajib Kumar Sen, senior advisor (education) NITI Aayog, said, “Project SATH-Education was conceptualised to bring systemic changes in School Education and put our students on the path of sustained and successful learning… The report encompasses contextual interventions from the SATH-E states and has the potential to support other States/UTs in tailoring initiatives to their context.”
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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