20. Meet Deepa Deepa Thappa, Primary School Chakarpur Deepa is currently in grade two. Her sister, who is six years old, attends school along with her. In her spare time, Deepa enjoys watching her favorite show Tom and Jerry. Her favorite subjects include Hindi, English and math. She dreams to become a teacher one day, so that she can help young children in her village, read and write. PRATHAM
21. Meet Rajesh Rajesh Singh, Primary School Nathupur Rajesh Singh is in grade 5 and cycles to school every day, which takes him about one hour. Since his mother doesn’t keep very well, he attends school during the day and helps his brother Arjun with his machine repair shop in the evenings. The family survives on whatever comes from the repair shop. Rajesh struggles to get up early in the morning and study before he leaves for school. His ambition is to become an engineer one day. PRATHAM
1:00 Total – 5:15; 5:00, 12:30, 13:05 = 36 This Section – 4:15 Greetings, thanks, finals week Introduce title Change of title bcos focus on scale, volunteers are a means Good afternoon everyone & Thank You for coming. I realize that it’s finals week so I appreciate your taking out time. So today, as the title of the talk says, I will talk about “Large-Scale Solutions for India’s Broken Primary Education Sector”. As you see, I have changed the title from what it was originally supposed to be – i.e “Mobilizing Unpaid Village Volunteers to Fix Primary Education in India” because actually Pratham’s focus is on scale & volunteers provide an avenue through which this problem can be solved at scale
2:15 Govt. is the key player Access, not quality – MDG as well 2001 SSA – mandate universal primary ed by 2010 Infrastructure – cess RTE – free & compulsary within 1 km; pupil-teacher ratio, number of classrooms; vague about quality Govt. collects info on enrollment, number of teachers, infrastructure There are two important points about the title. The first is that most of the focus in India, and even worldwide, for that matter, has been on providing access to school, rather than on the quality of learning outcomes. The Millenium Development Goals want donors to “ ensure that,by 2015,children everywhere,boys andgirls alike,will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling “ Note it only mentions schooling, and nothing about quality. The second is that when we are talking about primary education in India, we have to look at what the Govt. is doing since it is the only institution that has the reach and the finances to make substantial changes possible. In 2001, Sarva Shikha Abhiyaan, the India Government’s flagship program to universalize primary education was started with the goal that all children complete eight years of elementary schooling by 2010. SSA has helped India make great strides in enrollment. Between 2006 and 2010, there has been a _____ % increase in number of children in school. Today, 96.5% of children in India are enrolled in schools. School infrastructure has also improved considerably, thanks to the SSA being flush with funds, helped by a 3% educational cess that all India citizens have to pay. However, as we saw in the last slide, increased enrollment and better infrastructure has not let to improved learning outcomes. In 2009, the Right to Education Act was passed, which makes primary education free and compulsary for every child between the ages of 6 and 14. The RTE lays down various provisions such as the presence of a school within 1 km of any habitation. It lays down rules for no. of school infrastructure, pupil-teacher ratio, etc. However, it talks about quality in a very vague manner and does not hold the Government accountable to any clearly defined learning measures. The above points highlight the fact that the Government of India has been focused only on inputs, not outcomes. If you look at SSA annual reports, you will see data on enrollment, number of teachers, infrastructure but nothing on learning outcomes. However, things are beginning to change. Due to ASER and other initiatives, there is now much more data available on learning outcomes at the national levels. Politicians and bureaucrats now accept the problem, which was not true a few years ago. There is plenty of supplementary teaching-learning materials available in classrooms now, which was also not true a few years ago. Pratham would like to take credit for some of that. Many Governments now have Learning Excellence Programs and have partnered with NGOs, which is a change in strategy, because the Indian Government has been historically averse to working with NGOs. However, even the LEPs are often poorly planned and don’t have a proper assessment component to them. There is still a lot that needs to be done to get the Government focused on learning outcomes.
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2:15 Govt. is the key player Access, not quality – MDG as well 2001 SSA – mandate universal primary ed by 2010 Infrastructure – cess RTE – free & compulsary within 1 km; pupil-teacher ratio, number of classrooms; vague about quality Govt. collects info on enrollment, number of teachers, infrastructure There are two important points about the title. The first is that most of the focus in India, and even worldwide, for that matter, has been on providing access to school, rather than on the quality of learning outcomes. The Millenium Development Goals want donors to “ ensure that,by 2015,children everywhere,boys andgirls alike,will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling “ Note it only mentions schooling, and nothing about quality. The second is that when we are talking about primary education in India, we have to look at what the Govt. is doing since it is the only institution that has the reach and the finances to make substantial changes possible. In 2001, Sarva Shikha Abhiyaan, the India Government’s flagship program to universalize primary education was started with the goal that all children complete eight years of elementary schooling by 2010. SSA has helped India make great strides in enrollment. Between 2006 and 2010, there has been a _____ % increase in number of children in school. Today, 96.5% of children in India are enrolled in schools. School infrastructure has also improved considerably, thanks to the SSA being flush with funds, helped by a 3% educational cess that all India citizens have to pay. However, as we saw in the last slide, increased enrollment and better infrastructure has not let to improved learning outcomes. In 2009, the Right to Education Act was passed, which makes primary education free and compulsary for every child between the ages of 6 and 14. The RTE lays down various provisions such as the presence of a school within 1 km of any habitation. It lays down rules for no. of school infrastructure, pupil-teacher ratio, etc. However, it talks about quality in a very vague manner and does not hold the Government accountable to any clearly defined learning measures. The above points highlight the fact that the Government of India has been focused only on inputs, not outcomes. If you look at SSA annual reports, you will see data on enrollment, number of teachers, infrastructure but nothing on learning outcomes. However, things are beginning to change. Due to ASER and other initiatives, there is now much more data available on learning outcomes at the national levels. Politicians and bureaucrats now accept the problem, which was not true a few years ago. There is plenty of supplementary teaching-learning materials available in classrooms now, which was also not true a few years ago. Pratham would like to take credit for some of that. Many Governments now have Learning Excellence Programs and have partnered with NGOs, which is a change in strategy, because the Indian Government has been historically averse to working with NGOs. However, even the LEPs are often poorly planned and don’t have a proper assessment component to them. There is still a lot that needs to be done to get the Government focused on learning outcomes.
1:15 ASER – affiliate; annual survey – talk about ASER – Govt. does not do it so Pratham does it One-one one; simple reading and arithmetic Couple of examples – grade II level text; division (grade ___ level) Shockingly few kids can do them ASER Centre, a Pratham affiliate organization, conducts an annual status of education survey across India. Surveyors ask children to read simple letters, words and paragraphs and ask them to do some basic arithmetic. Here are a couple of examples of the questions they ask. The child is asked to read this paragraph. Most of you probably can’t read Hindi but basically this is a Grd II level paragraph. Let’s look at the numbers for India. Only about 50% of children in Grade V could read the Grade II text. For Math, it’s no better – only 36% of children in Grade V can do division. What level comptency is division? Which grade?
0:45 Numbers hardly changed Poor learning – dropout The worrying thing is that the numbers have hardly changed since 2006, when the ASER survey was first done. And of course, since children don’t learn much in school, they struggle in higher grades. There are approximately 130 million children enrolled in primary school in India. The enrollment numbers in middle school drops to just 5 million.
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2:00 How does Govt. partnership work? Chhatisgarh – example of how you take a demo model to scale Example shows big learning level improvements are possible