one touch at a time - sep 2010 - innovations in village schools

8/8/2019 One Touch at a Time - Sep 2010 - Innovations in Village Schools

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One Touch at a

Time

Primary Education in Karnatakas Villages

MindTree Foundation Journal . September 2010 .Raja Shanmugam


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Learning adventures in Indian Villages

Innovations stumbled upon during a field visit

Running MindTree Foundation exposes us to new learning every day with every interaction. More

often than not, just plain realities of life. But learning, nevertheless. During a recent field visit, I hadan learning overload which became the trigger for this note.

State of affairs in Indian primary education

Out of every 100 children who enroll into the primary school system in India, about 85 children drop

out before end of the secondary school. Almost all the progress we have made leading to tags such

as knowledge economy, service economy, India Shining etc have primarily been due to this

15% who managed to squeeze through! Imagine what can happen even if we manage to push the

needle by another 10%. This is one of the biggest motives for Primary Education being a core charter

for MindTree Foundation.

In spite of all the controversy on RTE, a sizeable population actually manages to enroll in schools.

More than 95% get that opportunity. There are 45000 schools in Karnataka . 127 such schools in just

Kanakapura Taluk alone.

It is what these kids get (or do not get) as inputs for learning along the way that leads to the high

drop out rate. Forget computers and such. When we started our second version of the Life Skills

program at the Uttarahalli Government School, the Asst. headmaster warned us. You guys are

starting the program by asking the kids in the 8th

grade to respond to a questionnaire. Many of our

kids have come in from village primary schools, after finishing 7th

grade. They do not know how to

read and write. You need to hand hold them individually to get this filled. BTW, if you are curious,they just need to tick Yes or No to answer them. In Kannada. Imagine these kids when they are

faced with daily trauma when forced to learn with 100 other kids in the same room who are miles

ahead of them in scholastic capabilities. Little wonder so many drop out.

We recently tied up with an NGO called Sikshana which is quite active in this

sector. They support 400+ schools in Karnataka. Their intervention costs just

INR 500 per year per student, but produces significant level of improvement

in the scholastic and attendance levels in almost all their schools. The chil-

dren in these schools read and write at much above the prescribed levels.

What is more, there is also a trend of reverse migration from private

schools to government primary schools they in a few of their schools.

Their charter to have a clear exit strategy by enabling the local population

take over their work in each of these villages is critical to us. So is their goal

of making their process repeatable and scalable and integrate it into the

larger program of the state education machinery.

As we progressed in our initial discussions, we learnt a few of their key innovations.


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Paper Bank A major problem of children from village schools is their inability to write. The reason?

No paper to practice. Yes! Many of these children can not afford the stationary to practice writing

and attain the required proficiency. The free notebooks given by the government (that too only for

certain communities) are too limited for them to be used for such practice.

Sikshanas solution? Every child in Grades 5-7 gets 5-10 A4 sheets of paper every week, to practice

writing. When she is done, she can turn in the sheets and get another set of sheets. No Questions.

No limits. I have personally seen the result of this intervention such beautiful handwriting in the

remotest of villages both Kannada and English. Any class teacher in any school will be proud to

have such children in her class!

Class Library.

The root cause of children unable to read well even at the 7th

grade? No practice. Many villages lack

decent alternate reading material. No local libraries. Not even news papers for the child to practice

at home. How will the child ever be proficient in reading?

Sikshanas solution? Build class libraries with books chosen by the children. Any book, as long it is in

the prescribed age group and is in either English or Kannada. Pratham books are recommended,

since they are more tuned to the Indian reader. Each child is recommended to read one book every

week. Again I have been in remote village class rooms where books are read fluently, dictionaries

used without prompting and prodding by teachers.

One Laptop per school.

This is one of the biggest attractions in Sikshanas programs. Student access and use of computer

centers are strictly controlled even in well equipped Private Schools. In Sikshana supported schools,

each school has a Laptop with open source software and applications preloaded (No DVD and CD

support will talk about this later). The Laptops are freely handled by children and even taken home

to do projects in rotation if required. I remember visiting one village school where the 4th

standard

girl was coaching her class teacher how to open files and operate the laptop!!!

Apart from this, the teachers are trained in TQM and in setting specific annual goals for their school.

Sikshana monitors and guides the progress of the school on a regular basis through identified men-

tors. They also provide discretionary funds to the schools to implement programs of their own

choice some have chosen to create a garden while some have set up local competitions/games.


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These are impressive system innovations from any NGOs perspective. So I was not expecting noth-

ing new when we went for the first field evaluation of their activities in our selected schools after

signing the MOU. I was wrong.

Learning from the Field visit.

Management co-operation The NGO believes that sustainable improvement will happen only with

both the Principal AND the teachers work in complete cooperation towards that goal. A major por-tion of the evaluation by Sikshana mentors is on this aspect. This is highlighted in reviews and

stressed as an important requirement for the school grading.

Community Involvement As a foundation for self sufficiency, the program expects the local com-

munity especially parents of the children to be actively involved in the development of the chil-

dren and also the welfare of the school. To this effect the mentors visit the homes of the parents,

deal with local community leaders and gain their confidence and support.

Scalability: In spite of the immense goodwill generated by volunteer programs, the biggest chal-

lenge is to keep the volunteers. In a program like the Sikshana, this could be a severe limiting factor

for success and scaling. Sikshanas Solution ? Hire local village youth, who are mostly unemployed,train them and deploy them to become mentors to their schools. Their part time (one day a week)

salaries keep the expenses under control, while creating sustenance and confidence in the youth.

Since they are local, their acceptance within the community is also high. They get to do their own

work on other days. Sikshana subsidizes the cost of higher education for these mentors. And, to

train the local administrators for the eventuality of directly funding these mentors, they are made to

pay from their pockets right now, even if it is Sikshanas money that is in their pockets!

Visible Health Tracking System : The most interesting innovation I noticed was this:


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Simple paper pouches, one each for each school. Color coded to visibly indicate the health of the

school. Eg. Red Attention required, Green Good, Yellow Satisfactory, but needs further work.

Stuck on Chart sheets on the wall, one sheet per Mentor. All schools arrayed across to give an im-pressive and immediate view of the overall program and the comparative state of affairs among

schools and mentors.

School Diary: A village school child having a formal diary where she can note down her homework,

calendar, reading records etc? The children love it. They feel immediately responsible and account-

able. To help win over the teachers to this concept, the diary is packed with content that has been

chosen by the teachers themselves about basic tables, facts about Karnataka and India, tips on

how to keep a good hygiene.


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An interesting feature of this diary is that each child makes a commitment of his / her daily work

habits and writes it down on the diary. Since it is a voluntary commitment, the schedules are

broadly followed without much issues.

Then comes the Reading Log in the Diary. A key aspect of the program is to increase the reading

skills of the children through class libraries. How do you ensure that the children really read?

There is a provision in each childs diary to list out the books she read, with a brief one liner on the

content. This way, the child, the teacher and the Sikshana Mentor can track progress.

At the Ambetkar Nagar School, many children here come from families where both parents are daily

laborers. They find little time, energy or interest to ensure that their wards get ready and go to

school in time every day. So how did the school solve the problem?

By forming a Class Committee for bringing in the absentees! This committee has 10 children who are

regular attendees to go and locate the absentee child. If the child is sick or otherwise in need of

help, they will do what they can and report back to the teacher. Else, they persuade the child to ac-

company them back to school

The actual innovation in this process is that the committee also includes 5 habitual absentees!! This

actually helps the team to understand the situation from the absentees perspective and act with

empathy and understanding.


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The response has been amazing most schools with Sikshana are running with >90% attendance!!

Incentive for Local administrators to get involved: Sikshana spends just about Rs. 500 per child per

year. Even this adds up to a lot of money when you deal with 40,000 children. One way to ensure

that the process is sustainable is to convince the local population to bear some of the financial bur-

den.

The solution presented itself in an unusual way. There is a huge shortage of notebooks in the villageschools. While the government supplies free notebooks to children certain communities, the others

have to fend for themselves, however poor they are. To bridge this gap, Sikshana used to buy and

supply notebooks to the schools. One particular village wanted them to deliver these notebooks in

bulk, for about 10 neighborhood schools. The bigwigs of the village offered to pay for this.

While negotiating for these notebooks, Prasanna, CEO of Sikshana, found that not only could he get

these books printed at a better quality and lower cost, he could also get it custom printed! So he

went ahead and printed the names of the donors on the back page and distributed the notebooks.

They became an instant hit because of their quality. This also created sort of a competition amongthe other big wigs around the Kanakapura area. Now, almost 50% of his annual budget for note-

books is already paid for. And he has to have different versions of the back page to accommodate

different clusters of donors and villages!!!

Prevention of Anti-Social Activities: Supply of Laptops to schools caused a peculiar problem. The

village dadas demanded to borrow the Laptops on evenings and weekends. These Laptops were

to be used as CD/DVD players to display questionable content for private audiences under ques-

tionable conditions. Sikshanas solution? All Laptops run open source software and the CD players

are disabled. Since the CDs/DVDs dont run on them, the Sikshana Laptops are left undisturbed .

Not all learnings were of a positive nature, though. We saw that the children were learning better.

We saw that the attendance was increasing. We could see the extreme commitment among the

teachers. They are proud about what they have been able to achieve against all odds. However,

when we reviewed the enrollment statistics, almost all schools are steadily dropping in their enroll-

ment numbers.

When I tried to probe further, I was told that the village populations themselves are shrinking, lead-

ing to drop in school enrollment. Sobering thought.

one touch at a time - sep 2010 - innovations in village schools

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