States in India working in Mission mode for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy to achieve student learning outcomes
New Delhi: A leading non-profit organisation working in the primary and pre-primary education sector in India, today convened a roundtable discussion to share progress made by different States in their respective Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) Missions, and how EdTech is being leveraged to support learning in classrooms and at-home. Central Square Foundation, based out of New Delhi, has been working for close to 12 years in the sector of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN), Educational Technology (EdTech) for Bharat to support at-home learning & Early Childhood Education (ECE), and School Governance.
With a commitment to reshaping the education sector in India, CSF has partnered with governments across 11 States to implement interventions that are research-driven, thereby ensuring an improvement of learning outcomes with the help of technology aided-monitoring. While gross school enrolment rates are over 100 per cent in schools in rural India, the reality is that schooling is NOT leading to learning outcomes being met. Findings from the recent Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2022 indicate how 80% of Grade 3 students in rural India are unable to read simple Grade 2-level text. Moreover 74% children are not able to perform basic subtraction. This underscores the urgent need to bridge the learning gaps.
CSF is working collaboratively with a few first-movers, which includes States like Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Telangana. In Haryana for instance, the NIPUN Haryana mission has ensured that academic resource materials (in the form of teacher guides and student workbooks) have been delivered on time. Mobile apps are being used for monitoring student learning outcomes for over 4.69 lakh students enrolled in government schools in the State, including classroom teaching-learning practices. In Uttar Pradesh, the State education department has set up Vidya Samiksha Kendras (VSKs) under its ambitious NIPUN UP mission for regular monitoring of schools with a call center unit for regular tracking.
In Telangana, the State’s FLN Mission – Tholimettu – is geared towards conducting regular spot assessments of teaching quality in the classrooms and sharing feedback with academic mentors as part of its overall framework of supportive supervision. CSF efforts are actively supporting at least 70% of all school-going children in primary grades in terms of designing and implementing NIPUN programmes.
Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja, CEO and MD of CSF, emphasised the need to accelerate and sustain India’s journey towards FLN. She said, “The clarion call for achieving FLN was raised by the honourable Prime Minister two years ago. We at CSF are committed to supporting States governments with necessary mechanisms to deepen the FLN reforms in their respective States. To that need, we are supporting states in ensuring they are developing protocols around balancing the learning needs of students with capacity building of academic resources.”
Early Childhood Education A Critical First Step in the FLN learning continuum
Along with FLN, there is clear evidence on the need for developing Early Childhood Education (ECE) for 3-6-year-olds, as a lever for making every child NIPUN, and achieving FLN targets by 2026-27. India’s recognition of ECE’s critical importance is reflected in initiatives such as Vidya Pravesh Module, National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Years, the ECCE Task Force, 2022.
Nonetheless, systemic and programmatic challenges hinder effective learning time in ECE classrooms, characterised by inadequate budget allocation, low teacher availability, and a lack of focus on ECE. Programmatic challenges impact the quality of available learning time due to inadequate or inappropriate teaching and learning materials, low-quality teacher training, and ineffective ECE monitoring.
CSF’s research underscores the urgent need to improve effective learning time in ECE classrooms. An Upcoming Report by CSF titled, “Building Strong Foundations: Examining Early Childhood Education in India” reveals that about 25% of visited classrooms did not engage in any ECE activities. Additionally, only 50% of teachers could provide a daily plan for activities conducted on the day of observation. Challenges persist in the adoption and effectiveness of state curriculums in classrooms, with only 30% of parents reporting access to tools and resources to support their children’s learning at home. The detailed findings from this Report will be released in the first week of December, 2023.
SabKa EdTech Is The Future To Support Learning Outcomes In Schools and At Home
The COVID-19 pandemic provided a much-needed boost to the EdTech industry as it was the first time that children, parents and teachers came on the same platform, especially in government schools. It has been heartening to see the government’s push towards greater use of education technology products in classrooms, making sure that EdTech is made more accessible and tailored for low-income communities in India.
CSF has a three-pronged strategy to support evidence-based adoption of EdTech across Bharat. The primary approach is to ‘Shape EdTech Supply’, which means ensuring availability of high-quality EdTech for low-income settings across multiple use cases such as remote learning for FLN. This is followed by ‘Generating Evidence’ on efficacy of EdTech solutions and lastly to ‘drive EdTech adoption’, which means adoption through research and advocacy.
In the last one year, CSF has launched a research report titled Bharat Survey for EdTech (BaSE), which captured user sentiment around EdTech products and showed that 85% households had at least one smartphone. It also showed how 70% of children surveyed, received some learning support from household members. We also partnered with IIT Mumbai to launch EdTech Tulna, which defines a set of research-based standards for quality design of EdTech products for the Indian context. It enables governments in the process of selecting the right EdTech solutions to be implemented in schools. Haryana has been the first state to use EdTech Tulna to digitally empower public school students in Grades 10-12 by providing individual tablet devices loaded with Personalized Adaptive learning software (PAL).
Continuing with its focus on EdTech for low-income communities, CSF has partnered with a consortium of leading non-profit and philanthropic organizations like Micheal and Susan Dell Foundation; Reliance Foundation; UBS Optimus Foundation; British Asian Trust and USAID to launch the Edtech Accelerator. The Accelerator aims to bridge the gap between EdTech supply and demand while generating substantial evidence regarding at-home learning by reaching over 2.5 million children from low-income segments. The Accelerator will collaborate with a dynamic ecosystem of eight EdTech players, supporting the scaling of two promising EdTech solutions for FLN during FY 24–25.
“CSF’s current focus is on developing contextually relevant, pedagogically sound, high-quality EdTech solutions for foundational literacy and numeracy. We want to generate evidence across the Product-Program-Scale continuum to inform policy and intervention design. Through our partnerships with different state governments, we have successfully tailored EdTech solutions to make a more significant impact on education,” Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja further added.