At CSF, we strive to enhance our capacity to innovate and implement impactful educational initiatives to support the NIPUN Bharat Mission. In AY 2023-24, our vision towards ensuring quality education for all children in India is reflected through our impact made across our focus areas – Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN), EdTech, Early Childhood Education (ECE) and School Governance.
Foundational Literacy and Numeracy
Our interventions in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Uttar Pradesh (UP) led to positive outcomes for sustained reform in structured pedagogy, teacher professional development, mentoring, monitoring and district-level initiatives. We supported the Government of Madhya Pradesh in launching the MP NIPUN Professionals Program in August 2023, that aims to strengthen the implementation of Mission Ankur, MP’s FLN Mission, by enlisting 52 young and dynamic professionals to work with the district administration. Through strategic interventions in Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, CSF spearheaded efforts to strengthen the implementation of state-owned FLN missions through collaborations with state and academic partners. In Assam, our efforts for a lean training cascade were successful, reducing transmission loss in teacher training. In Telangana, significant improvements were noted in students meeting state FLN benchmarks in reading, writing, number identification and number comparison.
CSF is now deepening its system reform work on FLN, focussing on districts as the unit of change. We are leveraging our work with state missions to set up CSF teams at the district level to support the district education department drive and review implementation of the states’ FLN missions with high fidelity for student learning. CSF works in 12 districts across Bihar, MP, Odisha, UP and Telangana to drive academic and governance initiatives for respective state FLN missions.
EdTech
CSF partnered with Chimple and Bharti Foundation’s Satya Bharti Schools to set up a teacher-led home learning programme. Early results from the Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) study of the programme have shown a 0.25 standard deviation improvement in Math skills for Grade 1 and 2 children, with the largest gains coming from the\ lowest performing children. We continue to support innovative EdTech solutions through initiatives like the EdTech Accelerator in partnership with eight EdTech organisations. We released our report Bharat Survey for EdTech (BaSE), in April 2023, a first-of-its-kind household survey in India that brings the voice of the end user into the discourse on EdTech. The report revealed interesting findings with 72% children having access to smartphones in India and about 51% of the surveyed children reported self-learning through EdTech.
We identified IIT-Delhi as the institutional home for EdTech Tulna and it was leveraged by two state governments (Gujarat and UP) for EdTech procurements. CSF also supported Telangana to embed home learning as part of public education delivery and the experience from its implementation are now being shared with other state governments.
Early Childhood Education
We published our report Building Strong Foundations: An Examination of Early Childhood Education in India, in December 2023. It provides a comprehensive situational analysis of ECE in the country, encompassing seven states and over 200 Anganwadis and government pre-primary classrooms. The report delves into various crucial elements of ECE delivery, including budgetary considerations, curriculum evaluation and classroom methodologies employed by teachers, aiming to strengthen the understanding of the systemic reforms necessary for successful ECE provisioning for children.
School Governance
To ensure that our system reform approach encompasses both public and private schools, we worked with states to institutionalise school-quality markers like the Competency-based Census Assessment (CCA). In partnership with state governments, we are shaping demand for quality learning and empowering parents to make informed choices about their children’s education. Additionally, our work on school governance was also presented as a case study by Global Schools Forum as part of their All Hands on Deck for SDG 4 and will be used to sensitise non-state actors globally on practical approaches to support governance for improving learning in schools within their local contexts.