Project Director – State Reform, CSF
Q1. India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recognises Foundational Literacy and Numeracy as an urgent and necessary prerequisite to learning. What is CSF’s approach to institutionalise FLN at the national, state and district level?
At CSF, we are systematically working with the national and state governments as a trusted enabler and catalytic partner. Our teams are supporting 11 state governments in line with the NIPUN Bharat Mission. But, when it comes to FLN, our horizon is broader; we are keen to persist for much longer till we achieve permanent shifts in states.
Within FLN, while we work with states to continuously improve materials and teacher support, perhaps innovating on how we can re-imagine teacher support will be a big focus for us in the coming years. At the district level, we are keen to institutionalise FLN delivery by leveraging systematic middle management capacity building programmes and running data quality improvement interventions. We aim to collaborate with the highest leadership in states, while working closely with our other partners, to deepen impact.
Outside of FLN, we feel early childhood education (ECE), especially in Balvatikas, is an important adjacent thread to look at and solve for FLN outcomes of children. At CSF, we are working towards understanding the evolution of ECE and its application in states as an enabler for FLN. Additionally, we are looking at setting up the State School Standard Authority (SSSA) in states, as per the NEP 2020, to enable assessment of school performance in elementary grades, thereby strengthening governance structures for schools.
Q2. What are your views on the implementation and progress of the NIPUN Bharat Mission so far? Highlight a few state-level initiatives/models that have shown excellence and can be replicated by other states to strengthen foundational learning for children.
2024 would be the third year of NIPUN implementation across India. From a system reform lens, it has been very heartening to learn how state education departments function in mission mode and design inputs which are long lasting and truly lift the capacity at all levels to deliver FLN outcomes for children. What is particularly noteworthy is how states have created custom solutions which suit the practicality of their situation.
For example, Uttar Pradesh (UP) institutionalised a new cadre of academic resource persons in each block to provide training and mentoring support to all FLN teachers and track progress made through spot assessments in schools.
Haryana banked on creating the role of an FLN coordinator at the district level; this person works closely with the district education officer and block education officer to drive the mission outcomes.
States like Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Tamil Nadu hired young professionals as FLN fellows to energise districts and blocks for mission implementation.
We have seen states like Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and UP creating long-term solutions like improved textbooks, student workbooks and teacher guides, with structured daily lesson plans. This means that materials used in FLN grades have been permanently improved and aligned to the new National Curriculum Framework (NCF). With every passing year, the hope is for teachers and the entire system to get used to leveraging these materials to support students better. Haryana, MP, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and UP have made significant strides for this.
Another critical piece that also made progress in a few states during the mission is understanding learning outcomes (NIPUN Lakshyas). Getting the entire system to understand learning outcomes (NIPUN Lakshyas) has led to meeting weekly and quarterly sub-learning outcomes of children. States have done well in communicating these outcomes to stakeholders and providing high-quality assessment items at all levels (school, district and state) to continuously understand how states are progressing.
Q3. Is the NIPUN Bharat Mission driving actual shifts for teacher practice and FLN outcomes on the ground?
The answer is yes! But the real question we need to address is how permanent are these shifts and will they last beyond the mission?
In some states where academic inputs were improved to meet structured pedagogy standards (known to work in the context of government schools), we have seen significant adoption of materials by teachers. Workbook usage has gone up and teachers and officials are appreciating weekly worksheets linked to FLN skills for students. Over 60% teachers have been observed to be correcting student workbooks correctly in Haryana, MP and UP, across ~300 schools, as per our recent dipstick survey.
Introduction of daily lesson plans have also shown positive shifts over the time. The entire system now has some way to understand the learning level of students in a class and what the teachers should be doing to cater to them. This has enabled teachers, headmasters (HMs) and cluster resource coordinators (CRCs) to track ‘behind the class’ activity with respect to the academic calendar. At a teacher level, we have seen them appreciate the ease of planning without any significant resistance for their autonomy being compromised. In fact, in the three states I directly work in (Haryana, MP and UP) teachers are even encouraged to have their own lesson plans to improve the structured plan provided by the state. For year three of the NIPUN Bharat Mission, ownership of materials by teachers has been very high in Haryana, MP and UP.
In terms of impact at student learning outcomes level, AY 2024-25 has the potential to show early signs of improvement. In MP, the state has seen early positive shifts in the state-led endline study, as compared to 2022. UP found close to 16,000 schools to be NIPUN, where the majority of students exhibited Lakshya competency on being assessed.
For us, the next big evidence of improved learning outcomes will be the NAS 2024 results of Grade 3. As a country, that result will give us a sense of whether anything significant has shifted with respect to the goals we set out to achieve with the NIPUN Bharat Mission.
Q4. The NIPUN Bharat Mission prioritises foundational learning for children in India. What, in your opinion, should be the priority areas for state education departments to successfully meet NIPUN goals in a timely manner?
At CSF, there are some key threads that we are constantly attempting to find solutions for.
First is the middle management capacity at districts. The Chief Development Officer (CDO), District Education Officer (DEO), Block Education Officer (BEO) and CRC are crucial cadres to translate inputs into outcomes in districts. The ability of these cadres to understand academic design and connections between materials, teachers’ capacity and students’ FLN skills are often broken. This makes it hard for them to develop strong change management plans that work for all teachers and schools in their districts. This capability within cadres can otherwise enable permanent shifts in the district’s capacity to offer a strong FLN base for all children.
Second is data quality to allow districts to make differentiated plans for blocks and schools. We find that while there is a lot of data now available, thanks to monitoring systems and state Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK) missions. Generation of reliable lead data is now a key goal for systems to design differentiated support for blocks and schools. This is crucial, as beyond common, large-scale inputs from states, there is a need to provide differentiated support appropriately at different levels.
Third, teacher support remains weak even now. While the mission has provided them with good materials and some reinforcement through few rounds of cascaded training, providing teachers with more nuanced support to improve actual delivery of FLN skills is a gap that persists in most states. Leveraging technology and more teacher-centric solutions may help to solve for this.
About Vinod Karate
Vinod leads the state reform work in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, at CSF. His work involves developing FLN reform frameworks to improve student learning outcomes in states, in line with the NIPUN Bharat Mission.
Prior to CSF, he spent over ten years in the education space, providing founder-level leadership in projects like STIR Education and TheTeacherApp. He specialises in designing programmes with state governments using a teacher lens. Additionally, before entering the education space, Vinod spent over eight years in investment banking and was part of Lehman Brothers and Nomura.
He holds a Master’s degree from Delhi School of Economics and a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Delhi University.
