The Project

Since January I have been working on a project called Indian School of Education. That’s a holding name more than anything else; the project has been evolving for the last two years and has yet to have its exact parameters drawn. The gist of what we want to do is there in the title though: the area of concern is education and our intervention will involve teaching.

The project is a reaction to the parlous state of education in India. Although the government has had success in improving children’s physical access to primary and secondary schools, especially in rural India, the quality of education delivered remains poor. A key indicator of that quality is literacy levels amongst school-aged children. Recent data compiled by Pratham India (ISE’s mother organisation) shows that out of a total 140 million rural children, 110 million cannot read a whole paragraph in their mother tongue. While illiteracy is bad enough alone, its knock-on effect is low secondary school completion. Across India kids make it through primary school without grasping basic literacy and then can’t cope at a more advanced level and drop out of school into low paid work.

There have been concerted efforts by non-governmental organisations to tackle this problem for at least the last 15 years. But while efforts to improve curriculum, raise teaching standards and involve communities more in education have made inroads into the problem, there has not been systemic change. And that’s where ISE comes in. Our model of improving education identifies headteachers and local education officials as the key individuals able to transform schools and in turn raise levels of student achievement, enrollment in school and completion of basic schooling. Moreover, our assumption is that this requires headteachers and officials to themselves be transformed. In general neither group is currently able to improve education standards. This is because none of these public servants are given professional training. To make matters worse, within the education system promotion to positions of authority is compulsory and based on seniority rather than merit. In this way a teacher may suddenly find themselves heading a school or a cluster of schools without having had any preparation for the role. Unsurprisingly these supposed positions of authority become largely administrative; incumbents are not equipped to show leadership and are therefore not expected to.

While ISE can’t change the way leaders are appointed in India’s education system, we can improve the capacity of headteachers and local education officials to act as leaders rather than administrators. We intend to do this by providing the first in-service education leadership programme for headteachers and education officials in India. The plan is for a 3-year part-time programme that will combine short training sessions with 3-month in-field projects that trainees will implement in their own schools.

I’ve joined the project at ‘a very existing time’ to quote the Wachowski brothers. We’ve just secured our first major donor and have established a team in Rajasthan to market the training programme to potential trainees and build relationships with higher levels of government bureaucracy. We’ve also run a recruitment and selection process for recent graduates from India’s best universities and chosen 17 people for a 2-year placement scheme we’re calling ‘Gandhi Fellowship’. Each fellow will be sent into rural Rajasthan to support several of the leadership trainees in implementing their projects.

My role in all this has been somewhat varied over the last 9 weeks. I’ve worked on a donor proposal, sat in on meetings with officials in rural Rajasthan and participated in the selection process for the Gandhi Fellowship in Delhi. My longer term role has become clearer in the last few days though and most of my time is likely to be spent working as part of a ‘new ventures’ team that will conceptualize and produce proposals on new elements of the project as it unfolds. For example there are plans for creating ISE as a private university and running masters programmes for education leadership, and an idea for setting up an education research centre.