Enabling Elementary Education for children

Organisational Background

XXXX was founded in 1919 by XXXX. Main aim of the organisations is to create awareness on environment and sustainable development issues among various target groups including children, youth, adults and decision makers. Towards this, it also works with organizations and institutions, capacity building them and provides resource materials support to undertake activities on education for sustainable development, particularly in context of SDGs. The centre works on undertaking model projects, field tests them and share experiences so that these could be replicated and adapted all over the country. Various issues of our work include Education, Health, Water, Climate Change and Disaster preparedness, relief and response. Our flagship programs are XXXXXX. We have successfully implemented programmes related to the above-mentioned issues for over 30 years now, all over the country, both urban and rural areas, impacting over 10 million lives and have partnered with over 500 expert organisations, institutions and networks.

Proposed Project Detail

Problem Statement

There are many challenges to making quality Basic Education a reality. The proposed project addresses the following major ones, prevalent in the four project locations:

• • Migration: Migration is not necessarily an issue; in several cases it is a lifestyle. CEE’s work in this area has shown that Migration is not always a result of deprivation, but of aspirations as well! The Basic (elementary) Education System thus needs to manoeuvre around it. Gaps between the migration cycles and school cycle, inadequate residential facilitates for school going children; and migration of senior girls and boys from the Community leads to high prevalence of irregular attendance and even drop out cases in the region.
  • Poor academic achievement as exhibited by Age (grade) Appropriate Attainment Levels: Several research studies show poor achievements in terms of attainment of basic reading, writing and numeracy skills among children in the primary grades, especially those in the rural schools. The reasons are many—most of these children being first generation learners do not necessarily get parental support; lack of functional schools; poor pupil-teacher ratios; irregularity in attending the school, etc.
  • Inaccessibility of schools: Our pilot work in migration prevalent south Gujarat region has established the fact that there are several sets of reasons for schools and quality education failing to reach every child. The reasons may be:
    • Administrative
    • Academic
    • Social
    • Economic

Proposed Solution/ Suggested Intervention

The proposed project makes a good case for innovations in enabling Right to Education (RTE), Government of India, and making good quality basic education reach all, especially in areas with high prevalence of migration, poor access to schools and lower attainment levels among students. Major innovative interventions proposed are:

• • Participatory School Approach: We propose to undertake participatory school approach involving all stakeholders and conduct activity-based learning, making it much more fun, instead of seeing school in isolation.
  • Self-Learning Kits (SLKs): It is an innovations tool to facilitate self-learning in a structured and progressive way and is based on Age (grade) Appropriate Attainment Levels. SLKs as an intervention will be most effective for those children who do not have access to schools and who live in a scattered fashion and hence cannot come to learning centres.
  • Edu-App- Remote Learning through Tablet (RLT): When migratory students who along with their parents move into a remote area, lacking access to schools, then they can use the SLKs for self-learning and their learning can be supported and monitored through e-tools like Tablet. Edu-App will be developed which can be access by the children through the Tablet.
  • Special Learning Centres (SLCs): For neo-learners, who irrespective of their age have never been to schools, need to be inducted to school-based processes and learning cycle. RTE demands that Special Training Programmes be organized for children who are out of the school system.
  • Hostels: For children of those families which select to migrate during the school cycle but are willing to leave behind school going children send their child in residential facility

Objectives

Main Objective:

The main objective of the project is to enable access to and improved quality of basic education to all children in the Southern Gujarat, covering 4 districts, the project areas.

Specific Objectives:

• • Improve learning environment as well as school infrastructure facilities leading to improved Age-Appropriate Attainment Levels (reading, writing and numeracy) in basic education
  • Develop and demonstrate innovative solutions towards making School Management Committee functional in all the project villages and empower them to play a proactive role in ensuring quality education in school and fulfilment of RTE provisions.
  • Provide a validated scalable multipronged strategy for ensuring quality of basic education and access to elementary education to all.
  • Develop customized empirical models to address the issues of non-school going children and irregular attendance in schools

Targeted location/s and recipients of this program (Program beneficiaries)

The proposed project would be conducted in four districts, in the Southern Region of Gujarat, a western state in India. Three of the four districts are those identified as Tribal districts. The project would focus on socially and economically underprivileged communities.

The project would directly reach out to 10000 children (in the age group of 6 to 14 years), who are in the bottom of the pyramid and are from marginalised communities.

• • Out of this, at least 3000 children belonging to migratory families.
  • Other key target group details are:
  • No. of families covered- 5000
  • No. of Formal Education Cluster Resource Centres (CRC)- 8 ( 2 per district)
  • No. of Block Resource Centre Coordinators-4 (1 per district)
  • No. of government schools-75
  • No. of government teachers- 350

Key Activities

The proposed project is an integrated approach to provide basic reading-writing and mathematical skills to children from marginalised communities including migratory families. Key activities would include:

• • Baseline Survey- A baseline door-to-door survey will be done to understand the education status and migration cycle in all the school area in the selected clusters. The project is proposed in four blocks, one per district and in 8 clusters (2 per district). The baseline will be conducted in all the clusters.
  • Development of Self learning kits- A Self learning kit will be developed. The kit will be developed in the form of monthly modules. These modules will be printed and will be available for distribution to non-school going children.
  • Identification of children for distribution of Self Learning Kits- As mentioned earlier, the kits are for non-school going children. From 8 clusters (4 blocks), based on the baseline survey, based on various criteria’s, 10,000 such children would be identified, who would be given a Self-Learning Kit on a monthly basis. One such criteria include, 3000 children receiving these kits should be from migratory families.
  • Tracking Tools to track status of children- A tracking tool will be developed which will continue tracking the status of the children
  • Edu-App- Remote Learning through Tablet- An Edu-App will be developed which will be available on the Tablet. Children who get migrated would be provided with the tablet so that they can continue the learning, wherever they go.
  • Development of manual on how to work with non-school going children- A special manual on how to work with non-school going children will be developed which will be available for teachers/ facilitators.
  • School Learning Centres- Special Learning Centres, available at the block and cluster levels, called block resource centre and cluster resource centres, respectively, of the Government of Gujarat, will be engaged to support non-school going children.
  • School Identification and training of teachers- 75 schools will be identified at the four project locations. Two teachers from each school will be trained on teaching learning approaches, making learning much more fun. These trained teachers will later be responsible for facilitating the program in the respective schools
  • School Development Visualisation workshop- A school development visualisation workshop will be conducted with all stakeholders in each school. School development plans will be finalised together with the school administration, parents and the local communities and the same will be executed through all stakeholders.
  • Hostels for children whose parents migrate- Other Charity run hospitals available in the blocks/ clusters will be identified where the children whose parents migrate, can stay and continue the studies.
  • Creating all schools Child-friendly- Based on the development plan, initiatives to ensure all schools are child friendly will be undertaken. This will include- drinking water facilities, sanitation facilities, cleanliness and hygiene, mid-day meals, play area and other child friendly elements are available in the school.
  • Project Documentation– All the project activities and processes will be documented so that the project could be adapted and replicated in other districts of the states and in the country.

Project Monitoring Mechanism

The project interventions will be monitored at progress, process and outcome levels. CEE will monitor general programme performance against the project outcomes, indicators and finance. Day to day monitoring and reporting will be the responsibility of the CEE project team members. During the entire monitoring task, the focus will be on assessment, analysis and action at various levels where information will be collected, collated and analysed. The following 4 level of project monitoring mechanism will be set up:

• • Annual Meeting to monitor as per Project Implementation Plan: The first step planned in the activities is the ‘Project Implementation Workshop’, which would lead to developing of the ‘Project Implementation Plan’ (PIP). The PIP would have major milestones of Project progress worked out. Further, the CEE project team will develop project implementation guidelines and standard operating procedural manual for better monitoring of the project.
  • Annual Monitoring visit (to project clusters) and meeting will be done.
  • Quarterly Review and Planning Meetings: Every quarter the Field Coordinators and the Project Secretariat will meet to take a stock of project activities, results and plan for the next quarter.
  • Monthly Meetings: Within each Project cluster, the teams would hold monthly meetings (including with the Education Volunteers), to check the on-ground progress of the various interventions, collect and update data and keep a track of pace of project work. These data, reports and progress indicators will be passed on to the Project Secretariat.
  • ‘Field Personal Diary’: CEE will develop this as the self-monitoring tool. This diary can act as ‘mirror of the wall’

Potential Risk and Mitigation Plan

Since the project is not built to erect/create and parallel structure outside the government education system and machinery, therefore there are minor risks that the Project and its implementation would face. Some of these risks include:

• • A very remote possibility of sudden change in the migration patterns of South Gujarat is the largest complication that could prevent the project from having its intended impacts as it would disrupt the annual activities and interventions planned under the project. We say this is remote, because the only reason that this could happen is the change in agriculture and cropping pattern in Gujarat, which is very less likely. In case it happens, will need to undertake alternative strategies for mitigation such as more kits, tablets, etc depending upon the level of impact.
  • A large number of residential hostels in the region are being run by different charity organizations, trusts and individuals. Ensuring that they practice the minimum quality guidelines and standards as required in Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) may be challenging. As one of the mitigation plans, partnership will be initiated with such local charity run facilities.
  • Use of E-tablet to assist in learning among migratory children is one of the main planned interventions under the proposed project. Among the various interventions proposed, this is completely new and additional to the efforts done so far. If this innovative intervention proves to be effective, the Government may need to build in the cost of the same into their planned budget. To ensure this, right from the project inception, relevant Government departments will be engaged
  • The last possible risk could be that BRCs and CRCs (Block Resource Centres and Cluster Resource Centres of the Government of Gujarat) are unable to find time and space for doing a few additional activities that may evolve under the project. To mitigate this, local government administration and education departments will be involved and partnerships will be initiated.