Education: Grade School

With a national literacy rate of 74 per cent (well below the world average of 84 per cent), India’s primary and secondary education systems — especially in rural areas — remains vastly uninspired. But working to improve the quality and quantity of education is the Centre for British Teachers Education Services (CfBTES) that has been piloting and scaling research projects in the education space for over 13 years.

The organisation — set up in 2003 and affiliated with its parent concern CfBT (now Education Development Trust) — was recently shortlisted as one of the 10 winners across five sectors to receive a grant of '10 lakh to scale up their winning projects to include a larger population.

Explaining the kind of work the organisation does, founding director G.V.S. Prasad, who worked as a chartered accountant before entering the education space, says that they focus on school quality reviews, conducting orientation programmes with parents and schools, provide English language support for teachers in rural areas and influence national policy regarding the education system.

The findings of a research project in 2002 is what led to the foundation being set up in India. “We found that more than 65 to 70 per cent of parents prefer to send their children to private schools, and two key reasons were lack of accountability in government schools and a fancy for English medium education,” Prasad explains.

The project that won them the Nasscom award began in 2008, when they began working with women’s self-help groups in Anantapur, associated with about 60 schools to develop a school score card.

“We deve-loped visuals for parameters with a traffic light system, so they could rate the school. After 8-10 manual iterations, we took it digital where they could send SMS to a central server, have the data processed and then a report would be generated,” says Prasad, adding that with these reports they were able to actively participate in school monitoring committee meetings that were earlier inactive or hijacked by local politicians, and “hold the authorities accountable for the educational services they’re expected to deliver”.

Prasad also says that scaling programmes such as this one rarely takes effort, other than convincing stakeholders like the government and the schools themselves “who exhibit an unwillingness to change or listen”. “Now the effort is to make it easier. With the Nasscom grant we want to convert this system into a mobile app where the report is generated automatically with the scores and can be displayed on the phone itself,” Prasad says, adding that the state government has sponsored scaling up of the project to include around 600 schools, including a pilot project in Jharkhand.