1. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
Manthan Topic: Stepping Stones: Enhancing Quality of
Primary Education
NAV PARIVARTAN
Team Details:
ISB, Mohali Campus
Laina Emmanuel
Komal Vasudev
Guneet Singh
Manvendra Singh Raghav
Harkabir Singh Jandu

2. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
India’s Most Pressing Problem: Crisis of Learning
at the Primary Education Level

3. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
Quality of Primary Education at Government schools has been declining at an alarming rate in recent years which can hurt India’s
competitiveness and productivity and damage quality of life in rural and semi-urban India in the long run.
•India’s elementary education budget has increased
more than two fold since 2007-08, from Rs. 68,853
crores to Rs. 147,059 crores in 2012-13.
•Allocations for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the
primary vehicle for delivering the Right to Free and
Compulsory Education Act (RTE), have increased
three-fold.
INCREASE IN RESOURCES
DECLINE IN LEARNING OUTCOMES
ASER 2012 and PISA 209show that fewer and fewer
children in successive batches reaching 3rd and 5th
standard are learning basics of reading , math and science
BUT

4. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
Substantial
Improvements in inputs
to Education over the
decades
-Improved access to
primary schools
- Better infrastructure
- Better pupil-teacher
ratios
- Increased student
enrolment
However, this is not
enough to reverse the
crisis in learning
POSSIBLE CAUSES FOR THE CRISIS IN LEARNING – What does
the research say?
Weak Pedagogy
Several randomised
evaluations find large
positive impacts of
supplemental remedial
instruction in early
grades that are targeted
to the child's current
level of learning (as
opposed to simply
following the text book)
(references in appendix)
Weak School Governance
Most striking symptom of weak
governance is the high rate of
teacher absence in government-
run schools, which has not reduced
substantially since 2003.
Rigorous evaluations of carefully
designed systems of teacher
performance pay show substantial
improvements in student learning
in response to even very modest
amounts of performance-linked
pay for teachers.

5. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
The Importance of SMCs in The Solution

6. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
School Based Management – Evidence from Across the World
• Since the early 1990’s School Based Management (SBM) has gained increasing popularity as a strategy for
improving responsiveness and accountability in the delivery of education services.
• In several countries, including Brazil, Nepal, Mexico, and Czech Republic, authority is devolved to school based
committees who are given varying levels of financial autonomy for
1) determining school needs
2) preparing budgets and plans
3) procuring items and incurring expenditure for meeting such needs.
• Research has shown us that Nicaragua’s Autonomous School Program and Mexico’s compensatory education
program have contributed to better test scores.
School Management Committees in India
• In India, under the RTE, SMC’s have complete financial power over three annual grants –
Teaching Learning Material (TLM)
School Development Grant (SDG)
School Maintenance Grant (SMG)
• However, the condition of SMC’s across the country is quite pathetic. In a lot of places SMCs have not been
instituted, while they are dysfunctional in a number of places.

7. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
• The World Development Report on “Making Services
work for the poor” recognizes that for education to truly
deliver on its promises, schools need to be accountable to
their local communities through bodies like “School
Management Committees” (SMC)
• The Indian Government also recognizes the importance of
SMC’s by empowering them with legal rights and duties
under the Right to Education Act
Empowering School
Management
Committees
• Volunteers drawn from two distinct pools – local citizens
and professionals from varied different professions.
Involving the former raises the capacity of local citizens to
monitor their schools, thus helping in scaling our ideas at
low costs.
• Technology enabled – Through strategic use of
Information Technology, such as Massive Online Open
courses, adapted to Indian conditions, we can further
lower costs and reach a wide audience
Implementation
Model –
Volunteer-driven,
Technology-enabled
Snapshot of solution proposed
We propose a technology-enabled, volunteer driven approach to empowerment of
School Management Committees (SMC’s) to help them effectively monitor schools and
adapt pedagogy to suit the needs of children in their community

8. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
Details of the Solution

9. `
Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
Volunteer trainers:
•Based out districts
•Involved in training and
empowering the SMC’s.
•Start with training 2 people per
district (~1400 volunteers
across the country).
Volunteer resource
people:
•Diverse set of non-state actors
who bring in requisite skill-
sets, funding and ideas.
•They help empowered SMC’s
achieve their goals.
Recruitment Of Volunteers
in the 2 – Channel Volunteer
Model
Cascading model of training volunteers: Each
set of 2 volunteers in a district train 80000
volunteers over the course of a year, thus
reaching out to ~1.12 million across all
districts in India
• Refresher training: To be provided through
online courses, facilitated by volunteer
trainers.
Training Of Volunteers
Skills imparted: Skills imparted across three
domains
Domain Knowledge
• Public finances, with special reference to the
district
• Financial literacy
Procedural Knowledge
• Procurement in a local government environment
• Assessment of learning outcomes through the use
of survey-toolkits
Soft-skills
• Group dynamics with special relation to social
dynamics in the district
• Decision-making in a group
• Team-building
Technology enablement
• Basic computer literacy and knowledge of
internet
•Interaction in forums meant specifically for
governance
Empowering SMCs
Initial training of SMC’s held
in partnership with Block
Development Officers and
District Officers, to achieve
scale.
• Refresher trainings held by
volunteer trainers, as
government capacity not
enough to conduct regular
trainings
• These technology enabled
SMC’s would be networked
onto the main GYAN
platform, and can ask for
specific ideas, funding and
skill-sets they require for
achieving their ideas.

10. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
Inform and Engage
Volunteer Resource Persons
and Empowered SMCs
Collectively Generate New
Ideas & Training Materials to
solve school-specific
problems
Select new ideas and
artifacts and
implement the best
solutions
Communicate Help people submit
Accept and group
training material
Help people search
and rate best solutions
Mentors, Sponsors support the portal
Community + Marketplace for ideas – Key Features
Moderation by experts to
prevent lower-quality
inputs
Evolving portal to match to
user expectations
Resource people review
ideas and materials
Group by topics
Add user ratings
Add insights
Online chat with education
experts
More search keywords for
knowledge documents
Discussion Forums
(District specific)
Architecture of the Online Portal

11. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
Key implementation challenges and
mitigation
Risk Cause Mitigation
Disinterested SMC’s SMC’s usually have low expectations from
government schools, translating into
disinterest in tracking the learning outcomes
of their children
Controlled experiments in Medak district in
Andhra Pradesh by Accountability Initiative has
shown that using local methods of
dissemination can help ignite interest
Khemani et al have found that Information and
advocacy campaigns can lead to better
participation in SMCs
Lack of buy-in from district officials Building a good SMC culture requires buy-in
from the local government, both for purposes
of infrastructure for training and rules
We have seen that sharing success stories as
well as data on learning outcomes across
districts can incentivize district collectors to
focus on education
Infrastructural issues Online networking on the GYAN network
requires access to good infrastructure
Partnering with infrastructure providers such as
TARAhaat can mitigate this risk

12. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
Expected Budget
•Management Team ( Rs. 6000 per district per
annum)
•Volunteer Team (Rs. 1.8 lac per district)
•Regional
Organization
Cost
•Transportation Cost (Rs. 10000 per district per
annum)
•Establishment Cost
Logistics Cost
•IT Software +Hardware Cost ( Rs. 2 lac per district
per annum)
•Communication Expense – mobile& internet ( Rs.
35000 per district per annum)
Technology
Cost
Rs 1.86
lac/district/an
num
Rs
10000/district/
annum
Rs
2.35lac/distri
ct/annum
Estimated Cost / Child = Rs 1.30 per annum

13. Stepping Stones:Enhancing Quality of Primary Education – ISB: Laina Emmanuel, Komal Vasudev, Guneet Singh, Manvendra Singh Raghav,Harkabir Singh Jandu
Appendix
Lant Pritchett, The first PISA results for India: The end of the
beginning http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.in/2012/01/first-pisa-
results-for-india-end-of.html
PAISA Report 2012
ASER Report 2012
World Development Report 2004, Making services work for
the poor http://www.gse.pku.edu.cn/lib/gse_lib/edu-
search/e_publication/e_pub/268950PAPER0WDR02004.pdf
Using evidence for better policy: The case for primary
education in India, Karthik Muralidharan
http://www.ideasforindia.in/article.aspx?article_id=119