Status Reports and Landscape Studies
Systemic Reform & Teacher Support for Tribal Schools in Maharashtra
School Closure and Education
Impact of COVID related School shutdowns: Experiences of Teachers and Parents from Maharashtra
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The COVID-19 pandemic swept India with full force, leading to a nationwide lockdown from 25 March 2020. For more than year, the schools in the country remained shut and compelled stakeholders of education institutions, such as officers, school leaders, teachers, parents, and students, to shift teaching and learning practices to remote mediums, with particular stress on the use of technology.
Given this context, LFE had the opportunity to under multiple rounds of data collection to help inform the current status and assist in determining immediate strategy. In particular, our team undertook a research study in December 2020 with two major objectives: (1) To understand the challenges faced by stakeholders (teachers and parents) due to the closure of schools and shifting to alternate teaching and learning formats; and (2) to understand the actual traction of educational programs and initiatives on the ground.
Challenges to Implementation of Mother Tongue as Medium of Instruction in India: A case study of Maharashtra
The working paper aims to analyse the history, challenges and current representation of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction in education. It focuses upon the progression of educational policies from time to time that has emphasised on the incorporation of local/regional/mother tongue languages till grade 5 or 8 and above.
The gaps in the policy implementation over the years and its current status in relation to the directed policies and principles. The paper will be dwelling upon the three major approaches to understanding the state of the medium of instruction in the country with special reference to Maharashtra -
(a) Review of available literature, (b) Analysis of gaps in articles and policies in relation to current practices and status, (c) Review and analysis of quantitative data from U-DISE and Census of India report.
Research Partners
Student FLN and Well Being Assessments
In the past year LFE has led the development of two sets of tools to measure changes at the student level. One focuses on foundational literacy and numeracy and the other focuses on student well-being. The tool on FLN was jointly developed with experts from the Belief Foundation. This assessment tests key grade-appropriate FLN competencies as outlined by the NIPUN Bharata guidelines. These assess students in Math and Marathi starting from school readiness to grade 5. With these tools, we tested 3,800 students across 7 jurisdictions in public schools (Feb- March 2022).
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The tool on well-being was jointly developed with Dr Shalaka Shah, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, School of Liberal Education, FLAME University, Pune; and Dr Shivakumar Jolad, Associate Professor, Public Policy, School of Liberal Education, FLAME University, Pune. The tool follows the CASEL framework to measure social-emotional skills among students for grades 6-8. The tool was tested against 2700 students across 7 jurisdictions in public schools (Feb- March 2022).
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The tools are freely available to use. Please contact the team for more information.
Education Landscape study: Khed Taluka
The Khed Taluka in the Pune District of Maharashtra has seen a multitude of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives directed towards the education sector over the past few years owing to the presence of a large Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) area. It is well established that CSR initiatives tend to be compliance-based initiatives due to the company policies and legal mandates responsible for the design of such initiatives.
An often-heard concern regarding this is that the resulting approach to complex social problems is disjointed in fashion and limited to specific problem areas or geographic regions. It is also well-documented that problems in education require a long-term focus. We at LFE feel that one of the contributors to this disjoined approach, especially with respect to Khed taluka, is an absence of a detailed articulation of the systemic factors leading to the problem of unequal access and low overall quality of education. Thus, to propel sustained systematic investments in support of long-term interventions geared towards improving the quality of and access to education, this study aims to contribute towards a better understanding of the challenges for education in Khed.
Training Needs Analysis
In working closely on the professional development of teachers and officers of the public education system, we have had the opportunity to conduct multiple training needs analysis.
