Nexus of Good: Fillip to the foundation

Attainment of foundational literacy and numeracy is the ability of a class 3 child to read and comprehend basic text, and to carry out some basic arithmetic operations with Indian numerals. The ASER India 2022 report states that only 10.2 per cent of Class 3 children from government and private schools could read a Class 2-level text in 2018; this dropped further to 4.8 per cent in 2022. Tamil Nadu was among the States with the lowest reading levels. Arithmetic levels are equally poor, with only 10 per cent of children in class 3 being able to perform subtraction. Research indicates that if a child is unable to achieve grade-level competency by the end of class 3, the learning gap will only further deepen, perpetuating inequity and economic loss.

With more than a decade of experience in the development sector, Merlia Shaukath, a passionate advocate for equity in education, founded Madhi Foundation along with Vijaylakshmi Mohan and Srivathsan Ramaswamy in response to this mounting crisis and out of wanting to ensure that policy and implementation goes hand in hand while ensuring equity. Starting with just 3 schools and a 5-member team, Madhi Foundation has now grown to become the Chief Management Partner of the Department of School Education, Tamil Nadu, for implementing the Ennum Ezhuthum Mission over the next 5 years across all the 37,000 primary schools in the state.

Madhi’s work

Over the years, the organisation has worked across Tamil Nadu alongside multiple government departments to implement holistic and multi-pronged educational interventions in primary school classrooms. Guided by a vision to put ‘foundational learning first, so that every child can thrive’, Madhi is focused on ensuring meaningful primary education for all by transforming classroom learning and systemic administrative processes. The team has been able to learn from years of experimentation and growth to develop complex interventions that are tailored to the unique contexts of Tamil Nadu’s government schools. With the integration of technology and contextually scalable models in its programme design, Madhi has been able to scale its reach from 15 schools in 2016 and 2,000 schools in 2018 to 37,000 schools and 3 lakh children today.

At the crux of Madhi’s model to effect change is the idea of systemic transformation and partnership with the government. Hence, the focus right from the beginning was to partner with the Government. Dynamic officers like Pooja Kulkarni, Nanth Kumar and Pradeep Yadav provided all possible support. Recognising that student learning outcomes cannot be improved by changing merely the curriculum or teacher training alone, Madhi’s programme design aims to tackle the foundational learning crisis through a 6T approach — by integrating interventions across teaching-learning materials, training, tracking of data, tutoring at home and targeted advocacy efforts all the while leveraging technology. This holistic approach necessitates a public-private partnership that allows not only scale in reach but also depth in the transformation made.

Parallelly, Madhi has run small-scale pilots to test the efficacy and scale for foundational literacy and numeracy. One such programme includes ‘Veedum Vizhuppum’ which works on increasing parental and community engagement and awareness about the importance of FLN, and empowering the community with the tools to support children in attaining strong foundational learning skills. The project will focus on building awareness of foundational learning goals among caregivers and ensuring parental agency through their participation in both learning at home and at the community level. While Madhi works with the state on the supply side, it is important to address issues from a demand perspective as well; Veedum Vizhuppum seeks to understand the demand side of the FLN problem better.

As a non-profit organisation, Madhi’s efforts to increase its impact have been nurtured by its donor partners as well, who have assisted with skill development, programme strategy, and product design, thus expanding the horizons of a public-private partnership to include various other integral stakeholders within the development ecosystem.

Impact

Madhi’s theory of change emphasises that when pedagogy is rooted in local contexts, and technology and data are leveraged to accurately capture student learning outcomes and teacher capacities, the system will make evidence-based decisions with a sense of urgency to improve student learning. Emphasising the role of the system as an agent of change, these interventions target multiple levels of stakeholders from administrators and teachers to parents and children.

Thanks to sustained efforts over the years, 95 per cent of all schools in Tamil Nadu have received a directive from the government to focus on FLN activities for classes 1-3, and 85 per cent of all schools in Tamil Nadu have at least one teacher trained in FLN, as per the ASER 2022 report.

Currently, rapid progress is seen in the adoption of the Ennum Ezhuthum programme. As of February 2022, the percentage of teachers who conduct the termly assessment and record data stood at 98.5 per cent. Moreover, the percentage of teachers who have an Ennum Ezhuthum kit from the beginning of the term is at 100 per cent. The EE Kit has been an absolute hit with teachers and other third-party organisations, to the extent that there have been written requests to provide kits at cost by many private schools. Parallelly, Madhi, in partnership with the Department of School Education, is also involved in continuous Teacher Professional Development by organising monthly cluster-level training for teachers, and the percentage of stakeholders who score at least 60 per cent at the end of training quiz (checks absorption & comprehension levels) is at 90 per cent. Madhi has also been involved in continuous tracking of the EE programme implementation by helping build the Ennum Ezhuthum App. Furthermore, it has conducted around 290 classroom observations so far. Of course, there still remains enormous work to be done in sorting out institutional structures, continuously refining and improving teacher professional development, building dashboards to track progress, and in community mobilisation.

Growth to scale

In working towards their goal of solving the foundational learning crisis in India by 2030, Madhi will be scaling, both in depth and breadth, in the coming years. Madhi is focused on creating a model that is both contextual and scalable, as the organisation believes that an intervention that does not cater to the diverse and unique needs of a system is not a scalable one. Madhi’s District Project Management Team has grown from 17 in 2021-22 to 222 in 2022-23, covering all 38 districts in the state through the Tamil Nadu Education Fellowship, which the organisation administers and manages. Today, there are four fellows and one manager in each district in the state, working out of the Chief Education Officer’s office. This indicates their engagement with multiple layers of the system in Tamil Nadu and bringing contextual, systemic reach.

Madhi Foundation presents a wonderful example of Nexus of Good wherein a scalable model for improving learning outcomes has been put in place with public-private partnership. Young and committed officers like N Venkatesh and G Latha, along with their teams, continue to provide support to this initiative.

Views expressed are personal