TaRL in India: New large-scale partnerships, program impact, and lessons learned

• In Event: Teaching at the Right Level: The power of effective instruction in improving foundational learning skills through contextualization, adaptation, and localization

Proposal

In India, which had one of the longest school closures global, schools remained closed for the entire academic year of 2020-21 and for almost ~6 months in the following year. However, during this same period, two significant education focused policy initiatives were launched by the Government of India through the Ministry of Education. The first one was the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which was last updated in 1992 and the launch of the National Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) mission known as NIPUN Bharat in 2021. The timing of these national initiatives was welcomed by all as they categorically and unequivocally stressed on achieving universal foundational literacy and numeracy in primary schools in a timebound manner. Referencing both government and private organization-led education status surveys and studies, the government acknowledged the deep ‘learning crises’ the country was in, even prior to the pandemic.

For many years now, Pratham has had and continues to have a long-standing approach of collaborating and partnering with state and district government administrations to take its different approaches to children across India, including it’s Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) approach. With the simple goal of ensuring that children can fluently read and demonstrate numeracy skills at a Std II level, Pratham’s TaRL intervention challenges conventional grade-specific curriculum focused teaching that is found in most government schools in India. For governments to implement TaRL, requires a basic understanding of the problem, a willingness to act and basic resources, including ‘leaders’ within the government system to own and drive the program. However, to ensure the approach is embedded and owned by the government system it is critical to work in sync with the government’s plans, priorities, and processes.

This presentation will talk about what the key elements of TaRL-based partnerships are in India, how they evolved in the last half decade (2016 onwards), why modifications and adaptations are necessary to work at scale with governments, and when and how to say that the program is having its intended impact. Lessons from different large-scale partnerships from 3 states – Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh will be presented as a case study. The 3 states adequately showcase the implementation of large scale TaRL work prior and post the pandemic and how TaRL had to adapted to the new education landscape and reality in their respective state, while keeping its core elements the same.

Additionally, the presentation will also speak about a large-scale summer campaign based on TaRL which was conducted by volunteers (over 300,000), especially youth, in the summer months (when school were formally closed) of 2023. The goal of the campaign was to ensure children (3.4 million) who are moving from Grade IV to V, V to VI and VI to VII are prepared with the basic foundational literacy and numeracy skills. To achieve such scale, the respective state governments played a critical role in the preparation and execution of such a campaign. Outcomes and lessons from this campaign will also be showcased.

Author

• Karthik Menon, Pratham Education Foundation