NIPUN Bharat Mission in Uttar Pradesh: Student Learning Enhancement and system change through large-scale Government and nonprofit collaboration

• In Event: Shifting Systems: Comprehensive and contextualized strategies for improving foundational learning in India

Proposal

The National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN Bharat) was launched by the Ministry of Education in July 2021 with the aim of all children gaining foundational literacy and numeracy skills by the end of grade 3 by 2026 (Ministry of Education, 2021). NIPUN Bharat is also the flagship program of the Uttar Pradesh government to improve the quality of education in 110,000 government primary schools across the state with an enrolment of over 8 Million students in Grades 1 to 3.

The government’s efforts for the FLN Mission include the following dimensions: (a) Academic initiatives to develop a new instructional design, children’s learning materials, student assessment frameworks, lesson plans and teacher guides, academic support to the teachers through mentors and teacher professional development initiatives, (b) administrative initiatives to improve teacher availability, enhance instructional time, improve student attendance and strengthen administrative structures with a focus on improving learning and (c) Enabling initiatives to improve school monitoring, data collection and analysis, strategic communications to build consensus to improve learning and improving school infrastructure. The state government has set targets for schools to achieve NIPUN goals and individual schools are being encouraged to apply for recognition when they feel 80 percent of children in their schools have achieved the FLN learning goals.

In this huge endeavor, the Government of Uttar Pradesh sought assistance from a small group of highly credible nonprofits including Language and Learning Foundation (LLF) and Central Square Foundation (CSF). LLF’s focus has been on the co-creation of the structured pedagogy curriculum, materials, and training programs in collaboration with the state’s academic agencies, while CSF has helped in project management activities for the FLN Mission.

Internal monitoring data and an external evaluation (Educational Initiatives, 2024) show that the Mission is resulting in student learning improvements. More appropriate teaching practices for literacy and numeracy are beginning to be adopted, though the adoption is uneven. However, there are some challenges. The scale of implementation and system reform in Uttar Pradesh is huge. For example, the training of teachers is delivered across three levels of a cascade process. This results in ‘transmission loss’ and the quality of training in some pockets is not satisfactory. Another aspect of the program that is being reviewed right now is the framework for student assessments. There is some concern about inadequate learning gains for children who are at the bottom quartile of the learning distribution.

The case study of Uttar Pradesh, a state more populous than all but four other countries outside of India, will help to draw lessons for large-scale implementation of learning improvement programs and efforts to improve the capacity of the government system to sustain these initiatives. It offers a good example of how synergistic partnerships between governments and nonprofits can lead to change at scale.

Authors

• Shanmuga Sundaram, Department of Basic Education

• BIDISHA BOSE, Language and Learning Foundation