The learning crisis 

Our Approach

Our Approach to solving learning crisis:

We believe in combining thirty-thousand feet bird’s eye view of the world with the ground-level worm’s eye view.

Hence we work both at influencing upstream policy and program organization through advocacy and dialogue with key stakeholders, and downstream at ground level though actual implementation and experimentation of different potential solutions.

The ground-level implementation not only gets into intricate details of what it takes to deliver quality primary education from teacher training, curriculum, parents’ involvement, class management, etc., but more importantly directly benefits hundreds of students in terms of improved access to quality education.

Our ground-level interventions currently include:

After-school Learning Centers:

Provision of high quality after-school supplementary inputs: Shakurpur Greenapple Learning Center.

  • Runs in a private rented space
  • Currently caters to about 120-150 children
  • Children go to regular school in addition to coming to learning center after/before school.
  • Operates in two shifts: morning and evening
  • Three teachers in each shift
  • Students come in batches of 10-12
  • Each class lasts for two hours.
  • Each teacher takes two batches of students for a total duration of 4 hours.
  • Students are charged a nominal fees to recover partial costs and to ensure accountability
  • Focus on strengthening concepts in maths and language (Hindi and English language).

Strategic human resource support to government primary schools

Most of the primary schools in Delhi are run by Municipal Corporation of Delhi, as primary education is the responsibility of the local government. Many of these primary schools have chronic teachers’ shortage due to vacancy, leave, and other official duties, leaving many classes to sit idle, often for long durations. We strategically provide human resources in terms of trained teachers to fill these gaps under partnership with the government.

As of August 2018, we are  supporting 3 primary schools run by NMCD by providing 9 additional teachers in:

  • MCD Primary School (Boys), Shakurpur Village II., Delhi (UDISE number: 07010406201) with an enrolment of about 500 boys.
  • Nigam Pratibha Vidyalaya (Girls), Shakurpur Village I, Delhi with an enrolment of about 500 girls (UDISE number 07010402712)
  • Haryana Power House (old), Rampura: coeducation school with an enrollment of about 180 to 200 boys and girls, UDISE number 07010406207)

Organization of remedial or bridge classes in government primary schools

For various reasons, a large number of students in grade 3, 4 and 5 are not even able to recognize alphabet or read in any language or count up to 100, the skills. These students require special catch-up classes to bring them to their grade level. Given the large number of students in each class, the teachers are not able to pay special attention to these students during regular classes while trying to cover grade-level curriculum for other students. GWE has been organizing remedial classes for grade 3-5 students both during regular session of the school and during summer break in 3 MCD primary schoools as well at its afterschool learning center. It is also making efforts by focusing on grade 1-2 that number of  such students do not accumulate further..

Development of learning materials and pedagogical techniques

While substantial learning materials are available in English language, there is paucity of good quality materials in Hindi. Worksheets are developed in Hindi both for Hindi language (especially for remedial classes) and for maths. Different pedagogical techniques are being experimented with for both regular and remedial classes.

Increasing awareness of provisions of Right to Education Act

Efforts are made to increase awareness among parents, teachers, children and wider community.

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