Aim

The aim of Education Support Organization (ESO) is to develop and

credibly demonstrate a model approach to provide good quality basic
education. This model would have three core characteristics, namely
(i) effectiveness in reaching children from poor urban and rural
families; (ii) replicable on a mass scale while maintaining quality, and
(iii) having unit cost well within the existing government budgetary
norms. ESO would also actively work for universal access to good
quality and effective basic education, through relevant policy
advocacy, institutional partnership, and attempts for structural
reforms.

Framework

The social goal of having a literate and numerate population cannot be

met unless the ‘quality of basic education’ is good. In practical terms,
the early years of schooling should enable children to start reading
books and other printed matter available in their own context, and to
also write simple text. They should also be able to use simple numeric
operations in typical transactions of their life. Only if this is assured,
children would have an interest in coming to school, and parents would
develop a stake in sending them to school. The Probe Report and
anecdotal evidence suggests that many children do not reach this level
even while studying in grade IV-V in public primary schools.

Almost 50 per cent of the children of the school going age, particularly
girls and those from poor families, drop out of the school system
before completing the primary cycle. The National Sample Survey
reveals that almost half of the dropout cases attribute it to their
inability to cope with academic load, indicating poor quality of basic
education. Given this, the children who drop out before completing
primary cycle would revert to illiteracy within a couple of years of
leaving school. This means that a large proportion of adult population
would remain illiterate even with high initial school-enrolment. Further,
even when such children continue in a school system, they find it
difficult to cope with studies and examination, and fulfill the purposes
that education is expected to serve. That partly explains why a further
50 per cent fail to complete the middle or high school.

The existence of a large number of good schools in India indicates that

how to provide quality basic education in a few schools is well known.
What is not well known or demonstrated is how to ensure good quality
on a mass scale. Gyan Shala aims to fill this gap in understanding and
practice by evolving a system to deliver quality primary education on a
mass scale. Gyan Shala focuses on the foundation years, which would
ensure highest returns on investments and multiplier effect on later
stages in primary years.

The designers of Gyan Shala analyzed the leading development

programs/ organizations in the World. Based on this, they concluded
that providing quality education on a mass scale has to go beyond
piecemeal improvements in pedagogy, learning and training material,
and teacher training. Instead, the program should seek to evolve a
`total system solution’ that provides assurance of the delivery of
education service of a desired quality. This should be done within the
material, human and financial resource constraints of India. The
managerial and organizational aspects are an integral part of such a
‘total system solution’. These, as such, are important in any large
program that employs thousands or lakhs of employees (teachers) and
many more people (children and their parents) as active participants,
impacting on program results.

Gyan Shala has designed a three-year module (grade I-III) of study

for fresh entrants to a school system. At the end of this module, a
child is expected to become an independent reader and writer in her
local language and capable of using simple arithmetic in routine
transactions. This module aims to provide a strong foundation and act
as the feeder stage for higher primary classes. This could also enable a
child to retain literacy and numerical skills for the whole life, even if
she withdraws from the school system at the end of the primary stage.
The Gyan Shala team recognizes that pre-schooling education can help
a child acquire important skills. But, it also holds its module can help
children attain the competence for grade III, as specified in the state
or national curricular framework, with in three years of school
education, even if child enters the school first time at 5+ age. From
the limited viewpoint of attaining curricular competence, the preschool
is not essential, even though it may be desirable otherwise.

Program strategy

The strategy of Gyan Shala is designed to unfold in three stages. In

Phase I (2000-2003), the focus was on evolving and establishing core
elements of learning methodology and education organization, and
demonstrating the efficacy of the selected aspects of the Gyan Shala
approach. This phase was used to lay the foundation of an education
design and delivery organization that would be able to implement the
program on some scale.

In Phase II (2003-2007), the aim would be to fully develop and to

test-demonstrate all aspects of the Gyan Shala model, covering the
learning model, class-process, teacher preparation, learning material,
and program management. Gyan Shala is conceived as a self-
contained complete education design and delivery unit catering to
around 15000 children. This unit would be capable of (i) nurturing and
retaining the required human resource/ skills, (ii) sustaining the
systems and processes needed for delivering target quality, and (iii)
being replicated under human and financial resource constraints of
India. During phase II, a beginning would be made to replicate Gyan
Shala in other states in partnership with other NGOs or specific
government programs.

Starting at mid-point in Phase II, but largely in Phase III, Gyan Shala
would work towards integrating its design features within the mass
primary education system. The attempt would be made to sell the
proposition that lower primary education should be delivered by a
multitude of independent units working on the Gyan Shala pattern that
would act as a feeder to formal upper primary schools. These units
should not belong to any one organization and instead should compete
for contracts or grants to run the feeder classes. In this phase, work
could be taken up in concert with bilateral and multilateral aid
institutions, particularly to address the requirements for urban areas,
particularly metro cities, which are growing fast, becoming the center
of India’s economy, and are expected to become the home of more
than 50 per cent of India’s population, by 2015.

The Gyan Shala approach is inspired by the example of

AMUL/Operation Flood, in which a model unit—AMUL—was developed
first, and later replicated under Operation Flood. The difference would
be in the design of a replication strategy that, unlike Operation Flood,
would rely on market mechanism, measurement of output, and
competitive dynamics among alternate service providers to ensure
cost effectiveness and accountability.

determinants of education quality

Gyan Shala employs five instruments to meet its education quality

targets that could be sustained on a mass scale. These incorporate
what are widely regarded as `best practices’.

Gyan Shala supports child-centered class processes with enough

space, time and material available for children’s individual and group
work. The class work is divided in three subject streams centered
around the first language of children, math and project work/ creative
expression. No module exceeds 20 minutes of class work at a stretch,
to keep it within the attention span of children. Children are provided
learning material in ample quantity, including learning aids for
individual and group activities, and a worksheet for each stream every
day that add up to more than 650 in a year. The group-activity
schedule is laid down for each day’s work, and specially designed
storybooks are composed and supplied as per the language context of
the children. The teacher spends less than 30 per cent of her time in
the whole class teaching, while the rest is spent in supervising
children’s work individually or in small groups. The learning material is
continuously upgraded on the basis of class feedback. Table 1 gives a
list of learning material and aids typically available in a Gyan Shala
class. The list of material used for group activities for math, language
and project work too is given here.

Second, Gyan Shala provides for continuous teacher training and

support that has annual, bi-annual, monthly, weekly and even daily
components. This enables a teacher with modest formal education to
conduct classroom transactions as per the design parameters. The
teachers undergo an annual two-week course, and a mid-year one-
week course covering the overall learning task and methodology. One
day of training in each month focuses on the preparation for using the
learning material for the following month and on providing feedback to
the design team. Each week, a school supervisor visits each teacher,
to check and demonstrate the appropriate class practices and to help
the teacher to go through the teacher guide for the next week’s
sessions. The team responsible for designing the learning schedule and
material also supplies the teacher guides for each day’s work
highlighting the issues/ examples that teachers must emphasize for
that day’s work. Gyan Shala sets up an example of best practice in the
sheer amount of support and training to teachers.

Third, Gyan Shala has established institutional mechanisms for quality

control and assurance. Written tests are conducted each term. The
school supervisors are required to monitor and report the completion
of learning tasks by children and provide feedback both to teachers
locally, and to the design team centrally. Supervisors are also
expected to provide additional support to children who are lagging
behind. A team is being set up for conducting periodic and regular
audit of learning quality/ attainments and to report to the design team
and chief executive.

Fourth, Gyan Shala consciously strives to establish an organizational

culture and an ambience conducive to quality. It starts with the
provision of good quality furniture, lighting and ventilation in
classrooms that are otherwise located in poor neighborhoods. The
teachers, who come from low-income background, are provided annual
and monthly training in a good quality training-center and are
encouraged to initiate quick action to tackle problems even if the cost
is significant. The design team is required to be in direct touch with the
teachers and classrooms so there remains least possible gap between
the design parameters and actual classroom practice.
Last, the Gyan Shala design institutionalizes a structural design for
accountability wherein a multi-tier supervisory chain oversees the
performance. The availability of financial resources to Gyan Shala
team is linked to the measurable performance of children in an
independently held examination at the end of three-year Gyan Shala
module. That is also subjected to competitive pressures. A significant
amount of turnover among staff, due to accountability pressures is
anticipated. A mechanism to replace non-performing staff without
disrupting routine performance is built-in.

maintaining low cost & replicability

Gyan Shala uses such human resources for all organizational positions
that are available in plenty and at a competitive low unit cost. There
are systems built in to enable such human resource to continually
grow and deliver required quality at target low cost. The system is
also so designed that each resource is fully utilized. For example, the
classroom processes are so arranged that a three-hour class contact in
a day is adequate for children in Gyan Shala to meet national
curriculum norms. A teacher, thus, can handle two classes in day in
two shifts. This results in a teacher- student ratio of 1:60 over two
shifts in a day, even though the class strength remains, in actual
practice, less than around 25 children per teacher. Since the staff
strength in Gyan Shala, except the design team, is in direct proportion
to teacher strength, a high student-teacher ratio translates to a low
staff strength and salary bill. Gyan Shala pays salary as per
competitive norms of informal labor markets in India, from where it
draws its human resource, and where unit staff cost is low. Gyan
Shala does not cut down cost if it has any negative potential impact on
quality. The budget for staff visits to classes, staff training, and for
the supply of learning aids and class material is liberal and flexible,
with adequate margin for meeting un-anticipated needs. It is
estimated that the per child expense on the supply of learning material
in Gyan Shala would be comparable to the cost incurred on this count
in leading private sector schools, where the annual fee is as high as
Rs. 20,000/- while the total unit cost in Gyan Shala is only around Rs.
1500/-. However, the cost is monitored and controlled as per modern
corporate norms.

Gyan Shala holds that its policy of relying on human resources that are
available in large numbers, and the overall low unit cost of education
per child makes adoption of its model on a mass scale a feasible
proposition. The Gyan Shala model is implemented by a self-contained
modular unit that relies on its staff and internal processes to perform
all the program activities and undertake staff development. It depends
on outside systems only for contract supply of competitively available
material and services, and occasional expert advice. The inherently
self-reliant nature of Gyan Shala unit makes its replication relatively
easy. The expansion or replication of Gyan Shala pattern would,
however, require a policy environment where resource allocation is
linked to measurable performance.

mechanisms for development of human resource

The basic goals of Gyan Shala are three-fold, (i) to provide effective
access to quality education to children in poor neighborhoods, (ii) keep
unit cost per child at socially relevant low level, (iii) and make mass
scale replication feasible. To meet these goals, the Gyan Shala needs
to use only such human resource that is willing to work in poor
neighborhoods on a sustained basis, is available in large numbers to
meet the requirements of mass scale replication and is low cost. In
practice, this would mean reliance on easily available and modestly
qualified human resource that is enabled to deliver quality
performance. The training and grooming of such human resource has
to be the defining strength of Gyan Shala.

core training program

Each entrant to Gyan Shala, at all hierarchical levels, including of chief

executive, is required to undergo the core teacher-training program
that is designed to help trainees conduct Gyan Shala classes. It
introduces the design of class-processes, curriculum and learning
material, and core aspects of program management and culture. Gyan
Shala does not train its staff to become good teachers on their own, or
in any general class situation. Rather, they are trained to become
effective in conducting classes based on Gyan Shala pattern. For
example, they are not taught general principles of effective teaching.
Instead, they are told how to conduct each module of class-process in
Gyan Shala as per design parameters that are laid down by its design
team. Table 2 lists the topics covered in this two-week training that
illustrate its operational focus. The training of all the staff in this core
program ensures that they all have common understanding of the
Gyan Shala system and processes. It also assigns central importance
to the task of class teaching.

Over the last three years, the Gyan Shala team has provided core
training to more than 400 people and evolved-stabilized the program
at a high level of effectiveness through many cycles of improvements.

The Gyan Shala team is also evolving a training module for school
supervisors, some elements of which have already been tested. It will
take another few years and induction of a few batches of supervisors
before this module too attains the effectiveness and reliability of the
core teacher training module. For the training of senior supervisors
and core team members, so far no standard training program has
been thought of. At present, the key instruments to develop these
cadres include exposure visits to other programs, occasional training
by external experts and continuous guidance and support by the senior
staff and team leader. Developing junior staff is rated as a critical
competence of staff at all levels. Should Gyan Shala reach a possibility
of large-scale replication, requiring many teams, some formal
mechanism to train and develop the design cum management team
and the senior supervisor will have to be evolved, probably outside the
Gyan Shala team structure.

organizational processes

Gyan Shala follows the policy of assigning independent responsibility

to each staff member, which could be formally assessed. In addition,
forums for internal discussion and review have been instituted to
enable both competitive and comparative review of performance, by
peer group and a multi-tier hierarchy of supervisors. The feedback
from such reviews and the responsibility for achieving measurable
results helps each staff to improve the performance continually. The
development and grooming of junior staff is regarded as a key
measure of core competence of senior staff. All senior staff, including
the members of design cum management team, are required to spend
considerable time in the classroom and to be in direct touch with the
teachers. An annual review of the overall program is conducted to
reconsider even basic design parameters afresh. Gyan Shala has four
hierarchical staff positions. The gap in the core competence of
teachers and supervisor, on one side, and between senior supervisor
and design cum management team, on the other, has been kept low.
The lower hierarchical level in each pair has a larger number of staff,
so at any time; a number of staff at lower level are being groomed to
take up vacant positions at the higher level. With a sturdy and tested
mechanism for inducting new teachers through a short two week
program, and the depth of informal labor market in India, Gyan Shala
remains confident of having a steady stream of staff emerging within
to occupy all positions in the organization.

participation in computer-aided education project

Development Research Network (DRN), a sister organization, has won

a infoDev (World Bank) project grant to work with the Gyan Shala
project to develop and test a system to use computer aided learning
module, in conjunction with Gyan Shala methodology, for raising
learning levels in math and language in lower primary classes. Under
this project, the Gyan Shala team and DRN will collaborate in
developing educational software and then later testing it 20 Gyan
Shala class locations. Low cost desktops, in the form of old/used
machines, will be obtained. Four desktop units would be kept in each
class, so that each child could get an hour of work practice on
computers each day. Two children will work on one machine at one
time, so there is some crosscheck and mutual learning. The teachers
and field supervisors of Gyan Shala will be trained to maintain the
hardware and software in the field, though the software is developed
for children to work independently on the computers.

The learning levels in the classes where computers are introduced will
be monitored carefully and compared with those in equal number of
control classes. The Gyan Shala team would work with DRN in
converting the lessons from the project implementation into policy
advocacy papers and guidelines for those intending to use computers
in primary schools.

The DRN and Gyan Shala team would seek partnership with other
leading organizations that are working on using computers for
educational purposes. Should the project result are satisfactory in the
sense that learning gains from computer aided program are worth the
cost of acquiring and operating the computers, Gyan Shala team may
consider integrating this component in the core Gyan Shala module.

finances

Gyan Shala has been designed to keep the total cost of education of
one child around Rs. 1500 per annum. The program cost in the
development phase is obviously high as a significant part of current
capacity is built up to prepare for future and planned expansion,
besides meeting the operations and maintenance of current task. In
spite of this, the program was close to meeting its unit cost target.
Financial resources for Gyan Shala came mainly from (i) Sir Ratan Tata
Trust, Mumbai, (ii) Volunteers for India Development and
Empowerment (VIDE), USA, and (iii) Utthan Seva Sansthan,
Ahmedabad. Mr. Sunil Handa of Core Emballage provided office and
administrative facilities, infrastructure, and utilities support, all free.
The project also received around Rs. 1.88 lakh as fee. Total program
expenditure came to around Rs. 35 lakhs. Following table gives the
breakup of revenue and expenses.

Gyan Shala had a total of 87 classes in 2002-2003. The total annual

expenditure on these was Rs. 34,90,000/-. This amounts to around Rs.
40,000/- per class. Most expenses of Gyan Shala are in direct
proportion to the number of classes, although, the cost of printing
worksheet is proportional to the number of children. The average
number of children in Gyan Shala classes was less than 30, so the cost
of educating one child was marginally more than Rs. 1500/- per year,
at present, but as the program stabilizes, the cost per child will remain
within the target range of Rs. 1500/- per child per year.
contact address
Education Support Organization
302, Indian Institute of Management
Vastrapur, Ahmedabad – 380015
Tel: (079)-6306381
Gyan Shala Project
Core House, Near Parimal Garden
Off CG Road, Ellisbridge,
Ahmedabad, 380006
Tel: (079)- 6461629
Fax: (079)-6563681
Email: gyan@jindalonline.net
web: www. gyanshala.org

Partners

• Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai was the first donor who provided
core funding to Gyan Shala at its start.
• Volunteers for India Development and Empowerment (VIDE) was
our second major institutional donor/ supporter who helped
Gyan Shala launch its program in rural areas, in the Earthquake
affected villages in 2001. Currently, it is supporting middle
school program.
• Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) Mission, Government of Gujarat is
supporting the education of out-of-school children, and also the
training of AMC teachers who are adopting Gyan Shala package.
• Social Initiative Group, ICICI Bank, India has provided core
funding since 2004, by meting cost of program components that
is not covered by SSA grant, since 2004.
• Jan Vikas, Ahmedabad, had supported Gyan Shala rural program
in Panchamahal district for three years over 2004-07.
• Share and Care Foundation, USA has supported part of the cost
of both elementary and middle school programs.
• Mr. Pulak Prasad of Nalanda Capital, Pte. Ltd., Singapore, is
funding the Bihar project of Gyan Shala.
• Michael Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF) has offered to support
various programs of Gyan Shala in Ahmedabad over 2008-2013.
• Mr. Sunil Handa of Core Emballage and Eklavya Education
Foundation, Ahmedabad provided office infrastructure and
support free of charge, from inception.
• Shri Kamal Mangal of Utthan Seva Sansthan and Anand Niketan
School has been active in mobilizing support and initiate
sponsorship support
• Alumni batch of 1983-85 of Institute of Rural Management,
Anand (IRMA) had decided to support some Gyan Shala classes,
over 2003-2005.
• Many individuals have provided support as sponsorship of one or
more children's education, or furnishing a class. An individual
who wants to remain unknown has sponsored a set of 10 classes
for five years.
• Development Research Network is a professional institutional
partner in an action-research project funded by infoDev (World
Bank) to develop the system and methodology for computer-use
in primary classes to raise learning levels in math and language.