Block Education Transformation Initiative

Together In Development & Education (TIDE) Foundation (www.tideinternational.org/), is an NGO dedicated to transforming education systems to bring about quality and holistic education of the whole child (education of the head, heart, hands, and soul) for all. Since 2014, we have worked with over 36,500 individuals and we invite you to support our innovative Block Education Transformation Initiative (BETI) which aims to transform government schools across Gujarat; we are currently implementing the program at schools in Ahmedabad and Sanand. 

BETI is a comprehensive program that tackles three critical challenges facing the Indian education system: 

• Foundational learning gaps: Many students lack basic literacy and numeracy skills, hindering their progress in higher grades. We leverage activity-based STEM learning sessions and remedial sessions to bridge these gaps.
• Limited holistic education: Access to life skills education, arts, sports, and psychosocial support is often limited, leading to stunted emotional and social development. We equip students with essential life skills such as communication, problem-solving, and teamwork and social emotional skills through workshops, expression sessions, extracurricular clubs and mentoring camps. 
• Low teacher support and poor pedagogy: Teachers are often overburdened and rely on rote memorization based teaching learning practices. We create communities of practice where teachers learn from each other and develop innovative teaching methods. 

In the past two years, we have also piloted BETI in 10 rural government schools and volunteer driven lifeskills education program in 15 urban sites (schools, slums, and orphanages). Drawing on these learnings, we are now seeking your support to scale our operations: 

• In Rural Ahmedabad: Expand BETI to 100 government schools in Sanand, reaching approximately 18,000 students across the entire block. This includes expanding our remedials programs through local associates, providing life skills education through camps, and empowering teachers to use activity and application based learning. 
• In Urban Ahmedabad: We plan to scale our volunteer driven lifeskills program to 30 schools, and in addition we would like to pilot BETI’s comprehensive school transformation initiative in atleast 20 schools. The program will impact over 7,200 students and form the basis of scaling the program to over 400 schools in the next 5 years. 

We believe that every child deserves access to quality education. With your help, we can make this dream a reality. We are confident that BETI holds the potential to transform education in India, and we invite you to be a part of this journey.

We are currently developing a Block Education Transformation Initiative as a means of scalable and sustainable education reforms in the government schools. The governance of government schools across the country is divided by states, districts, blocks (containing roughly 110 schools), and clusters (containing 10-12 schools). Blocks are the smallest unit of governance. We hope to develop a model to holistically transform blocks of schools, and this can later be used to transform education systems across the district, state and nation.

We have identified three major areas of limitations within the public education system and run a program to counter each of the issues including: 1) lack of foundational literacy and numeracy (countered through the Saral Kadam Program); 2) limited psychosocial support and socioemotional wellbeing support for students (countered through Disha Program); and 3) low teacher support and poor classroom pedagogy typically reliant on rote memorization (countered through EmpowerEd). 

Saral Kadam Program intends to support foundational learning of all children. The program includes 1. bringing about holistic foundational learning for children that have been left behind using teaching at the right level and holistic education inspired principles and 2. activity based learning for understanding and application based learning in mathematics and science.

Disha aims to provide life skills education, psychosocial support and socioemotional wellbeing support for students. We run interactive and participatory life skills sessions for all children and in addition we run counselling and camps for children with behavioral difficulties.

EmpowerEd aims to bring about bottom-up teacher education, empowerment, and enrichment by developing and running communities of practitioners based on ideas of collaboration, action research, and sharing best practices. 

We aim to transform the 110 schools in the block and we are currently rolling out our program across the first 10 schools meanwhile documenting our results and processes.

Through this year we hope to impact roughly 10 schools, 80 teachers and 2000 children. We hope to bring about holistic education and development for both teachers and students with a specific focus on activity based learning, conceptual understanding based learning, life skills education, and socioemotional wellbeing.