School Leadership Development Program, India

Can you imagine an organization in India whose CEO was chosen purely based on tenure and didn’t necessarily have the competency to run the organization? There are hundreds of such organizations in India - the schools! And the CEOs- the school Principals and HMs are also responsible for the future of our nation.

There is a learning crisis in India. The ASER report states how 50% of Grade 5 children can’t read a Grade 2 textbook and how 42% of India’s youth cannot even identify their own state on the map of India. 

A study that spans over 65 countries found that students led by the top 25% of school leaders (Principals, HMs) had the equivalent of three extra months of learning per year when compared with students led by the bottom 25% of school leaders. This suggests that school leaders can potentially have a large impact on student success.

In India, most school leaders are promoted from their positions of ‘teacher’ without requisite training. Without adequate leadership training, the school leaders are unable to improve the quality of their schools (though no fault of their own!) and as a result, a vast majority of our government schools perform poorly.

We aim to improve the quality of government schools in India by the professional development of the school leaders (CEOs of schools!). This equips them with necessary competencies that are required for them to function effectively in their jobs.

We have a three-pronged approach to support the school leaders:

i) Training: We facilitate workshops that are engaging, practice-oriented and aligned with our 'Leadership Framework'. The themes we cover are personal leadership, people leadership, strategic leadership and instructional leadership. The training content is designed based on a rigorous needs analysis of the school leaders.

ii) Coaching: We coach school leaders to support them in contextualizing the learning (from workshops) for their schools and help them in easy implementation.

iii) Community: School leadership can be a lonely job. We create a community of school leaders who come together and share their challenges and successes and learn from each other through Learning circles and WhatsApp groups.

We are currently running programs with 5 different government partners:

1. Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TSWREIS)

2. Telangana Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TTWREIS)

3. District administration of Narayanpet 

4. Andhra Pradesh Residential Educational Institutions Society (APREIS)  

5. Central Tibetan Administration (CTA)

Since 2020, we have seen multiple impacts in our programs that we will continue to make in the years to come. Some of these are:

i) A net increase of 27% in foundational numeracy scores in the students (Project Rise, 2020)

ii) A 45% increase in number of  school leaders who were confident of implementing remote learning in our training (Project Rise, 2020)

iii) 221 girls were identified by school leaders who were at risk of dropping out due to early marriage (Shakti, 2021)

iv) A government order being passed to conduct a gender survey to identify vulnerable girl children based on our recommendations (Shakti, 2021)

Over the next decade, we want to firmly establish ourselves as a premier school leadership organization that is doing cutting edge work on leadership development.  We have the following three objectives:

i) Improvement in school leadership practices (e.g. ability to give feedback to teachers, conducting meetings, etc.) that will help leaders run schools effectively which will result in 

ii) Improvement in school culture and teacher performance which will result in

iii) Improvement in student outcomes (e.g. foundational literacy and numeracy, reduce dropouts of students, etc.).