Q1. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and the NIPUN Bharat Mission place a strong emphasis on foundational learning. In your view, how are districts becoming the units of change for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) to sustain the NIPUN momentum on the ground?

Well-designed missions are often shaped by the strength of state capacity at the local level. While national or state – level policy might appear robust, it is the coherence, motivation, and authority of frontline administrative structures that truly determine how effectively plans are executed.

District functionaries are responsible for local adaptation, training and resource deployment, but also for creating mechanisms for monitoring and periodic review. The district, therefore, serves as a bridge between state intent and school – level practices, translating policy into actionable steps suited to diverse local realities. Policy ownership and accountability are cultivated through clearly defined roles for district, block and school officials. 

Strengthening district-level institutions, building managerial and pedagogical capacity and enabling a culture of data – driven learning become paramount. Unless these systemic weaknesses are addressed, the promise of foundational learning for all can flounder on the ground.

While NEP and NIPUN Bharat Mission are great enablers, the districts, blocks and classrooms are the true and necessary units of change because they are where policies meet practice and every child’s learning journey truly begins and shapes up. It is the officers and teachers that drive the crucial last mile of policy implementation for the NIPUN Bharat Mission. While the officers enable schools and head teachers on administrative aspects,  teachers, on the other hand, deliver academic instructions, making both the school and the children NIPUN. Effective teaching – learning material (TLM), clean school infrastructure and a happy school environment together reflect a well – governed district education system. 

Q2.  Why is it essential to have strong alignment and collaboration between state and district – level leadership to achieve NIPUN Bharat goals? Could you share examples of district – level actions that have contributed meaningfully to the state’s FLN priorities?

To implement NIPUN Bharat goals, the state government sends out a bouquet of inputs in the form of academic materials, then creates a cascaded training structure to train the last mile teacher to build clarity and conviction on the usage of these materials and finally deploys a middle management cadre to support and supervise quality implementation. In our experience in the districts, there are breaks on each front.

On the delivery of academic materials, there is a substantial lag time in getting the material from district level to block level to finally the schools. On the cascaded training front, we see transmission loss at each level of the cascade. Moreover, there are infrastructural constraints like non – working fans in sweltering heat at the block resource centre where teachers receive the training. On the support and supervision front, we see lack of good quality data relayed by mentors upwards. Bad quality data at each level makes it difficult to diagnose mission health during the review meetings.

This calls for a need for strong alignment between state government and district leadership to ensure quality implementation. 

For example, during our visits to school, the CSF team found out that while the state has created high quality teacher guides (Shikshak Sandarshikas) that provide day – wise plans and student learning strategies to each teacher, the usage of the same was extremely low. To nudge teachers to pick the sandarshika, we, along with the district leadership, co – designed easy-to-use, self-explanatory one – pagers summarising the academic priorities of the day and how teachers can effectively use the teacher guide.

These priority one-pagers not only rallied all key stakeholders towards common quarterly objectives but also nudged teachers to pick the teacher guide and teach better. Through this district level micro -innovation we attempted to close the loop between state input (academic material) and output(teachers teaching better through teacher guides).

Similar breakdowns across key workstreams might cause a mission to stall as it hits the ground and hence a consistent loop of design-implement-iterate is needed to ensure that districts and states achieve the common goals of the mission.

Q3. What are some of the key challenges you encounter at the district level while implementing FLN initiatives and how are you and your team working to overcome them?

There is a strong focus on compliance or in other words meeting targets and very little focus on ensuring quality. The structure of the review meetings across the governance level is such that inputs are tracked and questioned upon with scant regard to outputs achieved.  This creates a misaligned incentive for district education cadres to keep focussing on inputs because that is what is tracked during the reviews.

Let us understand this better through two examples and how our team is trying to solve the issues.

• The Academic Resource Person(ARP) is a mentor who is tasked to do 30 visits to schools where his/her primary responsibility is to coach teachers to teach better. However, these visits end up becoming a race to finish monthly ‘targets’ with very little focus on coaching. This behaviour goes against the carefully designed state policy where a coach/mentor is provided to teachers for ‘supportive supervision’. Our teams shadow these ARPs during their school visits to help them reorient their attention towards coaching teachers; our teams try to play the role of ‘coach to the coaches of the teachers’.
  
• The state provides a myriad of inputs under the various sub-departments like Mid Day Meal, Direct Benefit Transfer, Infrastructure etc. Nipun indicators are one of the many indicators that the District Magistrates, the Chief Development Officers and the Basic Shiksha Adhikaris have to review. This leads to review fatigue where key academic indicators under Nipun like usage of teacher guides and the data on learning outcomes do not receive ample time and attention because of other indicators taking that time. Our team is working with the district leadership office to sharply define the review meeting agenda to give ample time on the indicators that matter the most. Even after the agenda is set, our teams ensure that the major chunk of the time, preferably the first half of the review, is devoted to Nipun academic indicators.

Q4. What is CSF’s approach to strengthening foundational learning at the district level and how has it helped build systems that effectively deliver FLN outcomes for Uttar Pradesh? 

Focussing on districts as the unit of change, CSF’s District Project Management Units (DPMUs) have emerged as a key catalyst in driving the district level implementation of the FLN mission. CSF aims to demonstrate impact on student learning outcomes (SLOs) and scalability of programmes with moderate resourcing and external support through DPMU programmes. CSF’s work at the state and the district levels follows certain common pathways for bringing about change, which are an illustration of CSF’s premise of supporting and supplementing government programming. CSF-led DPMUs focus on five key change pathways including:

• Governance and Capacity Building: our teams work with the district leadership to create a shortlist of prioritised performance indicators which are tracked during review meetings across district and block levels month-on-month. These prioritised indicators are used to rally the efforts of district and block officials. The prioritised indicators include, inter alia, inputs (usage of academic materials) and academic outputs (performance of children on grade appropriate competencies).
  
• Middle Management Strengthening: academic Resource Persons are the key academic middle managers. Our teams shadow the Academic Resource Persons during their school visits to help improve their coaching capabilities. Our bet is that if ARPs coach better then that would lead to teachers teaching better then that would lead to gains in learning outcomes for children.
  
• Data System Enhancement: our teams work with the district leadership offices to co-create templates for data collection; supports in appropriate utilization of data during review meetings and dissemination to the last mile in easy-to-comprehend structures.
  
• Academic Input: our teams co-create action plans and localized district campaigns to deepen the absorption of academic understanding and usage of academic inputs by the state. We do this by closely working with the cadre of State Resource Groups , ARPs, DIET Mentors.
  
• Community Action: our teams are closely working with district leadership to reimagine the forum of parent teacher meetings as a space to amplify parent voice and enable a two-way dialogue between teachers and parents. 

These pathways, through various inputs, lead to the achievement of student learning milestones over the years, resulting in improved student learning outcomes at both district and state levels. 

Q5. Looking ahead, what are your aspirations for how district systems can further evolve to accelerate and sustain foundational learning outcomes in India in the years to come?

When it comes to foundational learning governance in Uttar Pradesh, there is a need to minimize the intent-implementation gap at the district level. We need to move beyond the top-down compliance culture where districts end up ‘meeting’ targets set by the state with scant regard to quality. Our foremost aspiration is to see an alignment in the system between the state, district, block and the school on the why, how and what of the Nipun mission and its key components so that there is adequate focus on not just compliance but quality too.

Our second aspiration is to bring teachers at the centre of the education discourse at the district (and state level). Teachers are the most important stakeholders and their voices must be heard at each level – right from block level reviews to state level meetings. There is a need to relay back the data gathered by the state to a teacher and provide support to them that provides them meaningful ways to support children. Teachers need to believe deeply that the creators and leaders of Viksit Bharat are sitting in their classrooms and teachers are playing perhaps the most important and sacred role in shaping the future of our nation.