This report provides a summary of the UDISE+ Report 2024, with all data drawn directly from the main report. Through a detailed trend analysis, this report aims to identify key insights around the evolution of India’s school education system. The objective of this report is to inform stakeholders, including policymakers, about these trends, helping to ensure that India’s education system remains inclusive, accessible and adaptive to the changing needs of its diverse population.

This report focuses on the challenges faced by private schools in India and the sectoral reforms needed to improve the learning outcomes of students attending private schools. It also aims to be a ready reckoner for stakeholders like policymakers, academicians, researchers, philanthropists and educationists.

India is home to nearly 8 crore children aged 3-6 years. Research has firmly established the long-term positive effects of investing in high-quality Early Childhood Education (ECE) programmes for children, their families, and society as a whole. While policies for this effort are progressive and far reaching, learning outcomes of children continue to be suboptimal. Our study involved a thorough examination of challenges and opportunities to enhance learning for young children through in-depth curriculum analysis, classroom observations, and interactions with key stakeholders.

Central Square Foundation, with support from Google.org, launched ‘AI Samarth’, an AI literacy initiative aimed at raising awareness and encouraging the responsible use of AI among students, parents and teachers across Bharat. As part of this initiative, we have developed an AI Literacy Curriculum Framework in partnership with the Wadhwani School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (WSAI), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras.

The research investigates the adoption of Smart Classroom integration in government schools of Madhya Pradesh and the factors influencing its sustained usage. It analyzes infrastructural readiness, teacher preparedness, and pedagogical alignment to understand what enables or hinders consistent engagement. The study further provides insights into improving digital learning implementation for effective adoption.

This report is part of the evidence-building agenda of the LiftEd EdTech Accelerator, aimed at creating evidence on  the impact of EdTech for FLN for learning at home. The ‘Insights on User Experience’ study provides a qualitative analysis of feedback gathered from end users on key aspects of the EdTech programme lifecycle – including acquisition, onboarding, engagement and retention.

This report is part of the evidence-building agenda of the LiftEd EdTech Accelerator, aimed at creating evidence on the impact of EdTech for FLN for learning at home. The ‘Impact of Acceleration’ study assesses the effectiveness of the strategies implemented within the Accelerator.

This report presents the findings from a recent randomised evaluation conducted in Haryana, India on the use of teacher-directed technology to improve foundational learning at home. Chimple, a Global Learning X-PRIZE finalist, partnered with the Bharti Airtel Foundation’s Satya Bharti Schools program to implement its teacher-led at-home learning model for grades 1 and 2 in five districts of Haryana. An impact evaluation of this programme showed significant and promising improvements in learning, particularly for foundational numeracy. This report synthesises our learnings from the implementation and evaluation of Chimple, and discusses the findings from the impact evaluation to support policy and intervention design.

This factsheet summarises our key insights from the project on ‘Understanding EdTech Usage at Home Using Dedicated Devices’ highlighting best practices for the implementation of device distribution programmes for educational purposes, as well as our learnings from programmatic interventions deployed to encourage the use of EdTech at home. The project was carried out in collaboration with ACT Grants, Prof. Tarun Jain from IIM Ahmedabad, Educational Initiatives and Sshrishti Trusts.

CSF’s project on ‘Understanding EdTech Usage at Home Using Dedicated Devices’ aimed to identify best practices for implementation of a programme where dedicated devices were given to children and programmatic nudges were deployed to encourage EdTech usage at home. This report details the iterative research design and our learnings from the project. 

CSF’s project on ‘Understanding EdTech Usage at Home Using Dedicated Devices’ was an attempt to create an archetype of a programme where children have dedicated devices loaded with two high-quality learning solutions, a Mobile Device Management (MDM) software and an internet package and programmatic nudges were deployed to encourage EdTech usage at home. This implementation playbook synthesises our learnings from procurement, provisioning, distribution and maintenance of devices for any stakeholders looking to set up a device distribution programme for educational purposes.

While India has witnessed extensive growth in the EdTech sector over the past few years, a key ecosystem challenge is that there are very few EdTech solutions that are built for and that have been able to scale in low-income segments, where the need for tech-based learning is probably the highest. 

In an endeavor to bridge this information asymmetry, Central Square Foundation has launched India’s first household survey, ‘BaSE: Bharat Survey for EdTech’, aimed at bringing the voice of the end-user in Bharat to the discourse on EdTech. 

This fact sheet captures key findings of a summative research study conducted for Top Parent (TP), a parent- and child-facing vernacular app for parental engagement and foundational learning for children. The study was conducted in partnership with Central Square Foundation and Saajha Foundation.

Research has shown that parents’ involvement in children’s learning can positively impact their academic performance and social-emotional development. However, parents’ involvement in children’s learning tends to be low because they often lack clarity on the role they can play and feel underconfident in supporting their child, given their own low literacy levels. To solve for this, CSF and CSBC at Ashoka University collaborated to develop behavioral interventions aimed at supporting an increase in parents’ engagement in their child’s Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) journey.

Practitioner’s Guide to Embedding Assessment-Informed Instruction (A-i-i) is an attempt to answer – “How can education practitioners support teachers to use assessment-informed instruction to improve learning in their classrooms?”

This report considers the risks and benefits of reopening schools and discusses approaches for safe reopening, including insights from other countries that reopened during the pandemic.

This report is a result of CSF’ response to Covid-19-induced educational challenges, that culminated in two partner forums organized by CSF with fifteen leading organizations working in education across the country. The forum was a platform for partners to share their learnings from last year and align on a way forward as a collective.

This report, focused on the public school system, is a synthesis of current evidence on key challenges driving low foundational learning outcomes in India, and learnings from attempts to improve them.

This report looks at how setting up of an independent regulatory body for assessment and accreditation of private schools, as suggested in the NEP 2020, can help create an enabling environment for these schools.