Overview

Samarth is the Government of Himachal Pradesh’s flagship programme focused on improving the learning levels of students in government schools by systemically transforming the state’s education system. The Samarth engagement aspires to improve learning levels of students by 8-10 percentage points, making at least 75% of students across elementary grades grade-level competent and establishing Himachal as one of the top 3 states in the National Achievement Survey.

15,000
Schools
67,000
Teachers
8,00,000
Students
Approach

Samagra’s approach to transforming school education combines both academic and administrative reforms. This means we focus as much on improving the quality of classroom interactions between students and teachers (shifting focus from syllabus completion to competency-based teaching, encouraging innovative teaching practices, conducting high quality assessments), as on making the education system administratively more efficient (ensuring timely delivery of textbooks to schools, robust review and monitoring mechanisms, ongoing mentoring and training support for teachers).

1st
state to ensure timely delivery of textbooks in 2016
80%
students in Grades 1 to 5 grade-competent
3,000+
state officials use a mobile app for monitoring schools
Key Initiatives
Saksham Ghoshna
Previously, government schools in Himachal Pradesh experienced an average delay of up to 137 days in the delivery of textbooks. This resulted in loss of teaching time, thereby adversely affecting the learning process. There were multiple administrative issues resulting in delayed textbook delivery such as logistical gaps, slow communication channels, unclear roles and responsibilities and consequently lack of accountability for unmet deadlines. In 2016, the Department of Elementary Education (DEE), Himachal Pradesh embarked on a mission to ensure timely delivery of textbooks across the state to eliminate loss of teaching time due to delays. By leveraging technology, streamlining the supply chain and fixing deadlines and accountability at every step, the Department of Elementary Education and the Himachal Pradesh Board of School Education have successfully delivered over 60 lakh textbooks across 2,100 education clusters to over 6 lakh students in 15,000 schools before the commencement of the academic year in 2016. This initiative has been successful in each academic year since then and delivery of textbooks on time has become the norm in the Department.
Timely Textbook delivery
Previously, government schools in Himachal Pradesh experienced an average delay of up to 137 days in the delivery of textbooks. This resulted in loss of teaching time, thereby adversely affecting the learning process. There were multiple administrative issues resulting in delayed textbook delivery such as logistical gaps, slow communication channels, unclear roles and responsibilities and consequently lack of accountability for unmet deadlines. In 2016, the Department of Elementary Education (DEE), Himachal Pradesh embarked on a mission to ensure timely delivery of textbooks across the state to eliminate loss of teaching time due to delays. By leveraging technology, streamlining the supply chain and fixing deadlines and accountability at every step, the Department of Elementary Education and the Himachal Pradesh Board of School Education have successfully delivered over 60 lakh textbooks across 2,100 education clusters to over 6 lakh students in 15,000 schools before the commencement of the academic year in 2016. This initiative has been successful in each academic year since then and delivery of textbooks on time has become the norm in the Department.
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Teacher Training
More than 45,000 elementary school teachers in Himachal Pradesh are trained every year by Samagra Shiksha. Because of the large number of teachers, the government follows a cascaded model of training, delivered manually by master trainers. However, due to sheer scale and size, this in-person training can only be delivered just once a year. Therefore, the government designed a programme, which can provide provide relevant, quality training to teachers on an ongoing basis. To this end, Samagra Shiksha created a Refresher Training programme, in collaboration with The TeacherApp, an online app-based training platform. Under this programme, Samagra Shiksha conducted a needs assessment survey of teachers which directly fed into the monthly training calendar of these 45,000+ teachers. Customized content is created every month by TheTeacherApp for teachers, without them having to travel for training sessions. Through the app a variety of content is being delivered to teachers every month, in the form of courses, teaching learning materials and the option of interacting directly with experts. At present, over 42,000 teachers have the app on their mobile, enabling them to upskill themselves and teach better.
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Teacher Recognition
Khaas Shiksha is an initiative to reward and recognize teachers on a monthly basis for undertaking diverse, exceptional initiatives of their own accord to make students learn better. This is a nomination-based process to identify and give due credit to well-performing teachers and boost their morale. It also inspires other teachers to improve their teaching methods, adopt innovative practices to make the teaching process student-centric so that learning outcomes of children improve. Selected teachers receive a signed letter of appreciation from the Director of Elementary Education and their achievement is shared through social media and communication platforms such as WhatsApp.
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Open Source Technology
The Samarth team working with the Department of Education, Government of Himachal Pradesh developed and rolled out three technology products that will significantly change the way the state's education system operates. Developed exclusively for the Department of Education, these tech products were built using open source platforms, thus making the government less reliant on tech vendors. In its own way, each of the three products bridges the information gap in the education system which has traditionally made timely corrective action difficult to carry out. The three products are 1) a dashboard providing multi-layered analysis of the annual state-level assessment results of more than 5 lakh students allowing stakeholders at state, district and cluster level to make data-backed decisions; 2) a parent-involvement platform through which a teacher can send regular SMS updates to parents about their child’s attendance, homework completion status, assessment results, and information regarding important events in the school, and 3) a mobile application to track monitoring and mentoring visits by over 3,000 officials to schools.
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