The NITI Aayog and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF) today signed a Statement of Intent (SOI) to codify, document and share best practices to improve learning outcomes in public school education through systemic reforms, based on their collective experiences of working with various state governments in India.
The SOI was signed in the presence of Mr. Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog, by Mr. Alok Kumar, Adviser (HRD), NITI Aayog and Mr. BarunMohanty, Managing Director (International), MSDF.
The NITI Aayog was established with the core mandate of promoting cooperative and competitive federalism through evidence-based policy reform and knowledge inputs. Since its inception, NITI Aayog has placed learning outcomes as a key focus area for establishing sustainable education systems.
As a part of this push, the School Education Quality Index (SEQI) is being developed to rank states/UTs on educational outcomes, with a high weightage to learning outcomes. Further, NITI is implementing the Sustainable Action for Transforming Human Capital in Education (SATH-E) initiative to induce systemic transformation in Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Odisha.
Education also forms a crucial component of the Aspirational Districts Programme, which seeks to improve status of education in the most underserved districts of India. Pursuing its mandate of disseminating best practices and knowledge sharing, partnerships with stakeholders in the development sphere are a continuing endeavour of the NITI Aayog.
Under this latest partnership, the NITI Aayog and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation will document the reforms pursued by various state governments that have initiated systemic reforms in education and have begun to see improved learning outcomes over the past few years. Altogether, nearly 30 million children have been positively impacted across India through the systemic reforms in education in different states.
Under the agreement, a joint team comprising of state leaders, consultants, research agencies and educators shall work together to develop a ‘theory of change’ based on the learnings from the states and will document the impact on the ground by commissioning third-party studies to evaluate the impact of systemic reforms in education.
Improving learning outcomes at scale will require a coordinated and simultaneous effort with both academic and governance reforms. The key findings and takeaways from this exercise will be disseminated to relevant decision-makers and policymakers in other states after a consultative process of validating the same. This will be done through workshops and publications in the coming months.
[Source: PIB]
NITI Aayog
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