by Nawaz Sarif 21 June 2023
What comes to mind when you hear the word “SCHOOL”? It might be a learning platform for kids, teachers, or a place, where young minds are fostered for holistic development. Have you ever considered what it might be like for a school to operate without a principal or with a single teacher? A school with around 40-55 kids and two rooms, one teacher, with no water, electricity, or computer facilities, what I experienced during my recent academic visit to a government primary school of a state in India. The teacher himself cleans the rooms, does the staff works, and even prepares mid-day meal. When I walked into the classroom, the scene became fairly distressing. The teacher tried to teach students of grades 1, 2, and 3 together in a single classroom. In such a class, the teacher is genuinely lost in what he wants to teach. I suppose you and I don’t think we call it ‘SCHOOL’. This is not a story but an anecdote of more than one lakh schools in our country, all of them run with very poor resources and one teacher, and thus no teaching happens at all, resulting in poor learning outcomes.
The Gross Enrolment Ratio at the elementary level (Classes I–VIII) has continually been high, at over 97 percent, according to a Ministry of Education report titled “Educational Statistics” At a Glance. This shows that nearly every Indian kid attends school. Despite this, it appears like kids are not learning anything in school. Only 44.2 percent of Class V pupils in government institutions in India can read level II text, according to the ASER survey. The situation is worse for maths, where only 22.7 percent of Class V students in public schools are able to perform division. Jaime Saavedra, the Global Director for Education at the World Bank, also drew attention to this critical state of India’s school system. “Learning poverty has shot up in the nation from 54 percent to 70 percent” he added.
In this country, there are 1.5 million schools. On the global learning index, however, children from India miserably find themselves in the bottom five. The nation has one of the biggest school enrollments and one of the worst learning crises in the world. This is solely a result of poor policies that endorse every state to build several little schools in every hamlet, village, and locality to achieve the Saikia Committee’s recommendation that there should be a school within 1-1.5 kilometers of an individual’s place of residence. And this expansion came at the cost of quality education.
This year’s budget speech focused on how 15,000 schools will be strengthened qualitatively and will serve as model schools across the country. A nationwide professional standard for teachers will also be created, however, there was no mention of how this would contribute to resolving the fundamental issues of kids not having access to essential educational facilities in schools.
However, amid this learning poverty, “school cluster”—the grouping of schools in the same area for economic, pedagogical, and administrative reasons—can be a potential means for countries like India to make improvements concerning their educational system. NEP 2020 and its earlier policies, including those of the Kothari Commission at the national level and UNESCO at the international level also endorse the proposal of a “school complex” or “school cluster”.
In India, there are approximately 1, 10,971 single-teacher schools. These “small schools” are identified by their low enrolment, in fact, sometimes just one teacher is in charge of everything at the school, and teaches many grades and/or multiple subjects, often in a single classroom. The states with the most single-teacher schools included Madhya Pradesh (21,077), followed by Andhra Pradesh (9,160), Telangana (6,678), Jharkhand (6,200), and Uttarakhand (3,216), according to UNESCO report, “2021 State of the Education Report for India”.
A few states, like Rajasthan and Jharkhand, have already embraced cluster school systems to best utilize their facilities and human resources to provide high-quality education. For instance, in one setup in the state of Jharkhand, three small schools—one with 40 students and one teacher, the second with 60 students and two teachers, and the third with 50 students and two teachers—were merged into one large school. This large school now has 150 students, 5 teachers, and 1 staff, and improved resources are available. Each class now has its own teacher. Teachers have a clear plan for what to teach and how to teach. Children are receiving customized education. They are content and progressing at a grade-specific level. Parents are initially hesitant to push their children too far, but they have eventually come to realize that their children are attaining actual learning. Over the course of four years, 20–30 lakh children in 2,000 schools in the state of Rajasthan are also benefiting from school clustering. Rajasthan also held the top spots in India’s National Achievement Survey.
This concept has been proved useful not only in Indian states like Jharkhand and Rajasthan but has the potential to transcend in other states of India, with 3,000+schools with single teachers, especially Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Assam, Telangana, West Bengal, and Bihar. This system of school clustering will enable these states pooling with resources like teachers, learning materials, and physical and infrastructural resources, like playgrounds, auditoriums, and laboratories, and share them with the spatially proximate group of schools or within the designated school cluster. Henceforth, both Central and State Governments, policy-makers, and other stakeholders must do the needful to identify regions or areas of these states, as a consequence map out the possibility for clustering “small schools”.
The cluster school would profoundly help children in rural areas since it would have access to resources that small standalone schools lack. Additionally, it would promote healthy competition, provide government school kids more exposure, and give them access to equal opportunities. From a pedagogical perspective, school clustering is especially beneficial because a sizable cluster encourages innovations, specific to the region and culture.
For teachers, cluster schools would be a beneficial means to find pertinent solutions for scaling localized, practical, and ongoing support. Increased cooperation, critical thinking, and teacher leadership are just a few of the substantial “process benefits” that school cluster-based training can provide in addition to improving teachers’ subject and pedagogy knowledge.
At the administration level, the cluster system would be helpful in decentralized planning and decision-making at cluster level, piling both human and material resources within the cluster, and ensuring that there would be a community of schools to assist one another rather than an isolation of schools. Additionally, it would also ensure that counselors are available, vocational education is implemented, and art, sport, projects, fieldwork, storytelling, and information and communication technology are all incorporated into the teaching-learning process in all schools. “School cluster”, thus can be a way forward as it provides the quality push that India’s education system needs to thrive in the 21st century’s global learning index, by tackling the root causes of subpar learning outcomes in the country.