Vigyan Foundation, Parwaaz project

Making management more effective in secondary schools

“Anurag and I have always wanted to help improve local education in the regions of Odisha and Uttar Pradesh where we come from,” says Soma, our Executive Trustee. “Part of our initial work with schools began with supporting them to create School Management and Development Committees, which included parents and community members as well as teachers and head teachers. The aim was to make the management and governance of schools more effective.”

We gave a grant of £111,659 over two years to improve schools by strengthening their Management and Development Committees.
The project benefited 5,000 children, parents, teachers, head teachers and comittee members.

Improving the ways schools are run

In 2012, we gave a grant to the Parwaaz project, run by the Vigyan Foundation. The project worked to strengthen the School Management and Development Committees in the district of Hardoi in Uttar Pradesh, and make sure they were doing everything they could to help government secondary schools succeed.

Back in 2009, the Indian Government had created Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA), a flagship fund to improve secondary education. Strengthening these committees was an essential component of RMSA’s schools’ improvement plans. The committees play a critical role in access, retention, enrolment and ensuring proper infrastructure and quality education.

Parwaaz aimed to address some of the obstacles preventing quality education. For example, while many schools had Management and Development Committees, they weren’t effective because they didn’t have the resources or skills they needed.

The two-year project included:

Strengthening Management and Development Committees in 40 schools, over two years, to ensure community support and a monitoring mechanism.
Creating an alliance of civil society organisations to advise and support the government for the RMSA roll out.
Tracking the progress of RMSA roll out and monitoring the School Management and Development Committees to ensure the school development plans were implemented.

We funded another project to strengthen School Management and Development Committees, in the district of Sambalpur, Odisha, in partnership with the Centre for Youth and Social Development.

“Kusuma has supported the capacity building of School Management and Development Committees in partnership with local NGOs and the Education department at the district level. We are now in a position to support the expansion of this important component of the RMSA nationally that will ensure better school management and improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools”.

Pankaj Vinayak Sharma, Executive Director of Transform Schools and former Country Leader of the Kusuma Foundation in India