School leadership is the backbone of the education system
Various research on the importance of school leadership suggest that it is a key lever in transforming the education system.
However, the potential of a school leaders’ ability to impact learning outcomes is not well understood in India. In majority of cases, the appointment of the School Leader is done solely on the basis of seniority, and the role is largely administrative.
In short, a school leader plays a key role in creating a conducive environment to spark the overall growth and development of the children. This ranges from improving teaching practices, to increasing learning outcomes, to ensuring the efficient management of school affairs.
How ISLI plugs the leadership gap in India
As a result, ISLI was founded in 2013, in partnership with the KIPP Foundation (USA), the Akanksha Foundation, Central Square Foundation, and Teach for India, to exclusively develop and upgrade the skills of current school leaders. Our current programme – the City Fellowships for School Leaders –improves the quality of classroom teaching and learning to support the development growth of children in underserved communities.
“To date, the City Fellowship serves about 430 School Leaders, impacting close to 250,000 children.”
Catalyzing scale by embracing various social investment capital:
Grants: We owe our success to the various organisations we have collborated with.
Being a strong believer in ISLI’s vision and model to bring about effective leadership, Central Square Foundation provided close to $0.5m. Similarly, MacArthur Foundation invested $200,000 worth of seed funds.
These grants were extremely useful at a time when we had not been able to prove ISLI’s impact, particularly when the conversation around the need for school leadership training in India barely existed. With their support, we were also able to connect with other donors to scale their impact.
Intellectual Assets: At present, we are partnering with AVPN member The Teacher App on the technology front, in which their expansive technological capital is enabling the digitisation of ISLI’s School Leadership content.
Finding Innovative, Cross-sector Partnerships to Expand Presence
Estimates put the total number of schools in India at 1.3million, which makes ISLI’s penetration seem insignifanct. However, having seen the impact of our programme on teaching practices in schools and consequently on better learning outcomes, we are keen to find new ways to expand its presence.
Over the next 3 years, we plan to scale to reach close to 75000 School Leaders using different models of engagement. As such, we are looking into:
- State Government partnerships, where we can work on whole school systems supporting the development of school leaders
- Technology to enable expansion to non-ISLI locations
“In order to drive growth, we are keen to engage with funders who can provide more than financial support.”
Resource providers are equally critical to us as they can provide provide domain knowledge, operation expertise and share their experiences and learnings.
Given the massive scale required to reach out to School Leaders across the country, we will engage with other organisations in the education ecosystem such as Createnet to learn from each other and provide insights. Join us at the AVPN India Summit 2017, where we will be speaking at the “Leadership Training in Schools” panel as a Deal Share Live participant to share our experiences.
Sources of quotes:
https://www.educationdevelopmenttrust.com/~/media/EDT/Reports/Research/2015/r-successful-school-leadership.pdf
http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/transforming-schools.aspx
http://portales.mineduc.cl/usuarios/fde/doc/201202221325220.Informe%20Mckinsey.pdf
