Education Support Services for 1000 Students over 40 Academic Support Centers
Education in these tribal areas is poor, as reflected in the preliminary survey. The survey highlighted a literacy rate in the range of 10-20% in these areas. Notwithstanding the structural arrangements for schooling (availability of a school building) in place, almost all the villages have a high number of non school going children.
The concept of Academic support centers, a two hours non-school time coaching was devised as a process to strengthen school education.
Here are the current milestones reached by the Education Support program:
This was achieved by a multipoint program that included:
Supported with a daily supply of nutrition for the children, the program intends to counter malnutrition, a common phenomenon in the tribal area.
Breakfast provided at School consists of:
- Daliya or Moong – 3 days a week each
- Chana (Milk product) or Egg – 3 days a week each
- Biscuits – all days a week
- Health drink like Horlicks, Bournvita etc. – 6 days a week
To give an extent of community participation achieved – today the community prepares breakfast for the school students with materials supplied by the Math.
Pre schooling is the foundation of schooling. Lack of pre- schooling services was very much visible in the Anganwadis in these areas. Strengthening pre schooling was adopted for anganwadis to develop them as effective service delivery institution as models for pre schooling.
For school going children so far in school classroom special coaching for two hours before school hours was targeted to inculcate the permanent habit of school going, simultaneously nutritional inputs added to their curriculum.
Methodology of special coaching
Education through Academic Support Centres is based on the specific technique called SATT (Students Academic Tracking Tool). SATT is a non textbook based learning ,a method based on tested tools for child learning that ventures with new technique to assess child learning not similar to traditional method of pedagogy. There are separate lessons planned based on the letters and numbers the children can identify. The lesson begins from teacher developing rapport with children.
- In Hindi, a set of letters are exposed to children. These letters look identical in some aspects that makes it easier for the children to identify. They then, make words interchanging the letters. Once they are used to the letters, a new set of letters are introduced to children.
- In Mathematics, similar lessons planning for identification of letters, addition, substraction, multiplication and division is done
Education through Anganwadi Centres, named Pre primary learning centres is also based on SATT with separate lessons planned for children. The curriculum includes rapport building, learning rhymes and songs, letter identifications.
Process of pedagogy
A baseline test at the beginning identifies the learning levels of children. This test is conducted every three months to know the learning levels of children. The children are then grouped according to their learning levels.
Learning levels are set up as below:
Below 25 % D group
25-50 % C group
50-75% B Group
75 % and above A group
Each of the tutors engages with a specific group (A/B/C/D) for 30 minutes while the other groups continue with the practice sessions.
Activities of Academic Support Centre and Pre primary learning centres
With Children
- Academic support
- Nutritional support
With Community
- Parents contact and follow up by Field Coordinators
- Village Meeting
With Teachers & Education system
- Individual Meeting
- Quarterly meeting with Block level officers
Capacity building of Staff
- Monitoring by Field Coordinators and Project Coordinator
- Cluster level meetings with Tutors and ASTs
- In-house meeting with FCs
