Leadership Enhancement and Acceleration Programme (LEAP) by Vidhya Vidhai Foundation

“Educate. Innovate. Lead.”

There is a gap in school leadership development in the public school system in India, which is recognised to be instrumental in determining school culture and learning outcomes. We address this gap in through a systemic approach, by partnering with the state education departments & charting the course for school leadership development through micro improvement projects and self paced learning

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Overview

Information on this page is provided by the innovator and has not been evaluated by HundrED.

Web presence

2017

Established

800

Children

1

Countries

Target group

Leaders

Updated

May 2023

We envision a child-centred learning environment in every school where children are given choices of how and what they learn, as they thrive when they can see a direct connection between the instructional material and their own interests and real-world experiences. The classroom becomes a collaborative environment, with the child as an active, rather than passive, participant.

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

A school leader holds immense potential to define the course of a school and its students and have a direct impact on learning outcomes. Even with such a pivotal role, a school leader receives minimal training. As such, a school leader is often found to focus on administrative tasks, while the quality of education takes a back seat in their order of priorities.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

To translate our vision of creating child centric schools that cater to the needs of every child, into action, we partner with state education departments and craft a school leadership development journey of that state, suited to its context and priorities. This journey consists of two main elements: micro improvement projects and self paced learning. Through micro improvement projects, we ensure schools take small achievable steps towards a larger goal of child centric education, thereby creating a sense of accomplishment and a habit of continuously driving improvement in their schools. Through self paced learning, we ensure that school leaders gain and imbibe knowledge on their own time and at their own pace. We share interactive, innovative and easily consumable, low-tech knowledge resources, so that every school leader has access to best practices from across the globe. We incentivise application of this knowledge by creating platforms for leaders to showcase their efforts.

How has it been spreading?

We started by partnering with 2 school in 2017 where we implemented our whole school development approach by focusing leadership development. Once we established proof of concept, we partnered with state education departments of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry as strategy partners and charted a course for school leadership development for the state/specific blocks as well as designed specific improvement projects for these states after thorough needs assessment.
In the next two years, we will be partnering with 4 states and impacting over 100,000 public schools and school leaders. We will also be launching a school leadership development course in affiliation with reputed institutions which will be offered to school leaders across the country.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

Partnering with the school or local education body, conducting a needs assessment to understand the school's context and needs, identifying priorities and co-designing interventions alongside the school leadership team, creating high quality knowledge resources for leadership development and micro improvement projects to be lead by stakeholders and design and implement monitoring and evaluation

Implementation steps

Partner with local education body

A memorandum of understanding will be signed with the local education department(block, district or state level). This will detail out the duration of engagement and key responsibilities of the organisation within the ambit of school leadership development. The approach will vary from state level to block level. At a state level, the organisation will work with key decision makers (steering committees) while at block level they will work with a group of school leaders in one administrative unit.

Conduct a needs assessment

A thorough needs assessment will be conducted to understand the local context and needs. This will include school visits and school observations, teacher and school leader conversations. This will assess needs at the enviromental, capacity and function levels. The assessment will also be conducted for student learning levels to determine the nature of initiatives that will be driven by school leaders.

Identify priorities and co-design solutions

An improvement journey will be mapped in collaboration with the leadership teams at various levels based on the identified needs. The prioritisation of needs to be addressed will also be done in collaboration with the education leaders. For example, in Puducherry state, the focus area identified is foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN). Vidhya Vidhai charted a course and developed a number of initiatives for school leaders to drive the vision for improved FLN in schools.

Drive innovations

Vidhya Vidhai charts out an improvement journey working alongside the leadership team. Once this is complete, we develop a number of self paced knowledge resources to strengthen the skills and knowledge of school leaders; we develop a number of micro improvement projects for leaders to choose from and implement in their contexts, equipped with the skills and knowledge acquired through their professional development journey.

Monitoring and evaluation

We have a number of monitoring mechanisms including reflection meetings, personal interviews and conversations, school observations. These allow us to course correct and re-design solutions best suited to the context. This also allows us to take the feedback to the state level and strategise accordingly.