India is one of the youngest countries in terms of demography, with a median age of 28-29 years. This requires that young people, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, have access to quality learning. Currently, 53 out of every 100 children (124 million) attend low-resource Government schools and come from economically marginalised households. Despite policy focus and increased enrolment, Learning Outcomes remain low. Many children advance through the system without acquiring foundational skills, leaving them underprepared for higher education, employment, or meaningful participation in the economy.
There was a felt need for a solution that could work within the existing system by creating a design that embedded itself within the system, allowing us to leverage the system as a force multiplier and putting teachers at the centre to achieve scale, systemic change and sustainability. To achieve practical and lasting impact, interventions had to be system-led and not reliant on high-end infrastructure/resources.
The solution needed to be modular, contextual, and grounded in local cultural context. It had to focus on strengthening teacher agency, building institutional capacity, and creating sustainability by institutionalising design within State Education Departments. By working with and through the public education system, the goal was to strengthen existing structures, support teachers, and build long-term ownership within the system.
Design thinking is central to our approach for large-scale, system-level education reform. We collaborate with all stakeholders in a child’s learning ecosystem: teachers, District officials, and State Education Departments, to ensure contextual relevance and system ownership. Learning loss is diagnosed using a laddered assessment by administering the same question across Grades 3, 5, and 8. Insights from this data inform the creation of experiential, activity-based modules, integrated into grade- and subject-specific textbooks. These are aligned with Government-defined Learning Outcomes, enabling students to reach Grade-level proficiency.
To ensure consistent implementation, we develop detailed Teacher Handbooks and competency-based Student Worksheets. This enables standardised activity delivery across 3,000–7,000 public schools, depending on the size of a State.
We provide ongoing support by embedding our team within State Education Departments. Teachers receive training to ensure uniform rollout, and our support structures, including a dedicated telephone helpline and WhatsApp groups. While system actors at all levels are important to the programme’s success, teacher agency is at its core. We invest in their continuous training and capacity building.
Our embedded Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) framework ensures a dynamic, responsive model by capturing real-time feedback, allowing us to adapt and calibrate interventions to meet evolving needs.
Our approach is rooted in designing for scale to enable us to reach the largest number of children across public schools. This scale is achieved by leveraging Government infrastructure and outreach to cover all schools within a State. Over the years, our programme has grown to impact over 7.19 million children across four States, 58,000 schools and over 319,000 teachers. Our journey has unfolded in two phases. From 2007 to 2019, we worked at the community level, which included School Management Committees, Teachers, Parents and District-level Education Department functionaries and reaching 55,592 children. This engagement allowed for a deep understanding of how the public education system works on ground.
Post 2019, to take this extensive bottom-up learning from pockets of excellence to scale, we pivoted our strategy and began partnering with State Education Departments to reach all children within the Public school system in a State, with the focus being on strengthening Learning Outcomes. Since then, we have signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with the State Education Departments of Gujarat (in 2019), Haryana (in 2021), Arunachal Pradesh (in 2022), and Meghalaya (in 2023). This extension of our geographical outreach has led to a significant increase in the number of children reached. This strategy has led to visible impact, backed by Government data, demonstrating the success of our scalable model in driving lasting, system-wide educational improvement.
When we began engaging with schools at the community level, whereas it led to a deep understanding of the public school system, we operated in pockets of excellence. With all our experience, it was clear to us that scaling up and designing for scale are two very different design elements. After an extensive field engagement, we had to change our approach, design and strategy as we felt that all this deep learning had to be rolled out at scale so that a much larger number of children would have access to quality education.
The key modification has been a focus on systems change, scale and sustainability. By partnering with State Education Departments, we have been able to reach very large numbers and have succeeded in strengthening core approaches to Learning Outcomes. Every new State that we have engaged with has its own vision of how the public-school education system should function. Although the umbrella approach is focussed on systems change, scale and sustainability, the design elements have been modified or adapted to local needs and user asks. This is a demonstration of the agility of our design, and we hope to keep innovating and adding to maintain the relevance of our interventions based on consultation and stakeholder demand.
Over the past few years, we have focused on fine-tuning our innovation by testing our interventions in real-time by working with State Governments. Our agile, modular design is easily adaptable since India has diverse cultures across various States. Each time we move into a new geography, the basis of engagement is consultation so that our material and interventions are adapted to local needs and cultural contexts. Due to the adaptable nature of our design and approach, we are ready to roll out in geographies within and outside India through this ‘plug and play’ model.
If an agency wants to try our model, we recommend a project visit to experience the model firsthand, the roles of various stakeholders, and how monitoring, evaluation, and documentation support success.
We can be reached at info@reach-to-teach.org and our website www.reach-to-teach.org for any further information.
