Saturday Art Class created this innovation responding to a reality witnessed first-hand: 250 million children studying in India’s low-income government and private schools are deprived of holistic development. These children face extreme poverty, and may be exposed to resource scarcity, violence, substance abuse, poor health, and underage employment. Yet, they lack access to a safe space in schools to express themselves or build the skills needed to cope with these challenges. Classrooms focus solely on academics, neglecting creative and social-emotional learning that shapes resilience and agency. While India’s National Education Policy (NEP 2020) recognises the importance of arts and SEL, it lacks effective implementation because of untrained teachers, insufficient curricula, and limited resources. This problem also reflects a larger global trend, as the World Economic Forum warns that education systems risk leaving students unprepared for a future workforce shaped by critical thinking and creativity. SArC is bridging this gap between policy and implementation through a scalable solution. Harnessing visual art, it creates safe, joyful spaces for children to express themselves, develop self-awareness, and build essential 21st-century skills to navigate their lives and future. It trains teachers in the existing school system and designs a child-centered visual art curriculum, ensuring that social and emotional learning is a fundamental part of every child’s wellbeing.
SArC recognises that the absence of creative learning in low income schools is a systemic problem, and requires a multifaceted intervention. Our solution adopts a three pronged approach: research & development, training, and advocacy. Art Labs, is our R&D program, pilots SArC’s originally designed, age-appropriate curriculum in a model school. Since 2017, the program has engaged 600 students to test content, observe teaching practices, and generate evidence on the impact of arts and SEL in the Indian context. Art for Educator is our teacher-training program that adopts a decentralized approach to deliver our arts + SEL curriculum at scale. Instead of running parallel programs, this program leverages the existing system by partnering with state governments and other non-profits to train educators already enrolled in their schools. We have created 120 partnerships and trained 6,388 educators to become visual art facilitators across 17 schools in India. Teachers receive real-time support through our WhatsApp-based chatbot. Art-a-Day, is our advocacy initiative, through which we conduct art workshops and community initiatives to raise awareness among parents, educators, and institutions and drive narrative change about the value of arts education in India. By engaging 4,047 participants, the program has led SArC to establish 37 new partnerships. Through its cost-effective and scalable model, SArC builds the social and cultural infrastructure needed to advance and sustain art.
Our scaling strategy is anchored in the Art for Educator teacher-training program, which has reached more than 193,125 students across 17 Indian states over the past eight years. In 2024, we expanded through strategic state partnerships with the Governments of Maharashtra and Nagaland. In Nagaland, where over 50% of students report low social-emotional wellbeing while only 17% of schools offer life skills or art education, the Art for Educator initiative made a strong impact. After its success, with the recommendation of the state government, SArC implemented its first Art Teacher Upskilling Workshop training 282 educators across Nagaland. In the same year, we collaborated with Pratham International to digitise our curriculum and launch Creative Arts Express, a free online resource offering online art class plans for Grades 1-8. This digital expansion enabled our first international partnership with Faces Up Uganda, where we introduced the Art for Educator program to support vulnerable youth. Looking ahead to 2030, SArC aims to create safe, joyful, and expressive learning spaces for more than 5 million children across India. We will expand our scaling strategy by including new innovations in the coming year.
After eight years of Saturday Art Class, we have established an expertise delivering arts and SEL in mainstream education across India. We have learned that visual art is not only effective for developing SEL but also a powerful tool for communication and storytelling. This has opened space for innovation as we apply our expertise to new themes and challenges affecting our children. A key insight from our work is that our children’s wellbeing is increasingly shaped by the realities of climate change. Their communities often bear the brunt of environmental harm driven by the actions of more privileged groups. Many of our students in Mumbai face frequent home flooding and community conflict due to chronic water scarcity. These conditions heighten their fear and anxiety, increasing the need for SEL to help them cope. In response, we began developing an Art & Climate curriculum in 2024 and testing it through our Art Labs program. Though still in R&D, it has already opened a new direction for SArC. We are also launching an Art & Climate Fellowship to empower young people to design and lead climate-related interventions in their communities, extending our impact beyond the classroom. Our team continues to innovate by staying informed about emerging issues and global best practices, ensuring our work remains responsive to the evolving needs of the children we serve.
There are many ways to engage with our work. You can partner with us through the Art for Educator program or connect us with other organizations to run our teacher-training workshops internationally. We also offer introductory virtual workshops through Art-a-Day, offering a first-hand experience of our arts and SEL class. Additionally, our open-source online resources are freely accessible to anyone worldwide. These digital resources include In My Mind, developed during the Covid 19 pandemic for educators, parents, and students and Creative Arts Express, developed with Pratham International for students worldwide. Reach out to us at info@saturdayartclass.com to explore more collaborations.
