Strengthening Teaching-Learning And Results for States

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The objective of the Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States (STARS) Operation for India is to improve the quality and governance of school education in selected states. The STARS Program has two results areas: 1. National component that supports efforts to improve overall monitoring and measurement activities in the Indian school education system and 2. State component with five sub-components. Results Area 1: National Component - at the national level, four goals will frame STARS support to Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). The first goal is to strengthen MHRD’s national data systems to capture robust and authentic data on retention, transition, and completion rates. Second, STARS will support MHRD in improving states’ Performance Grading Index (PGI) scores, again by incentivizing states’ governance reform agendas through State Incentive Grants (SIGs), with financial support from STARS. Third, the operation will support the strengthening of learning assessment systems. Specifically, STARS will supply multi-year financing for India’s participation in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2021, including establishing an independent National Assessment Center to manage that participation. Results Area 2: State Component has five sub-components. RA 2.1: Strengthening Early Years Education: Samagra Shiksha expands on the government’s existing early years learning program, which covers grades one and two, by providing guidelines for the introduction into government schools of two years of Early Childhood Education (ECE). States are devising different approaches to meeting this new challenge. Monitoring of states’ progress in strengthening early years education will focus on the development of teacher training modules for ECE teachers and facilitators and the percentage of ECE teachers and facilitators who receive training on those modules. RA 2.2: Improving Learning Assessment Systems - all of the selected states intend to use STARS funds to set up or strengthen state-level assessment cells that can design and manage state-level assessment surveys; build teacher capacities for competency-based assessment and continuous comprehensive evaluation; and manage state-level implementation of national assessment exercises. In each state, support will be provided in the areas where states have requested assistance. RA 2.3. Improving Teacher Performance and Classroom Practice - most selected states have already begun using State Learning Achievement Surveys (SLAS) and National Achievement Surveys (NAS) results to inform their needs assessments with respect to teacher training. RA 2.4. Strengthening School-to-Work Transition: Vocational education and school-to-work transition is still at a nascent stage in India. RA 2.5: Governance and Decentralized Management for Improved Service Delivery: Building on the India Country Partnership Framework (CPF), STARS will focus on enhancing state capability to improve service delivery. The goal will be to focus on the last mile of service delivery, and through this, to facilitate the Samagra Shiksha implementation scheme, which calls for bottom-up planning led by district-level education functionaries while maintaining schools as the centers for planning and budgeting.