Kshamtalaya

Supported by: Wipro

About the organization and location of work

Kshamtalaya Foundation is a not-for-profit company founded to support children in achieving their true potential. Kshamtalaya since its inception has worked in the states of Rajasthan, Karnataka, Bihar, and the Union Territory of New Delhi,  in partnership with the respective governments. Our key mission is to build the local/regional leadership to transform the quality of learning, well-being, and school governance. Kshamtalaya’s vision is to demonstrate how schools in rural India can be used as hubs for community-led sustainable development. It is also a demonstration that high-quality, child-centric education and development can be successful in the areas that are considered the most backward. 

Partner updates

As the academic year draws to a close, it is time to reflect on the journey that our organization has taken in the past year. It has been an eventful year, marked by growth, expansion, and innovation. We started the year with a lot of hope and enthusiasm, with a clear vision to expand our reach and impact, and to provide relevant, meaningful, and compassionate education to every child.

One of the highlights of the year was the expansion of our operations to two new locations, Pindwara and Bihar. This was a major milestone for us, as it allowed us to bring our transformative programs to new communities and to work towards our goal of creating centers of excellence in education across the country. We also focused on building institutional support in all three states – Rajasthan, Bihar, and Delhi – by working on content and curriculum development, teacher training, and assessment support.

Recruitment, onboarding, and building alignment with new team members were major focus areas for us in the first quarter of the year. We learned from our experiences in Kotda and worked to build a synergy with the district administration, moving towards a more systematic approach. We also spent time building relationships with teachers and communities, conducting surveys, and realigning our goals for the year.

One of the most significant developments of the year was the implementation of our programs in a full-fledged manner. We held Learning Festivals in Delhi after the pandemic, and in Kotda, we welcomed new teachers who joined government schools, creating space for us to onboard new teachers and work towards transforming their 40 schools into centers of excellence. We also took our CELL (Cluster Excellence Learning Labs)_ program (Idiscover Fellowship) to Bihar, and initiated our first-ever cohort of Wellbeing-preneurs, who are currently supporting almost 2,000 teachers of Rajasthan with a 21-day mental and emotional well-being program named, Hausla.

The second quarter of the year saw the arrival of a new cohort of wellbeing-preneurs, with great energy and enthusiasm. It was heartening to see a group of well-being practitioners coming together to make well-being accessible to every educator. As the mid-year mark approached, we paused to reflect on our achievements and growth areas as an organization and to innovate and plan for the next phase of our journey.

As the year progressed, we organized boot camps for kshamta sathis, career awareness camps by the Diganth team, mid-year boot camps for fellows, and learning festivals for children. These events provided our team with opportunities to rejuvenate, learn, and grow, and to bring back refreshed energies to lead their goals ahead.

We collaborated with RSCERT in designing online teachers’ training to make it more engaging and interactive and also contributed to designing an Induction training module for new teachers. In this way, we got an opportunity to spread the learning across Rajasthan.

The year has been marked by a sense of connection, commitment, and hope. We have grown as an organization, expanded our reach, and made significant progress toward our goal of creating centers of excellence in education across the country. We have worked tirelessly to provide relevant, meaningful, and compassionate education to every child, and to support teachers and communities in their journey toward growth and transformation.

As we look back on the year, we are grateful for the support of our team members, partners, and stakeholders. We are proud of the progress we have made and the impact we have created, and we are excited to continue on our journey toward creating a brighter, more equitable future for all. We know that the road ahead will be challenging, but we are confident that with the support of our community, we will continue to make a difference in the lives of children and communities across the country.

Challenges and Learning

Once the school reopened to its full potential in a new academic year, the departmental priorities for Initiating Mid Day Meal, Janadhar, increasing enrollment, and conducting surveys took away a huge time of teachers into administrative work and affected their academic time with students. This could have been distributed among different teachers in a school but in the geographies where we work, there is a lack of teachers so most of the work falls upon one or two teachers in primary schools. 

Apart from the administrative responsibilities, consistent training had been planned by the department to lead innovations such as Rajasthan Ke Shiksha Me Badhte Kadam (RKSMBK), Gramin Olympics, Palanhar Yojna, and sessions based on Teacher need analysis through in-person and online mediums. It affected teachers’ motivation to attend workshops and impacted their attendance in teacher workshops

Fellows worked closely with teachers to distribute the work and supported them in taking the RKSMBK bridge course by working on the concept of FLN with children. They also supported teachers in mobilizing the community, conducting surveys, and organizing PTMs in school. 

We further learned that teacher support programs and workshops need to be done in a decentralized manner working in synergy with the block’s calendar of cluster workshops to ensure more attendance. 

Most of our fellows come from the same communities and education system where there were very limited opportunities for them to cultivate leadership skills. Not having enough knowledge and theoretical understanding affects their confidence to work with teachers directly in supporting their pedagogy and becomes a barrier for some fellows to overcome that hierarchy. Consistent capacity building of fellows in supporting their domain-related knowledge and skills. Also, tweaking our teacher support program by adding time for relationship building, shadowing and observing teachers, and sharing the relationship with them. 

During this financial year, we also discovered that SMC members’ Literacy level and functional understanding of school-related responsibilities is very marginal because of the limited opportunities to cultivate that awareness which further affects their motivation to participate in the meetings and add their input.  To strengthen their confidence and understanding of the functioning of the school, we would need to increase the intensity of inputs related to building relationships, working on their comprehension, orienting them gradually with the school’s processes, bringing them to school and then gradually moving to the responsibility of SMC and development of SDP.

Future plan of action

Keeping our three-pronged approaches to strengthen the education ecosystem of a child, we have been able to draft a 3 years Operational Plan.