India hosts 31% of the world's "multidimensionally poor" children (OPHI), attending schools charging less than $12/month. However, these schools fail them, with less than 50% proficiency across four grades (NAS survey). A key factor is the inadequate skills of school principals, who can alone impact student outcomes by 30% (McKinsey), lagging behind global counterparts (GSL).
Rehnuma addresses the identified need by adopting a three-fold approach rooted in empirical findings that emphasize the pivotal role of school principals in driving educational improvements, with potential gains of up to 30% in student learning.
1. Enable: Through workshops, exposure visits & personalised coaching, we build the capacity of school principals, empowering them to think innovatively and strategically, like entrepreneurs
2. Document: We actively document best practices originating at the grassroots level, curated by principals based on unique challenges they face.
3. Scale: Building on the track record of our proven contextual solutions, we grow our impact by collaborating with state governments and other non-governmental organizations. We also plan to scale through a content platform with dedicated leadership courses for school principals.
Our vision is that every principal in India has the skill and the will to make education meaningful for children, Now!!
80+ principals have been trained directly with learnings from our 30 incubatees from impacting 75,000 students in the past 3 years. We have formed 2 strategic partnerships at the district and state levels -Mumbai and Himachal Pradesh to run interventions with a select cohort of school leaders on school improvement projects. Rehnuma was one of the 31 global initiatives published by UNESCO as a transformational innovation during COVID that could shape the future of education.
By 2025, we aim to:
1) Digitize workshops and best practices into 12 self-learning courses for principals and aspiring coaches
2) Forge partnerships with school associations and government to train more principals to become systemic leaders
3) Our alumni school leaders start collectives to make a systemic level impact
If you are an education NGO, we would love to partner with you to integrate school leadership into your program. Furthermore, we can equip your team members to become school coaches who can drive innovations in your schools. Write to us at contact@barefootedu.com.
