It's time to accelerate India's education NGOs

Set up in November 2016, Gati is a consortium of Atma that aims to develop and disseminate best practice and address mutual challenges in the education for persons with disabilities. As of March 2017, it is a cohort of 25 members conducting the platform through bi-monthly meetings and exposure visits, that aim to address challenges focused on the needs of specifically, students with intellectual disabilities and mental or developmental disorders.

Globally, 98% of children with disabilities do not have access to the education they need.

Relative to mainstream education, the special education sector receives little attention, even while students with special needs face often greater barriers to access and learning.

Over the last three years, Atma’s Accelerator Programme has worked with 14 organisations in the special education sector, who have collectively reached over 3500 children with special needs (CWSN). The initial four such organisations that we worked with showed excellent ability to grow and sustain their reach; these successful partnerships drove Atma to expand our work to a further ten organisations in SE.

Some common features we identified across this new cohort included:

1. Controlled student to teacher ratio
2. Focus on completion of Std.X through NIOS
3. Lacking student assessments, verified against externally- validated benchmarks for students’ progress
4. Low scalability of models and low focus on systems development

Zooming out to the sector of players who take up education for PWD, we found evidence to support:

1. Common to the education sector, government regulation focuses more on resource allocation and physical infrastructure solutions, rather than provision of quality education
2. Factors exacerbating this situation within the indian scenario include a relatively young industry of practice and a focus on individual interventions rather than scalable models
3. An overall lack of information about this sector in the general population and an overall lack of regulation of services offered

Overview of activities

(i)                 Bi-monthly meetings
These are meant to be a prime point of interface between stakeholders involved with Gati.  Organised and facilitated by Atma, each Bimonthly builds on the preceding agenda on 1-2 focus areas (of 3, mentioned earlier). The meeting focuses on showcasing best practice from players in the disability space, which is followed by a discussion on its suitability to the space and to the cohort’s organisations.

Outputs:

• 3 bi-monthly meetings held over 5 months
• Identification of focus areas and planning have been completed for 2 working groups
• 3 newsletters have been published

(ii)              Exposure visits

The function of exposure visits is to allow educators to see firsthand how other educators work. Visits are organised both to sites of Consortium members and to high-income schools that operate “without” resource constraints. This will increase exposure to both local best practices and some international best practices.

Outputs:

• 2 site visits in the first 5 months (through the end of fiscal year), of which the first was a peer visit to Gati member VASS’s centre and the other was an exposure visit to advanced stage organisation SPJ Sadhana
• 1 learning blog published so far, on segregated versus inclusive curriculum frameworks; 1 more blog in pipeline on SPJ Sadhana visit

(iii)            Working groups

Working groups will be formed around key topics identified by the Consortium group. Each working group is expected to research solutions, identify locally-appropriate solutions, articulate research and recommendations in writing and/or move towards actions. Atma will aid in the writing process.

Outputs:

• .4 partnerships between Consortium members were seeded by the Gati platform