MCD Co-ed Primary School Lajpat Nagar III
Developing parental engagement in low-income communities
Event Overview:
- Prize Category: Innovation
- Format: Panel discussion
- Country: India
- Languages: Streamed live in English with automated captions in Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and other languages to be confirmed later.
- Learn more about the Top Ten Shortlisted Schools in the Innovation category on the World’s Best School Prizes website.
MCD Co-ed Primary School Lajpat Nagar III, a primary government school in New Delhi, serves some of the poorest communities in the city. With monthly incomes of under $80, families didn’t see the point in sending their children to a government school, which they viewed as poor quality. They encouraged students to abandon their education to help their families. The school works closely with parents so they can see first-hand the value of quality education and dispel the stereotype that government school education is inadequate.
This was achieved through a package of interventions to boost enrolment and attainment and engage parents. The school gently encourages parents to enrol their children, and it holds visit days for parents to see how students learn. The school works closely with parents to arrange a suitable time and date, aware that parents are sacrificing a day of work and losing wages by attending these days. Interventions like this ensured that parents could take an active interest and be appropriately engaged with their children’s learning.
The school has invested in rigorous teacher training, including to support activity-based learning, and has significantly boosted attainment. In a typical government school in India, 50% of students from grade 5 cannot read a simple grade 2 text. However, in SDMC Lajpat Nagar III School, 85% of the students meet or exceed grade-level expectations. Its interventions have seen school enrolment rocket from just nine in 2015 to over 500 today.
Government schools often cater to the lowest income backgrounds and children of different backgrounds and genders tend to sit separately. SDMC Lajpat Nagar III School stood up against these trends, and they encourage students of different religions, castes and genders to sit and learn together.
Join us for a lively panel discussion and learn about the innovations implemented at the school.
Speakers
Moderator: Aprajita Mishra
An engineer by education, Aprajita has over six years of experience as an educationist, running schools in low-resource settings. She started her career by working at a leading software company, Infosys, before switching to the development sector via the Teach for India Fellowship. After completing the fellowship in Pune, she has served as the Assistant School Leader in Republic Primary School, a low-resource school in Ahmedabad impacting 500+ students.
Currently, as an Academic Coordinator at the SDMC Primary school Lajpat Nagar III, she drives the overall academic development (teacher training and development, improving student outcomes etc.) and school functioning to support 500+ students from lower-income communities.
Speaker 1: Urmila Chowdhury
Urmila is an educationist with over 30+ years of experience in education. She has developed curricula, written school textbooks, and worked extensively on teacher development in her extensive career.
As the Education Director for the public-private partnership model at the SDMC Primary school Lajpat Nagar III, Urmila leads the education and academic team, providing strategic guidance to the school. Before this, she taught for twenty years in two of India’s most prestigious schools – La Martiniere, Kolkata and The Shri Ram School, New Delhi. At The Shri Ram School, she was a teacher for 15 years and a school leader for five years.
Speaker 2: Ananya Upadhyay
Ananya is an Academic Coordinator at SDMC Primary school Lajpat Nagar III. She provides academic coaching to teachers to ensure their professional development and the implementation of effective teaching practices at school. She also drives rigorous community engagement by guiding the community officer at the school.
Ananya is a Teach for India (TFI) alumna and carries a profound experience in school leadership & management. She was also a Program Manager at TFI where she led 18 young changemakers to transform multiple low-resource schools in Chennai, India. With a Master’s in Engineering from the prestigious Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ananya served as Assistant Professor at the Kashi Institute of Technology, Varanasi.
Speaker 3: Tanya Jain
Tanya is one of the senior teachers at the SDMC Primary School Lajpat Nagar III under the public-private partnership model. She specialises in teaching early years and currently serves as an Early Years Lead, coaching teachers on Early years’ teaching practices at the school. Further, she supports new teachers in conducting classes as a Mentor Teacher and supervises the curriculum for grade 1.
Tanya holds a Bachelor’s in Elementary Education from the prestigious Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University. A believer in the power of Yoga, she drives mindfulness in her classroom through consistent Yoga practices.