The union cabinet on October 14, 2020 approved the Strengthening Teaching Learning and Results for States (STARS) project. The aim is to improve the teachers learning process. The project would be implemented as a new centrally sponsored scheme under the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education (MoE). The total project outlay is Rs 5,718 crore with 50 per cent financial support provided by the World Bank which amounts to US $ 500 million (approximately Rs.3,700 crore).
The main aim of the STARS project is to support the states in developing, implementing, evaluating, and improving interventions with direct linkages to improved education outcomes and school to work transition strategies for improved labour market outcomes. It would cover six states, namely, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Odisha. The project seeks to improve the overall monitoring and measurement of activities in the Indian school education system through the involvement and participation of the selected states.
The traditional Indian school education system focuses on provision of inputs and maintaining of outputs. Whereas, the STAR project endeavours to achieve its objective by focusing on actual outcomes; rather than concentrating on provision of inputs and maintenence of outputs. For this, it would link receipt and disbursement of funds to desired outcomes.
- The various aspects of the project are aligned with the objectives of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 of Quality Based Learning Outcomes. The STARS project would also focus on initiatives of PM e-Vidya, Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Mission, and National Curricular and Pedagogical Framework for Early Childhood Care and Education as part of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan.
Another major feature of the project is the establishment of ‘Performance, Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development’ (PARAKH), a national assessment centre. PARAKH would be an independent and autonomous institution under Department of School Education and Literacy, MoE. Its main function would be to set norms for student assessment and evaluation for all school boards across the country. At present, most of the school boards follow the norms set by their respective state governments.
PARAKH would have the leverage to collect, curate and share the experiences from the states selected for conducting this operation with the rest of the states. PARAKH can share the information through online portals, social media and other media engagement, technical workshops, state visits, and conferences.
(In addition to STARS, the Union Government has also planned to implement a similar project in five other states, including Gujrat, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Assam. This project would be funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). These states would partner with one another for sharing their experiences and best practices).
Components of STARS The project comprises two components:
(i) National level At the national level, STARS project proposes the following interventions for the benefit of all the states and the union territories:
- To strengthen MoE’s national data systems to capture robust and authentic data on retention, transition, and completion rates of students.
- To support MoE in improving states’ Performance Grading Index (PGI) scores—to be done by motivating the states by providing incentives, governance reform agenda through state incentive grants (SIG).
- To support the strengthening of learning assessment systems.
- To support MoE’s efforts in establishing PARAKH.
Besides, the STARS project also includes a contingency emergency response component (CERC).
- CERC would enable it to be more responsive to any natural, man-made and health disasters.
- It would help the government respond to situations leading to loss of learning due to school closures, infrastructure damage, inadequate facilities, etc. Under such circumstances, it can resort to the use of technology for facilitating remote learning, etc.
- It would facilitate the rapid re-categorisation of financing and the utilisation of streamlined financing request procedures.
(ii) State level At the state level, STARS project proposes the following:
- Strengthening early childhood education and foundational learning through improving learning assessment systems;
- Strengthening classroom instruction and remediation through teacher development and school leadership;
- Governance and decentralized management for improved service delivery; and
- Strengthening vocational education in schools through mainstreaming, career guidance and counselling, internships and coverage of out of school children;
Outcomes Envisaged The measurable outcomes of the STARS project include:
- Increase in students achieving minimum proficiency in grade 3 language in the selected states;
- improvement in secondary school completion rate;
- improvement in PGI scores;
- strengthened learning assessment systems;
- partnerships developed to facilitate cross-learning between states;
- improvement in the state level service delivery including strengthening planning and management capacities for decentralised management by training of block resource centres (BRC) and cluster resource centres (CRC); and
- strengthened school management by training of senior level teachers and principals for delivering improved education standards.
Concerns Many NGOs in the education sector feel that there has not been much discussion on this project. Moreover, they feel that this project is spending the money of the taxpayers while entering into partnerships with the private sector which has no concrete steps to build system capacity from within. This should have been done after an extensive consultation with the stakeholders in the six selected states.