Masoom

About the organization

Vision: Empower, strengthen, and transform night schools to ensure the youth can learn and earn better 

Mission: Enable night school students to achieve their full potential through educational and policy support leading to better skills and job opportunities 

Theory of change: If we provide resources and build the capacity of night schools then we build a strong academic foundation, leading to widening the scope of career opportunities for the students. 

Location and area of work

Currently, we are working in the states of Maharashtra (Mumbai, Pune & other districts), Gujarat (Ahmedabad, Bhavnagar districts) & Uttarakhand (Dehradun). With the support of Wipro Care, we are implementing a night school transformation program in two night schools and an evening learning program in one center at Aarey Pada. An ERG team will be developed through the support of Wipro to develop pedagogy and best teaching-learning practices of ELCs and night schools. The project interventions are located at Prerna Night School, Govandi & Nanaware Night School, Wadala – Mumbai. The center for the evening learning program operates in Unit no 22 ELC Aarey pada, Mumbai.

Challenges

• We are getting enrolment but facing difficulty in getting them to attend classes regularly. There is a continuous struggle with their job timings and other priorities. 
• As the students admitted to the centers/schools have a long education gap, they have forgotten the basic concepts of mathematics and science. It takes time to explain the concepts. 
• Activities got delayed due to the school’s activities and holiday schedule. 
• Apart from the textbooks, there is no guidance manual available for teachers to guide them on how to achieve minimum passing marks. 
• Since Aarey Pada is a forest tribal belt, we don’t have a separate place for running ELCs like school buildings. We need to run ELC in community hall only and that hall is also used for community events. Events like Ganapati Utsav, Jayantis, etc., are celebrated in the hall, so children must be given a break on those days. This hurts the time allotted for learning.  

Learning

• Blended Model is used in the school and online as well as offline lectures provided to students. Also, offline lectures create more impact on students. But the online lectures are useful for working students. 
• Along with the academic syllabus, non-academic activities are conducted for students. Child rights awareness sessions and life skill sessions are conducted with students to improve their personality development.
• Extra attention is given to SSC-appearing students by providing extra lectures on holidays and Sundays. 
• Extra guidance is given to SSC students via moderator lectures. 
• Meetings with the stakeholders improve the impact of the night school transformation activities as all the stakeholders involved conduct the activity. 
• Extra attention is given to SSC-appearing students by providing extra guiding lectures on holidays and Sundays. 
• Regarding ELC, it has been observed that the proportion of women and girls in the center is significant. 
• The girl-to-boy ratio for enrolment is 70:30. It is mainly because ELC runs in a community itself which is more accessible and safer for them. 
• It was also found last year that the alumni helped more with the enrolment drive. 
• More than 30 enrolments were done by alumni only.

Plan of action

We plan to improve SSC percentage by implementing SSC result improvement plan. We will also improve the teaching in the school by providing training sessions to teachers and headmasters. 

In 2023-24, we aim to address the issue of out-of-school adolescents on a bigger platform. So, we are planning to do a national conference. This is going to be the third conference of organizations working in the space of education of out-of-school adolescents and adults. We are trying to collaborate with organizations to implement the evening learning center program across other states. We also plan to work on an advocacy group to make some visible impact at the policy level, especially considering the New Education policy. At the organization level, we are happy to have got special people recruited to work on pedagogy and curriculum for night school and evening learning centers. 

We aim to elicit recommendations on how the quality of the teaching-learning process in the Evening Learning Centers and Night Schools can be improved. We will be running pilots in the Wipro-supported schools and ELC to test the recommendations so that we can replicate them in other schools & evening learning centers in the year 23-24. Operationally we are working on strengthening the processes as far as teaching learning is concerned. 

We want to formally assess the teachers in ELC and give incentives to teachers and center heads to make teachers more professional. In this year we also plan to monitor the pedagogy aspect of ELC & NSTP. We plan to come up with monitoring tools to check the quality and efficacy of the existing pedagogies. 

We will be spending 10 -15 full days on capacity building of ground staff and some of the master trainers identified in the organization to lead the modules like we have leadership module and financial literacy module. These modules will be implemented across all the ELC and Night Schools. Overall, we plan to strengthen the capacity of our master trainers and staff to justice the program.

We are interested in the workshops that will mentor our master trainers to become better communicators. We are also interested in the workshops that will improve the writing skills of staff. We would also like to get support for monitoring tools that will monitor the pedagogy and training of our field staff to monitor the same. This kind of training and capacity-building workshop will enhance the overall capacity of in-house staff who are ready to take the program to the end level.