Samait Shala Education Foundation

Supported by: Wipro

About Samait Shala

Samait Shala Education Foundation is working towards implementing two core government policies: NCERT’s Recommendation on Inclusive Education Policy (Page 71), and Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan’s Recommendation (Page 60). Under this, the SSA mandates support given to children with varied learning needs. We are working on one particular disability called Specific Learning Disability.

Vision: To create an inclusive learning environment for every child

Mission: Enabling instructional leadership in teachers, school leaders, and resource teachers to take data-based decisions to create an inclusive environment in their school.

Principles: 1) Inclusion in mainstream education; 2) Implementation at the core; 3) Build data for decision; 4) Design scalable approaches.

Inclusion for Samait Shala means: Children learn with their age-level peers; School stakeholders (administrative leaders, instructional leaders, teachers) maintain sensitivity towards children with disabilities and diverse learning needs; and, making learning in schools accessible to all children.

Short-term Theory of Change: In the short term, we enable instructional capacity in schools with our two key stakeholders, school leaders and teachers. The instructional capacity is based on the pedagogical practices relevant to cater to diverse learner needs, based on inclusive teaching practices.

Long-term Theory of Change: In the long term, we learn with the school, other parameters in which they would like to see inclusion as their priority. We help them partner with similar institutions to bring inclusion in their own way.

Our approach is to enable schools in building: a) instructional capacity through inclusive teaching learning practices; b) resource capacity through accessible teaching learning materials for diverse learners; c) partnership abilities to collaborate with relevant special education partners in order to bring required support for teachers and students in schools.

Location

Ahmedabad District

Approach

Before COVID, Samait Shala’s Program theory was focused on the classroom directly with the help of schoolteachers. During COVID, we captured the opportunity to revisit the program’s growth in the past three years, identifying its gaps and strengths. With that, we modified the program to include the school leader as a stakeholder in the program design. We realized that through teacher intervention, we are able to intervene in the classroom. However, there are aspects of the systems in schools, for example, teacher preparation time, teacher reflection time, teacher mentoring, observations which are critical and are left behind.

In 2020-21, we could hand hold and stay strong with our private school stakeholders. Both the schools put together have 4 School Leadership members, 65+ teachers, and 900 students. We managed to train all 65+ teachers from both the schools on digital capacity building. We created 750+ digital Google Forms worksheets for students of Grade 1-8 for English and Math.

Ummeed Child Development Center from Mumbai has shown strong interest in developing Samait Shala’s team capacity on inclusion. We were able to continue our social media efforts to spread awareness while sharing resources on our new YouTube Channel (with 100+ videos) and extending our professional network by starting a LinkedIn page. We officially completed 3 years on paper in September 2020. With the help and effort of our Auditing Partner, Ms. Chhajed & Co., we have 3 years of auditing reports and ITR complete, along with 12AA and 80G certification secured in December 2020.

Plan for the Next 1-3 Years:

1. Working closely with the government of Gujarat on promoting and enabling inclusion in classrooms
2. Building more partnerships with like-minded organizations for knowledge and expansion
3. Creating at least 10 stories on inclusion across the private and government classrooms
4. Building internal team capacity to drive inclusion at all levels within the organization
5. Focusing on core team-building activities
6. Leveraging technological platforms to mobilize knowledge
7. Securing 2 sustainable ongoing sources of finance