Unique secondary school from Class 8-10: Small step towards big dreams

During the summer of 2013, some corporate managers and leaders working with Thermax, Akanksha and Teach for India in Pune were put to an unusual test by a group of 13-year-old students. They were asked one question: "What would your life look like if you studied only up to the 7th grade?" 

The most frequent response to the question was silence, followed by, "It's impossible for me to imagine such a life."

This response didn't surprise take any of the students. Rather, it affirmed the harsh reality of their life. Along with their families and friends, this group of students had visited every school possible in the past year within the Yerwada area looking for admission. And all of them went to bed at night wondering what their lives would be like if they had to drop out of school after 7th grade.

When I first met these students and their families, it was deja vu. While working as a Teach for India fellow in a Mumbai municipal school, I was faced with a similar situation where the parents approached me for help in finding schools that would take their children and allow them to study all the way up to the 10th grade. 

A little research threw up a glaring gap: most government run schools in cities like Mumbai and Pune went only up to 7th grade, which meant students either had to shift to private schools or change the medium of learning (from English to Urdu or Marathi) too late in life. As most private schools charged a fee mostly beyond the reach of low-income families, it led to students dropping out after the 7th grade due to completely avoidable reasons. 

That was the first time that the idea of starting a secondary school took shape in my mind. Over the next few months, the idea only became firmer. I remember meeting a 13-year-old girl who had been studying in Grade 5 for three consecutive years, not because she was failing but because she loved going to school very much and there was no school beyond Grade 5 in her village.

And so, two years later, when Teach for India's Pune team explored the possibility of starting a secondary school, I grabbed the opportunity with both hands. 

The Acharya Vinoba Bhave Secondary School was started in May 2013 with the aim to offer quality secondary education to students studying in Pune Municipal Corporation schools who didn't have access to education beyond 7th grade. The school is run and managed by the Akanksha Foundation in partnership with PMC, and was started with crucial support from Teach for India and the Poonawalla Foundation. 

Currently, the school serves 113 students mostly from the Yerwada, Bibwewadi and Kondhwa areas. Being a standalone secondary school - only grades 8 to 10 - it is a completely new experiment for Akanksha (which mostly runs schools starting from kindergarten) and PMC, and therefore brings with itself completely new challenges. 

Some of the guiding questions for the team were: How do we support students who have a huge academic gap? How do we move away from rote memorisation and towards skill development that is applicable in real life? How do we balance the socio-emotional development along with academic needs? And most importantly, how do we create a culture that inspires students to live by values?

These questions have guided the team at every stage of the design - investing the parents in the mission through an orientation program, choosing a long eight-hour-day of instruction         (as opposed to five-six hours in most other schools), spending break-time with students building personal relationships, doing remedial classes before and after school and even on holidays, having a daily reading slot, choosing to focus on theme-based units in languages despite the pressure to finish the textbooks, giving career awareness and exposure to students, offering career guidance and counselling support through a structured advisory program - where each teacher acts a parent for a group of students, guiding them through day to day challenges. 

While most of the students were aware of the importance of grade 10 exams, they didn't know how to take ownership of their own learning. However, all the choices above have ultimately led the students to be deeply invested in their own learning in a very short span of time. Students have started taking ownership of their actions - both inside and outside school. They come to school earlier and stay longer. Some students travel an hour and a half in the morning to get to school on time. They understand the importance of Grade 10 exams as one of the most important milestones in their lives. They solve problems independently; they encourage each other and cheer when their schoolmates do well. This is extremely crucial, given teenage years are fundamental to formation of identity and positive peer support influences teenagers more than parent's or teacher's support. 

While, the team has certainly seen good tangible growth in basic skills across languages, there's still a huge gap with what students from top private schools have mastered at the age of 16 years in comparison to students in our school. And this puts them at a disadvantage in the competitive college admission process. Also, some of the students might be forced into earning, leading them to drop out after grade 10 due to family circumstances. 

So our current challenge is two-fold: to create an extremely strong and tight academic program across subjects that can expedite the acquisition of basic skills, and an alumni support plan that will allow us to keep a laser like focus on our student's performance, family circumstances etc ensuring they cross the hurdles that a college life brings, with relative ease. 

If one looks at the secondary education landscape in our country, it is a white-space as there has been very little innovation or experimentation. The government's focus over the past two decades was primarily on increasing enrolment in primary school under the flagship Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan scheme. However, recently the government has included the Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyaan (RMSA) as one of its priorities, which will shift the focus a lot more towards the secondary education system.

So I believe there's a huge scope of experimentation through trial and error that will allow us to arrive at a much more evolved and progressive model of secondary schools that focuses on overall development of children between 13-16 years rather than just the preparation of board exam and can be replicated across the country. 

Saurabh Taneja is School Leader at Acharya Vinoba Bhave School, Pune. The Akanksha Foundation runs 15 municipal schools in Mumbai and Pune in partnership with the BMC and the PMC respectively. Follow them on twitter at @Akanksha_India.