Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, has expressed his support for ARK's work developing a quality assurance programme for schools.
In a document outlining his vision for 2018, he stated that he considers it a priority for the education department. He has also called the programme 'a special and excellent step for the enhancement of education' on Facebook.
This announcement confirms the state's commitment to rolling out our quality assurance framework to schools across Madhya Pradesh. The state is one of the largest in central India, educating 10,000,000 pupils in over 120,000 schools.
The programme is part of our work to help improve the quality of education delivered in government schools. Our quality assurance framework focuses on governance and leadership structure, the monitoring of teaching and learning, student behaviour and school culture, and student outcomes.
It enables schools to improve the quality of the education they provide through taking ownership of improvements and evaluating progress.
Under the programme, schools are visited by an inspection team, which implement the quality assurance framework and evaluate outcomes. The inspectors then work with school leaders to help them assess priority areas for development, and then to create a school self-improvement plan.
Through this work, we aim to empower schools and support them in taking the necessary actions to improve the management of all elements of their schools - ultimately resulting in better quality education.
Baroness Sally Morgan, the Chair of Ofsted and an adviser to ARK, said, "I welcome the support shown for this initiative. It is incredibly important to have independent inspection and oversight in order to drive up school standards."
We have already piloted the framework in 100 schools, in collaboration with our partners DFID, CFBT and M-CRIL. We will now be working with the government in Madhya Pradesh to train school inspection teams and build their capacity to implement the framework independently. This will enable the framework to be rolled out to 2,000 schools over the next year, and scaled up further in future.
Based on the success of this project to date, ARK is now planning to expand our work to partner with other state governments in India to develop and implement similar frameworks. We are also looking at the potential for the programme to have a global reach, using the knowledge and expertise we have gained to support school regulators across the world.
Watch a video demonstration of the proposed process for quality assessments in Madhya Pradesh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIZsv9yKx2M