Public-Private Partnerships planned by BMC / MCGM for municipal schools-
BMC is visualising 3 types of public-private partnerships for its schools:
– a school adoption program
– a school partnership program
– a school support program
These have been outlined at www.karmayog.org/educationfocusgroup/educationfocusgroup_3755.htm
Do send in your suggestions immediately regarding these.
Regards,
Vinay
www.karmayog.org
Responses-
1.
From: denny john
I along with Bhaktivendanta Hospital, Mira Road (where I am Consultant-Community Health) has currently submitted a project proposal for coverage of 11920 children in municipal schools in Borivili, Dahisar and Mira-Bhayander to a funding agency for funding. The emphasis of the project is on health of school children through medical check-ups, referral to medical facilities of sick children & their follow-up, nutritional counseling to parents and teachers of the school children. We are awaiting for approval of the funding agency for approval. I have seen the models of Naandi Foundation in Hyderabad which is also running a school health programme.
I would like to speak to me and Bhakitvendanta Hospital members to see if we could provide some support in the school health programme.
One question, Bhaktivendanta Hospital is supporting the ISKCON Food foundation which is currently providing mid-day meal programmes for over 35000 children in Mumbai (including Mira-Bhayander), We could propose for a school health programme for these schools. But , we are not in a position to do the educational monitoring of these schools. Could we tie-up with another NGO who could be providing the educational aspect of the project?
Denny John , MBA(Hosp Mgmt)
Faculty
Institute of Public Health
C/o Share Your Care
C-51, Saptarishi
Sector 2, Srishti Complex
Mira Road (East), Thane – 401107
Tel: 022-28458485
2.
Name : Raj N J
Organisation (if any) : Ruia College
Telephone : 9867987031
Subject : Concern
& nbsp;Message : Everything planned by BMC till now is OK,
but the main thing seems to be affecting the number of dropouts is the medium of English
so why can’t we have English medium Schools with one subject as the mother tongue?
this would improve lot of the situation in BMC Schools.
3.
Name : Shailendra
Organisation (if any) : Shroff
Telephone : (922) 429-7063
Subject : Primary School Education
Message : Please keep me informed of the developments taking place.
4.
From: “Thomas Kunnunkal” <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/karmayog/post?postID=OsGUIwDwpREOt_YtO82VcVrxrEMj6l0aF03qJ5-qpkz6VV3ZXNP04luhpLtDNVGy2t1E1wN8KAzcHXciNgjhKQ>
Greetings. I am answering briefly.
Partnerships are fine, but they must be true partnerships
So, a) the Government continues to be the primary partners and bears
responsibility for the education and its quality
- b) Associating private partners should nto result in asking them to share in
any large measure in providing the finance. Their role is to provide their
expertise and commitment to make things happen, which are not happening now.
Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is a case in point. A lot of hype and little of
education, in a number of cases. It will be an immense tragedy if, at 2015
an external agency finds out that a third of our population is still
uneducated. Mere writing of a couple of letters is neither literacy much
less
education. Re-define literacy as functional education. And public and social
audit int he sector of education, involving those who are the real
beneficiaries, the parents and the local community.
Tom Kunnunkal
5.
From: Bill Finger
Greetings Vinay,
Thanks for your email. Family Health International provides staff to the Interagency Youth Working Group, but we do not have the staff time to field specific questions in any detail. I glanced at your web link but didn’t totally understand the question. We focus on reproductive health and HIV prevention.
If that is your interest, a tool that provides excellent guidance for school systems on this topic is a set of Standards for Curriculum-Based Reproductive Health and HIV Education Programs (see link below), based on a recent global review of evaluated programs. A link to that research paper is also shown below.
http://www.fhi.org/en/Youth/YouthNet/Publications/otherpubs.htm (Standards: see first item under “Training Materials”)
http://www.fhi.org/en/Youth/YouthNet/Publications/YouthResearchWorkingPapers.htm (See Research Working Paper No. 2)
Bill Finger
FHI/Youth Information and Communications
P.O. Box 13950
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
919-544-7040 ext. 468
6.
From: PK Biswas
The draft is excellent. Still there are two suggestions. The first relates to day-to-day monitoring of the implementation. This is necessitated based on past experience when many good intentions could not be implemented in practice due to lack of monitoring and follow-up action. Further, based on such monitoring and concurrent evaluation of the progress there is need to empower the schools to take decisions within their own fund (including Corporation / State Government aid / grant) and act quickly.
The second suggestion relates to mentoring and counseling. We have excellent teachers to train the students to learn knowledge and skill. Practically there are none who can help students to transform thenselves and counsel students. Unless this vacuum is addressed to, I am afraid that attrition rate will not drop nor will the students be able to cope with the realities of the life. This is where NGOs can even think of roping in volunteers from any sphere of life who will help students. Even Karmayog can think of listing names of such volunteers who can spend at least one to two hours per week / fortnight and spend the time with the students.
Prabir K. Biswas
7.
Name : Rima Bose
Organisation (if any) : Seva Sadan Society
Telephone : 9820283985
Subject : Information/Clarification
Message : We have a BMC run Primary & Secondary school at SevaSadan. Need to know how I can get help from this Programme to improve the life of the 1500 girls of our school. How will I be able to make our existence known to the likely participants? We urgently need help from the Authorities/BMC/Edu Dept. to help us run the schools better.
8.
From: Kirk Wilson
Thank you for referring me to Public-Private Partnerships Planned by BMC / MCGM for Municipal Schools at https://www.karmayog.org/educationfocusgroup/educationfocusgroup_3755.htm.
I read about the public-private partnership plans and there is clearly a need for institutional and organizational adoptions and partnerships to upgrade the capabilities of schools to deliver their services and a system of agreements or contracts that keeps everyone informed of progress or lack of progress toward agreed upon organizational goals for the schools.
Our own interest as developers of the World School Network (an initiative of the World Partner Network) is to enable not so much institutional as individual student “adoptions and partnerships” although these terms are easily misunderstood in the context of individual students. Our approach is to provide our service that enables schools, administrators, teachers, parents, students and others to organize and track services provided to individual students via either (1) a sponsorship where an individual or organization provides funds to deliver these services, or (2) the school uses its own funds to purchase a subscription that enables the delivery of these services. Of course, we expect schools in India to require sponsorships to participate in providing and tracking services to individual students. We are referring to services in virtually any school context, e.g., public schools, private schools, “platform schools”, schools for disabled or disadvantaged students of any type.
Our approach enables specifying commitment to specific Tasks that all stakeholders will aim to complete. We would like Sponsors to agree to support a specific group of individual students and our service would report to the Sponsor on exactly what the student has achieved and exactly what others have done to enable the student to achieve. Or if a school purchases a subscription, then the school and its stakeholders would be able to see exactly what Tasks have been completed or not completed. This is a radically different approach — it is results-based because our technology enables it. Of course, our expectation is that the vast majority of students and schools in India will depend upon a sponsor to enable their use of this technology, i.e., with the exception of some private schools, all students in India will be sponsored in their and their teachers assignment of Tasks and tracking of their completion.
With regard to our current work, the World School Network is being implemented in English, Hindi and Urdu for use in schools throughout India and Pakistan. We intend to implement other languages later this year or as soon as the current version has been field-tested.
We would like to discuss with you how the public-private partnerships can be implemented so that sponsors see the direct results of their participation on improved achievement and service delivery to individual students in participating schools. What are your thoughts?
Kirk Wilson, CEO
World Partners Network
9.
From: Ken Ziegler
Are you interested in understanding our municipal education program which will see the settlement of a number of foreign students in high schools located throughout Saskatchewan, and upon graduation these students will then go on for further training either at the U of S, or Technical Schools.
Ken Ziegler B.A., LL.B.
GPC Capital Corporation
673 University Drive
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
S7N 0J1
http://www.greatplainsofcanada.com/
10.
From: “shadi katyalsearch”
My views might not gel with the group because I am
living abroad and School sytems here are very local
basis.
I live in US where all the schools are controlled by
the County or as you call Tehsil. The household pays
school taxes for education for their children. Those
who live in rented houses or flats, the landlor pays
such taxes. The Schools are under the State Govt as
state proivides buildings, teachers and books etc. I
am sure you all are familiar with the system. Whereas
in India present system as described into your link
for Bombay sound good. The question I have is of
accountability of teachers teaching qualifications and
presence.
One has to take plus and minus of all the systems.
would education facilities like student teacher ratio
will be less and would the salaries of teacher will be
attractive to bring new blood and ideas into eduction?
Would there be availability of latest equipment for
the benefit of students. What is attitude of Mumbai or
Maharashtra Eduction Department?
One also must consider that with the changes in the
climate of education of present day, which will be not
only beneficial but more progessive so that students
are prepared for college and employment.
Only thing I would like to see in Indian education is
some kind of manual training or workshops for
carpentry, car repairs etc. so that any student coming
out of Indian education should not be afraid to get
their hands dirty. There should be pride in
working with hands and moreover ethics of work must be
there before graduation. The student must have pride
of his/her knowldge and not just matriculation.
Shadi
11.
From: Desai, Virendra
We feel sorry and about poor and disability kids who could not afford for private schools. You should let them in public schools. All government should help for poor kids for free school that they will learn more better education. They will be understand more education that it will be keep to clean up for less dirty on streets, river, lake and land from science and less people family from sex education. I believe that if poor kids learn education then India can be back beautiful county someday. Many village kids have no school so Government should help them for school. If you help poor kids for school that God will bless you and India county.
Virendra
12.
From: Bhamy Shenoy
This looks very promising. This kind of experiment has been tried in other states also. If adoption has to work, then total autonomy should be given to the NGO. Otherwise such an experiment will fail. The critical element is the ability to hire and fire teachers. The biggest bane of government school is lack of accountability on the part of teachers. It is that which makes a private school to be better than the government school.
Of course this is a good beginning. As they say in maths, this is a necessary condition, but not sufficient. But without such autonomy, no amount of involvement on the part of NGOs will help the schools. I am basing this based on my direct involvement with two educational institutions in my home town. Both are private. But in one private school (it is English medium school having 600 students), we have the right to employ headmaster, teachers and staff. In another which is five year degree college with 1000 students we have no right to appoint the headmaster (the senior most teacher irrespective of his managerial ability) or teachers (we can appoint teachers who are not on government pay). As a result, we are unable to improve teaching in the college, but have been successful to some extent in the school.
Bhamy
13.
Any schools in the Colaba area that require financial or managerial support?
Name : ajit balakrishnan
Organisation (if any) : Ajit Balakrishnan Foundation
Telephone : (022)2444 9144
Subject : School Adoption Program
14.
Comments from Navnirmiti on Draft Proposal for School Adoption/ School Partnership programme for BMC schools :
The proposal has several provisions which are wrong in principle and need to be opposed strongly.
These are :
- The role of providing teachers and social workers should rest exclusively with the BMC. The NGO cannot and should not provide this function. NGOs can provide special training and facilitation to upgrade the teachers skills in conformance with the state curriculum and national curricular framework.
- The basic and ultimate responsibility for providing quality education should rest with the BMC/Government. NGOs can and should play only a facilitating role.
- The structure and powers given to the school management committee are fundamentally wrong. The school management committee should be re-designated as a School Quality Assurance Committee.(SQAC) It should include all the stakeholders including a representative of the teachers, a representative of the non academic staff, and a representative of the administration. This committee will have the function and role of monitoring the quality of school services according to well defined and agreed criteria, which must be publicly discussed, and making recommendations.
This committee should not have powers in respect of :
-
- Admissions: (All children desirous of admission should have the right of admission.)
- Appointments of teachers, social workers and other support staff. This right cannot be given to NGOs who are unaccountable. It must rest with the BMC/ Government as it is now. The SQAC can submit its recommendations which will not be binding on the BMC/Government. These recommendations will be public and not confidential.
- Charging fees or other charges: No fees should be charged to BMC school children who come from disadvantaged background for any curricular program. If fees are charged for extra-curricular activity, it should be ensured that no child is excluded for reason of not being able to pay fees.
This committee should have the powers to implement, without further interference from the administration, approved programmes for improving quality of school education in one or more subjects. The approval process should be clear and well defined.
Additional Comments :
- There should be no distinction between School Adoption Programme and School Partnership programme. No NGO should be given exclusive rights in any school. If two or more NGOs want to adopt/partner/support a school that should be permitted and encouraged. This will encourage healthy competition among the NGOs to provide better services.
- The principal objective of the program should be � To facilitate the BMC to fulfill its basic responsibility to provide a quality education to every child in conformance with the constitutional mandate and the National Curricular Framework.� The words �best interests� are vague. It should be replaced by the above well defined objective.
- The sub-objective should include � To provide nutritional supplements so as to ensure that no child in the school is deprived nutritionally�.
- The sub objectives should include � To ensure that minimum 150 clock hours per year in each of Language, Math and EVS (Parisar Abhyas, Science, History, geography) is made available for the teaching- learning process and that other functions/activities (including mid-day meals scheme) are managed accordingly�
- The point 9. should read � To achieve the national goal of universalization of education… in conformance with the norms of the National Curricular Framework.�
15.
From: Paresh Jain
Recently, we had visited a BMC run municipal schools and It was observed that few of the classrooms did not have benches/mats for students/children to sit on apart from things like non availability of good drinking water, dustbins etc. We donated few items to the school and helped them to some extent and in future we may like to help such schools in a big way. But what i believe is support from BMC is very crucial.
If i am correct, then BMC doesn’t lack funds for education of poor kids — what it lacks is team of dedicated violunteers. I would like to see Public-Private Partnerships in which Financial support is provided by BMC and a particular NGO manages the school’s needs. I mean NGOs shall work as facilitators, identify needs of the children, supervise all the activities of the school, try to sort out the problems within and recommend the desired changes to BMC. BMC then shall evalute the suggestions and provide that NGO with funds to be utilised for the school’s betterment. So in short, an NGO managing schools affairs with school authorities and BMC on their part helping financially and cross checking NGOs funds utilisation shall make a robust model to build GOOD municipal schools.
Paresh Jain
Projects Director
Young Jains of India
www.yjindia.org