Vidhya Vidhai Foundation

Supported by: Wipro

About Vidhya Vidhai

Vidhya Vidhai is a not-for-profit organization working towards enabling schools to deliver quality education. We collaborate with education leaders to strategically plan and execute the best systemic leadership practices in the school education system. We are working with 10 state-run government schools and 4 low-income private schools in Chennai, one corporation school in Madurai, and 416 schools in Puducherry. We are currently influencing 450 schools and 55,000 students by building the capacity of more than 650 education leaders across Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.

What do we do?

We at Vidhya Vidhai address the ‘Lack of leadership and management to deliver quality education’ in the state-run government schools and affordable private schools in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. Through our programs, we equip the leaders with school leadership knowledge, skills, and attitudes to deliver quality education. We work with a vision to ensure that ‘every school in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry has an effective school leader who ensures quality education for every child.’

Our Approach

We at Vidhya Vidhai believe that context and agency play a major role in designing any solution for a sustainable change. Hence, we invest a lot of time and energy to understand the context and the status of agency among the people by doing an intense needs assessment, which involves classroom observation, teacher interventions, school leader interactions, students assessment, and parents’ interactions. Based on insights from the needs assessment as well as the inputs and suggestions from engaging with the leadership, the implementation plan for the next two academic years will be drawn up. These often consist of conversations, capacity building sessions with school leaders, observations, debrief conversations, co-planning, and capacity building sessions for teachers, projects for students and many more. Changes sustain when capacity of the stakeholders in the existing system is built. For this, we ensure that a gradual release of responsibility is planned during the course of the program itself.

Impact of COVID-19 on the organisation and operations

In the wake of the pandemic, all the field operations including the conversation with leaders, capacity building sessions for teachers, and opportunities for parents have been translated into remote operations. Contextualised support was provided to the schools and the stakeholders while addressing their specific needs to ensure that student learning is not hindered. The situation demanded us to halt the plans that were designed prior to the school closure. The immediate step was to design solutions that support the schools in overcoming the challenges posed by COVID-19.

As schools were closed which put a halt to the school visits, the program had to be transitioned to a virtual setup. In-person meetings with school leaders and capacity building sessions for teachers were replaced by Google Meet and Zoom. The issue of device accessibility and internet connectivity proved to be the greatest challenge because of which the stakeholders found it difficult to yield results as compared to the classroom facilitation.

Two major assessments had to be halted due to the prevailing situation. This includes an end-line assessment of School Transformation at Tondiarpet schools, which would highlight the impact of 2 years of Vidhya Vidhai’s intervention. Another assessment was the baseline assessment for School Transformation Program at Elango School, which is usually the first step that gives the direction to program implementation.

The impact of COVID-19 on organisation was not any different. The team members had to operate remotely from different locations. The joining of 2 new members for the core team had to be delayed by 5 months and the orientation of the organizational structures and processes were impacted because of remote operations. In addition to this, STEP BACK – a bi-annual process of the organization, which focuses on validating the progress of the programs and capacity building for team members, could not be held. On the financial front, we had our major funder halt the funding for one of the newly on-boarded clusters. We are still looking for a funding partner for the new cluster consisting of 6 schools.