It is common knowledge that Indian schools, especially those in the government system, have failed to deliver quality education.
Ten years of ASER reports, National Achievement Surveys by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and data points from India's rankings in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have made it clear that our education system is in an abysmal state.
Teacher absenteeism, lack of motivation, and poor skill-sets are often cited as reasons for poor quality educational outcomes. While this is partly true, in our experience from working deep inside education systems, the causes go far beyond. One key factor is management capacity in the education department or the lack thereof – both in terms of people and systems.
Systems missing
Imagine an organization with over 1.5 lakh employees, spread over 20,000 locations, serving nearly 30-40 lakh customers. These numbers would rival large corporates anywhere in the world. Imagine what this organisation's management structure and HR systems should look like. And the kind of sophisticated communication system it should have to ensure information is disseminated effectively and there is a feedback mechanism in place, aside from an efficient management information system.
This is the size of a typical medium-sized State school system in India – a State of the size of Punjab, Haryana, or Odisha perhaps. However, both management structures, as well systems and processes, are practically non-existent.
The Block Education Officer (BEO) — to whom a school principal reports and who is supposed to guide and monitor the school and its principal — typically manages more than 70 schools.
Vacant posts
This implies that even if the BEO visited one school a day – she could only visit every school in her jurisdiction a maximum of thrice a year. Typically, BEOs spend only 30 per cent of their time in the field – thus translating into one visit a year. It would take a District Education Officer nearly two years to visit every school in her jurisdiction at the rate of one school per day.
About 20-40 per cent of these posts are found to be vacant at any point of time in any State – making the span of control even broader. The vacancies are often because of poor promotion planning and administrative/political delays in appointing people to these roles.
While policy envisages that cluster officers and other resource persons will help lighten the DEO’s load, this doesn’t always work as these personnel are moving across departments and can rarely fill all the gaps.
Slow communication
Linked to this is the second issue of communication channels. If the Directorate wants to communicate a new initiative to all schools, two possible routes are to send a note through registered post to all school principals and hope they receive it. Or, they let the District Education Officers or BEOs know and hope they find a way to communicate the message to all schools.
Similarly, the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) can either undertake communication directly, or through the District Institute of Education and Training (DIET). None of these are efficient or effective channels – and often create a significant hurdle in implementation of potentially impactful programmes. In terms of a feedback loop, to check whether something has been implemented and is having the desired impact, almost no mechanisms exist. One relies on hope and anecdotal data from the field.
The third large issue is the lack of HR systems and processes. Managing a work-force of over a lakh employees; their recruitment, promotions, transfers, salaries, and even travel and dearness allowances, is no easy task. Doing it within government systems, where everything is procedure-bound and requires multiple levels of clearances, complicates it further.
HR issues
Managing such an employee base without modern HR processes, HR professionals and IT systems is mind-boggling. Hence the key managing role in in any education system is just the management of people. A time-and-motion study conducted in one State showed that at all leadership levels – State, district or block – people spend nearly 60-70 per cent of their time on people management – clearing files, listening to grievances and, most worryingly, clearing court cases of teachers who moved the legal system against their department to get their due.
It is not uncommon to see long lines of people in front of every office in the Education Directorate just waiting for the Officer to appear, to present their case. It is also not uncommon to find that the IAS officers managing the department spend at least two days a week in court sorting out HR issues.
The final issue is the lack of a student database. So while the national standard system of DISE captures basic data like total number of students by school and broad classification by class, gender, age, etc. – there is no student level tracking in the system. It is impossible to get a student level history of a child's education graph – schools studied in, number of times schools were changed, attendance record, education record, etc. This makes it nearly impossible to study student trends or enable student specific action.
We need to think through content, pedagogy, teacher training and motivation to run an effective education system. In organisations comparable in size to the largest companies in the world and often to populations of very small countries – we cannot put off the agenda of strengthening the management systems. Without strong management systems and processes – the in-schools initiatives have very little chance of successful implementation and impact.
Seema Bansal is the Director and Head of Education Practice, and Arindam Bhattacharya is the Senior Partner & Managing Director and the Head of Bruce Henderson Institute in Asia. Both authors are from The Boston Consulting Group.