Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the exceptional case of Delhi’s recent reforms in the context of the overall lacklustre performance of India's government school system. More specifically, it investigates how teacher development, primarily in the format of in-service teacher training, was emphasised as an important component of a comprehensive solution to the deficits of education delivery.

Paper long abstract:

Despite remarkable achievements on universalising basic education, India’s progress on raising student outcomes has been much slower and uneven. Whereas government schools in many states are reported to be struggling with lacklustre performance, Delhi managed to turn around its government schools into performing consistently better than their counterparts in the private sector through a series of reforms since 2015. A distinctive feature and underlying thread of these reforms is a commitment to support teachers. This paper seeks to analyse the exceptional case of Delhi’s recent reforms through a design perspective.

Drawing primarily on existing secondary sources and supplemented by expert interviews, the paper investigates how teacher development, primarily in the format of in-service teacher training, was emphasised as an important component of a comprehensive solution to the deficits of education delivery in the government sector. It shows that in designing and implementing this solution, not only has the state government designated a substantial amount of financial resource, but it also sought to invigorate school-level learning communities through mentoring programmes and harness the contributions from the non-governmental sector. Such efforts were welcomed by the teachers who were meant to be supported, although some of the training delivery was still commented as dissonant with teachers’ needs and preferences and inconclusive towards enhancing their professional capacity.

Delhi’s pioneering experience of supporting teachers to achieve educational improvement can generate valuable lessons for other states attempting to pursue the same while moving beyond the traditional accountability-tightening approach. However, direct “copy and paste” is likely to falter without paying attention to the policy capacity that the Delhi government has possessed and accumulated along the reform journey.

The paper is proposed to be organised as follows. The opening section reviews India’s overall track record in the basic education sector over the past few decades, which serves to highlight Delhi as an exceptional case and introduce how this case will be analysed in this paper. The next section gives an overview of Delhi’s educational reforms since the incumbent AAP government was in power, with a specific focus on how supporting teachers was conceived as a vital means of getting schools to work better. Section III offers an in-depth analysis of the promise and pitfalls of the design and delivery of its teacher-supporting reforms, to be followed by a critical discussion of how Delhi’s lessons can be learned by other states. Section V concludes.