Education

India has made remarkable gains in school enrolment over the past two decades. The harder problem – ensuring that children who are in school actually learn, and that the institutions serving them are genuinely accountable – remains largely unsolved. India Institute’s Education programme works on three interconnected dimensions: how parents engage with schools and governance, how schools are managed, and what happens inside classrooms.

1. Parent Engagement and School Governance

School Management Committees are legally mandated bodies intended to give parents a meaningful voice in how their children’s schools are run. Research across India suggests that SMCs vary widely – from highly engaged bodies that hold schools to account, to nominal bodies that exist on paper. The gap between mandate and reality is poorly understood, largely because the evidence base is thin.

India Institute is conducting a large-scale study of parental engagement in one Tamil Nadu district, surveying over 2,000 parents, 200 school leaders, and 50 local counsellors. We are examining the quality, nature, and determinants of parent participation – what drives meaningful engagement, what suppresses it, and what the difference looks like in terms of school governance and student outcomes.

Report expected: June 2026. Findings will be shared with the Tamil Nadu Planning Commission and School Education Department alongside policy recommendations.

2. School Management Accountability

Public school management in India faces a well-documented accountability gap: performance data is sparse, monitoring is inconsistent, and the connection between what happens in a school and what consequences follow is weak. India Institute is developing diagnostic tools and a digital monitoring dashboard – designed for use by state education departments – to make school governance more transparent and responsive. This work draws directly on findings from the parental engagement study.

3. Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Learning Outcomes

What children learn in school depends on what they are taught and how it is taught. India Institute’s work in this area is anchored in a randomised controlled trial of a critical thinking and scientific temper curriculum for middle-school students in Tamil Nadu, asking whether structured classroom instruction can meaningfully build these capacities.

The trial was conducted with the approval of the Tamil Nadu School Education Department. The full report is expected in May 2026. A technical version is being prepared for journal submission.

We are also developing a teacher companion book, a video resource library for teachers, and a monitoring dashboard to support implementation at scale. Discussions are underway for a replication trial in Telangana, where the curriculum will be adapted into Telugu.