The Early Warning System (EWS), under our Anandshala program, helps teachers understand students’ needs better and build better relationships to provide personalized solutions. EWS helps identify students at risk of dropping out. Enabling teachers and parents to identify these indicators, helps build a sustainable intervention to solve these. This aids student retention in education, thus helps solve for the more significant challenge of high dropout rates and low education quality.

We organized a two-day design workshop in Lucknow on the 18th and 19th of May, bringing together teachers, headmasters, block education officers, district coordinators, Basic Shiksha Adhikari from the Devipatan region, state functionaries from Uttar Pradesh’s Samagra Shiksha Abhiyaan, and representatives of civil society organizations. Key findings from an analysis of trends on dropout indicators and a contextual needs-assessment were shared to understand ground reality and co-design EWS for 150 of the state’s govt. schools.

Mr. Deepak Kumar Singh, IAS, Principal Secretary, Govt. of Uttar Pradesh, at the workshop stated that EWS will be able to address the state’s issue of dropouts entirely, and not a single student will be out of school. He also said the state’s Chief Minister’s Office is very concerned about the status of education in Uttar Pradesh and is invested in the enrollment drive.

Mr. Ritwik Patra, Education Specialist, UNICEF, said there had been few experiments on EWS in India, but Uttar Pradesh will be the first state to design and implement EWS at an institutional level. Based on the insights from the pilot intervention in Devipatan, the initiative will be able to draw up a comprehensive plan with the final set of composite indicators to identify, track and support at-risk students to scale it up at the state level.