For years, India has focused on improving access to schools. Haryana, a state in northern India, has been successful in expanding accessibility to match the national average. In the process, however, academic quality has not been adequately addressed.
Although 99% of the 4.5 million school-eligible children are now enrolled in the state’s 15,000 public and 5,000 private schools, this access and attendance hasn’t always translated into actual learning. Students were consistently underperforming on national standardized tests, and more than half of the children in class V couldn’t read at even the class II level. The state initiated more than 40 pilot projects—run by different organizations—in an attempt to affect systemic change and improve academic outcomes. Yet all of these were too limited in scope and scale to achieve any real impact.
In 2013, BCG was asked to diagnose the problem and help Haryana officials implement a comprehensive and transformative roadmap for change. By early 2014, we had begun designing and implementing Haryana’s Quality Improvement Programme (QIP). Our team brought about radically different results because we provided:
BCG’s rollout of a structured QIP has quickly delivered significant improvements in academic quality and learning outcomes across all government schools in Haryana. Our comprehensive approach has succeeded for three key reasons:
As a result of BCG’s implementation of the QIP, the Haryana school system has already realized several large-scale achievements in a very short period of time:
The Haryana QIP has been so successful, in fact, that it is now being seen as a potential model for education transformation in other Indian states—as well as in other countries—that are struggling to achieve higher learning outcomes at scale.