A Systemic Approach for Better Interventions

Students from government schools in Dommasandra, Bangalore, campaign for higher enrolment

In 2019, it is a well-known and well-documented fact that India’s education system is in trouble. Amitabh Kant, CEO of Niti Aayog, puts it best when he writes, “Approximately 29% of India’s population is below the age of 14, and, at 250 million, we have the highest number of school-going students in the world. Unfortunately, we also have a public education system that is failing the young population by denying them quality education.”

Neither the education crisis nor attempts from various sectors to address it are new to India, but the idea of systemic reform might be. Through data collected about over a hundred organisations in 2019, spanning multiple geographies of India, we found that approximately 17% of interventions directly adopted a piecemeal approach in their interventions. This fact indicates, partially, that many organisations are unaware of the systemic approach and its benefits.

This article explores the need for a systemic approach in educational reform, and details some strategies on how a practitioner might adopt this approach. As Kant writes, “To effect a large-scale transformation in education, a systemic approach, consisting of comprehensive and coordinated set of academic and administrative reforms, is needed. Academic interventions like competence-linked teaching, learning and assessments need to be accompanied by an overhaul of the existing governance structures.” But before we dive into the concept of systemic transformation, let us explore the other end of the spectrum: the piecemeal approach.

What is a piecemeal approach?

As the name suggests, a piecemeal approach is a solution based on a narrow or singular focus area. A classic example of a piecemeal approach is that of an organisation that wants to bring technology to government schools, and has thus installed projectors in all schools and provided technical training to the teachers in a district. However, further analysis reveals that since the schools only get about 2 hours of electricity, teachers find it hard to include the use of projectors in their lessons. In this case, the narrow approach of the organisation has cost them money, time, and resources. Another example — frequently seen — is an organisation that buys music or sports equipment for a school, without fully equipping teachers and students to use it effectively.

In this constantly evolving ecosystem that churns out many and frequent innovative solutions — that often end up becoming a set of parallel and unaligned initiatives — it is questionable if a school or a network of schools always has the capacity, structures, strategies and the motivation to leverage and integrate them for sustainable transformation.

This is where systemic education transformation as an approach enters: as an umbrella solution for the sustainability of all other standalone solutions.

Defining a Systemic Approach

The Glossary of Education Reform* defines the concept of systemic reform in this way:

“In education, the terms systemic reform or systemic improvement are widely and commonly used by educators, reformers, and others. While education reforms often target specific elements or components of an education system — such as what students learn or how teachers teach — the concept of systemic reform may be used in reference to (1) reforms that impact multiple levels of the education system, such as elementary, middle, and high school programs; (2) reforms that aspire to make changes throughout a defined system, such as district-wide or statewide reforms; (3) reforms that are intended to influence, in minor or significant ways, every student and staff member in school or system; or (4) reforms that may vary widely in design and purpose, but that nevertheless reflect a consistent educational philosophy or that are aimed at achieving common objectives.”

Put simply, a systemic approach takes into account the different elements and levels present in a school or system, and aims for a large-scale impact on stakeholders across levels. It is an approach that aims to reform a system as a whole.

Kant has written about states like Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Rajasthan adopting a systemic approach to education transformation, because “this approach recognises that piecemeal initiatives, mainly academic in nature, are unlikely to improve student learning in any meaningful way, unless accompanied with administrative reforms that create an enabling environment for these new practices to take root.” He goes on to write that the results have been positive: in Haryana, for example, grade-level competence is seeing an increase from 40% in 2014, to approximately 80% in 2019.

The big takeaway here is not that piecemeal approaches are ineffective: an isolated approach focusing on a single element can directly contribute in increasing enrolment and access to education — such as mid-day meals or e classrooms have, acting as attractions and motivators for the parents. The key question, however, is whether they can lead to a sustained improvement in learning outcomes of the students.

What Does a Systemic Approach Look Like?

Let’s think about the case of an educational practitioner deciding how to help a school build a library. Consider the following two scenarios:

Scenario 1: The organisation uses its funds to set up a library in a school.

Scenario 2: The organisation enables the school to identify the need for improving reading culture by itself, enables them to co-create a plan with the teachers and students to have activities for the same, collaborates with the parent community, and crowdsources funds to set up a library.

Scenario 2 might seem like the longer road, but it is also the more effective road — the school is not simply receiving a library, but actively building one. The school leader and teachers are much more likely to commit to making the library a useful and important resource because they worked to make the library a part of a system that recognises the need for it.

The example of the library emphasises that an intervention need not lose sight of its focus area or specialty in order to be systemic: in both scenarios, the ultimate goal is to create a culture of reading in the school or to improve literacy. The difference in the two approaches lies in how effectively the intervention is able to integrate into the system of the school.

This example also highlights the key functional features that go into a systemic intervention: collaboration, empowerment, capacity building strategies and the building of an adequate resource base.

The key underlying features of a systemic approach highlighted across research.

These are mutually reinforcing factors that drive systemic change. Translating these factors into action often takes form in the following ways:

1. Enable the development of a vision aligned to all the stakeholders’ needs, with a core focus on students. Keeping students at the center of plans and goals can help bring multiple stakeholders together.
2. As an organization, map capacity building strategies to the identified needs and ensure timely execution.
3. Facilitate a culture of collaboration among the different stakeholders — this collaborative culture goes on to form a sense of ownership among the stakeholders.
4. Enable the development of system leaders — leaders from within and outside the school who are interested in driving systemic improvement. The tapping of these stakeholders gives access to a wider spectrum of changemakers and enables ease in execution. One of the primary objectives of systemic education transformation is also to enable a culture of leadership which becomes the DNA of the school and the education system, instead of the concentration of leadership among few individuals which is unsustainable and non-holistic in nature.
5. Co-create a roadmap for growth and for addressing various needs; co-create strategies for the same.
6. Simultaneously, collaboratively, and inclusively develop a resource base: both material and human.

A Way Forward

The purpose of a systemic approach towards education transformation would be defeated if its ideas and approaches were not integrated into the system’s DNA. Collaboration, empowerment, building an adequate resource base and deploying suitable capacity building strategies are the guiding factors for developing a culture and driving any sustainable and holistic intervention in an education system. The key thing to remember about the systemic approach is that it should essentially become the means of education transformation, and not remain to be perceived as a utopian end.