Fundamental Rights of Education

1. Purpose of the Report The purpose of this report is to describe and then provide an evaluation of each stage of the programme in order to give recommendations for follow up activities and further professional development for Master Trainers and teachers. 2. Introduction 2. 1. Three organisations, The British Council (BC), UNICEF and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) Tamil Nadu collaborated on an ambitious programme to develop the skills of English language teachers in government primary schools. The project aimed to improve the English language teaching methodology of over 40,000 Class 5 teachers across the state. To this end, 600 Block Resource Teacher Educators (BRTEs), 60 District Institution of Education and Training (DIET) Teacher Trainers and 240 standard V teachers were to be trained and they would in turn cascade training to the standard V teachers at district and block levels. 2. 2. Following a needs analysis carried out in November 2008 by two British Council Senior Training Consultants (STCs) a proposal was made to SSA Tamil Nadu. The proposal detailed the results of the needs analysis and took into account discussions made between the three partner organisations regarding the needs of the primary school teachers working across the state. . 3. The British Council was invited by Tamil Nadu SSA to provide the following outputs: †¢ diagnostic assessment of up to 450 teachers with the purpose of determining the level of spoken English amongst teachers in primary schools in Tamil Nadu. †¢ needs assessment for development of training materials, a bench mark in order to measure p rogress and used as a selection tool for entry onto the programme. †¢ design and deliver 2 x 30 hour courses for 900 Master Trainers, which would be cascaded to 40,000 standard V primary English teachers in Tamil Nadu. organise monitoring and evaluation of the Master Trainer programme and subsequent cascade programmes. 2. 4. The cascade training model is generally applied in large scale training programmes where sheer numbers and geographical reach prohibit direct training. In India, where a single state may have as many as 150,000 teachers, it enables large numbers of teachers to be trained. We recognize that the model has limitations, critics have pointed out that as training flows through the layers a certain amount of quality andeducation is must