Ampersand Group completes Online Teacher Training in Jammu & Kashmir

- Ampersand Group conducted online teacher training for nearly 100 schools in Early Childhood Care Education in Jammu & Kashmi

- Ampersand Group’s Eduspark partnered with Samagra Shiksha, Department of School Education, Government of Jammu & Kashmir to conduct the pilot project which is scalable across the state at any given time

New Delhi, 5th August: Ampersand Group’s Eduspark, an end to end school management services provider completed the second edition of the five-day online teachers training project in Jammu, today. Ampersand Group partnered with Samagra Shiksha, Department of School Education, Government of Jammu & Kashmir for conducting this program.

The five-day Professional Development Program in Early Childhood Education commenced from July 27, 2020 with a select group of 54 teachers hailing from 11 districts and 44 zones in Jammu, under the Samagra Shiksha programme. This is an overarching programme for the school education sector extending from Pre-school to Class 12 that will be highly beneficial for the teachers to enhance their skill set and usher a new era in academics and learning in the state. Earlier, in the first phase, Ampersand Group had conducted a similar programme in Kashmir which had a participation of 40 teachers from 40 schools.     

Addressing the valedictory session post the conclusion of the online teacher training programme in Jammu, Dr. Asgar Hassan Samoon, Principal Secretary to the Government School Education Department, Government of Jammu & Kashmir, said, “I congratulate Mr. Rustom Kerawalla and Ampersand Group for their efforts in conducting the second edition of the online teacher training programme in Jammu. The focus should be in pre-primary education through modern methods of learning at a time when the New Education Policy too has sought to bring pre-primary education into mainstream education. We hope this project will help teachers from Jammu benefit from the online training for helping children in the state. We will gradually take this to other parts of the state.”

Mr. Samoon added that teachers are role models and children will follow them and become like them. The idea behind this pilot  is to create a platform for training of teachers. “We should aim at training 2000 teachers every year. Fifty percent of the teachers should be recruited directly from the market as they bring in fresh ideas. We need to create a separate cadre for pre-school education and specialist teachers have to be employed for that. It is time to look at all chidden, rich or poor, and give them education. There are 30 crore kids who are our future. We have to focus on them and go out of our way to provide means of education for them.”

The teacher training project is aimed at helping scores of teachers to maintain continuity in learning and is expected to boost the upgradation of teachers. The programme is also highly scalable and can be expanded to the teachers across the state at any given point of time ensuring timely upgradation of skill-sets and training mechanisms.

The programme aims to cover certain vitals aspects for Early Childhood of children with teachers through a tech-enabled platform and covered modules such as child development, special needs, safety practices in school, and curriculum planning among others. The project was led by Dr. Reeta Sonawat, Director, Academics and Training, Ampersand Group who specializes in the Early Childhood Education programme and has been extensively training teachers with a primary focus on strengthening skills in the formative years of the child. 

Dr. Anuradha Gupta, Director, School Education, Jammu, Government of Jammu & Kashmir said, “We have got extremely positive feedback on the online training programme in Jammu and teachers are really motivated and satisfied about the content of the training. It will be a natural progress to take it to all parts of the state and train as many teachers as possible so that ultimately children in the state are benefitted.”

Dr. Arun Manhas, Project Director, Samagra Shiksha, Government of Jammu & Kashmir, Said, “The session has been extremely productive and useful for teachers who have found new methods of early childhood education. We will endeavour to take this to other parts of the state to try and train as many teachers as possible in the state.”

In his speech, Mr. Rustom Kerawalla, Chairman, Ampersand Group said that Ampersand was committed to expand the online teachers training in Jammu & Kashmir in collaboration with the state government for the benefit of teachers and students. “In line with the New Education Policy, we are committed to increasingly use technology for teacher training and continued learning in the state. With the bringing of pre-primary education into the mainstream in the New National Education Policy, the relevance of early childhood training of teachers has become more important and such training programmes will assume special significance. We intend to take this to other parts of the state and train as many teachers as possible to enable them get tuned to modern teaching methods for children.”  

Ampersand Group’s Eduspark has been extensively partnering the central and state governments across India undertaking public-private partnership projects by providing infrastructure, teacher training, content development along with several e-learning modules in K12 schooling. Its recent projects include those with the Government of Punjab, Ministry of Women & Child Development in Nashik, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, Central Tibetan School Administration in Uttarakhand and West Bengal, Tamil Nadu among others.

Ampersand Group: Ampersand Group is a global leader in providing complete solutions in school operations and end-to-end school management services to private institutions and government-run Public-Private Partnership projects in several developing nations across the world. The Ampersand Group was founded in 2004 by Mr. Rustom Kerawalla, a renowned Edupreneur with a vision to transform the educational ecosystem through consistent innovation and use of emerging technologies; to build a modern preschool and K12 education systems, which are equitable and accessible to all. The Group showcases its excellence in the K12 education through its flagship brand - VIBGYOR Group of Schools, a state-of-the-art institution built with a vision of providing high-quality education to young minds for their holistic growth in today’s times. Today, Ampersand is also one of the leading PPP partners in the national government’s endeavour of transforming its Anganwadi and Balwadi’s. The group is currently responsible for providing nearly 700 municipal Balwadi’s in Maharashtra with innovative interventions such as theme-based lessons, usage of new-age technology and a structured age-appropriate curriculum, while targeting multi age-group students.

Samagra Shiksha: The Union Budget, 2018-19, has proposed to treat school education holistically without segmentation from pre-nursery to Class 12. Samagra Shiksha - an overarching programme for the school education sector extending from pre-school to class 12 has been, therefore, prepared with the broader goal of improving school effectiveness measured in terms of equal opportunities for schooling and equitable learning outcomes. It subsumes the three erstwhile Schemes of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) and Teacher Education (TE). This sector-wide development programme/scheme would also help harmonise the implementation mechanisms and transaction costs at all levels, particularly in using state, district and sub-district level systems, and resources, besides envisaging one comprehensive strategic plan for the development of school education at the district level. The shift in the focus is from project objectives to improving systems-level performance and schooling outcomes which will be the emphasis of the combined Scheme along-with incentivising States towards improving the quality of education.