The British Council responded readily to a request from the Honourable Minister for Education, Kerala, India, and the Director of the State Council Educational Research and Training programme, for help with improving the English language and teaching skills of primary teachers in the state.

Client, stakeholders, partners

• The State Government of Kerala, Department of General Education
• Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), a flagship education programme of the Government of India.

Focus

• Trainer and teacher training, for primary level
• Story telling

The project
The British Council responded readily to a request from the Honourable Minister for Education, Kerala, India, and the Director of the State Council Educational Research and Training programme, for help with improving the English language and teaching skills of primary teachers in the state. This formed part of the Indian government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) education programme.

The project director of the SSA programme first agreed a pilot programme to cover one district of Kerala state, involving 300 Master Trainers, 6000 Primary teachers and over 200,000 children in Kollam district, with further potential to reach 70,000 primary teachers and 3 million children state wide.

After an initial needs analysis, the British Council identified the need to develop the teachers’ ability to use the existing curriculum to maximise the amount of English spoken in the classroom and to improve their story telling skills. The innovative story telling component will help teachers to make texts come alive for children, and to deliver learner-centred lessons.

The British Council then developed and conducted a ten-day Master Trainer course for 300 teachers and teacher trainers from the primary sector. This included modules from the British Council’s global product, Classroom Language. Approximately 200 of these teachers were selected to cascade the training to the remaining 6,000 Primary teachers in the district. This cascade programme will be monitored and evaluated by both the SSA and the British Council. 

What the stakeholders say

• 'I am sure that this training programme is quite different from conventional training programmes. I am expecting a paradigm shift among English teachers in the coming years.'
  Dr Vijaya Kumar, former SSA State Project Director, Kerala.
• 'This was a very good course and all our participants have enjoyed it. They feel it as a new experience, they are very happy and they are very interested in conveying these new ideas to their students.'
  Master Trainer, Karunagapally, Kollam, Kerala.
  
  

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