Working with the System, Not Around It: What It Takes to Ensure Every Child Learns
This blog post by Daya Ram, Executive Director, ASPIRE, is part of the Systems Thinking blog series. Dayaram contributes a case of systems approach in practice, working with public education systems to ensure quality education for the most marginalized in many districts in India.
Aspire’s starting point has always been simple, almost uncompromising: each and every child matters. Not as a number, but as a real child whose place in the system must be visible and sustained. We begin with a census of every child. Updated through a digital platform, it tells us whether a child is in school, out of school, has dropped out, at what stage, and why. Without that understanding, we cannot plan effectively. With it, the system becomes visible—and so do its gaps. But early on, we realised that access alone is not the problem. Nor is learning. Nor is governance. All three are deeply interconnected, and unless they are addressed together, the system resists change.
Official data often shows very few out-of-school children. Our census tells a different story. Children’s names may exist in school registers, but they have not attended for six to eight months—they are, in reality, out of school. We do not contest this on paper. Instead, we place this data in the Gram Sabha (Village Council). For the community, this is not numbers—it is about children they know. The list is verified by the Gram Panchayat ( Local-self Government) and the School Management Committee, shifting the conversation from disagreement to shared recognition. In tribal blocks of Odisha, this process consistently revealed 10–20 percent out-of-school children per block—children who were previously invisible in official records.
Bringing children back to school is not a single, linear process. Some can return directly, but others require time and support. We learned this through experience and evolved multiple pathways: short-term non-residential bridge courses of five to six months for recent dropouts, and residential bridge programs for children coming from labour, migration, or extreme vulnerability. At one point, these residential programs covered more than 5,000 children across 21 centres in Odisha—many of them rescued from child labour in dhabas, as cowherds, or orphan-like situations. For these children, transition requires more than enrollment. Yet one principle remains constant: all children must ultimately be part of the public education system. We do not create parallel structures; the effort is to revitalise the existing public system of education that already exists.
If access can be addressed through mobilisation, learning requires confronting belief systems. Teachers often attribute low learning levels to factors outside the classroom—poverty, irregular attendance, or tribal contexts. These are real, but they cannot be the end of the conversation. We did not begin by asking teachers to change. Instead, we worked with them to assess children using a shared tool, selecting one school per panchayat ( Village Council) and jointly identifying the bottom 30 to 60 children, depending on the size of the school. Our volunteers then worked with these children before or after school hours, inside the school premises without replacing the teacher. What followed was instructive. Children who had been disengaged began attending regularly. Backbenchers moved forward, and some became the highest performers in their class. Each child’s daily work was documented and shared regularly with the teachers, making progress visible. Change did not come from instruction; it came from evidence that challenged existing assumptions. From an initial group of 128 teachers—out of roughly 1,100 schools across six blocks—who opted in, after seeing ‘backbenchers’ become class toppers via documented daily progress files, the approach gradually expanded. Today, it includes Anganwadi workers, primary and middle school teachers, and integrated learning efforts across more than 5,000 schools & 8000 ECED centres, including STEM programs.
Schools, however, do not function in isolation. Structures like School Management Committees (SMCs), Panchayats, and Mothers’ Committees exist, but often only formally, with relationships between teachers and communities marked by blame and frustration. We did not begin by attempting to “strengthen institutions” in the abstract. Instead, we created shared work. As communities engaged with data, planning, and monitoring, relationships began to shift. Today, SMC members visit schools weekly to conduct headcounts, and a child absent for even two days triggers immediate follow-up—even Unified District Information Systems for Education( UDISE), a national level database on schools , students and teachers across the country, lacks this real-time attendance tracking. This is significant because the formal system does not track attendance in such a sustained manner. Over time, what was once antagonistic relationship between the community and the teachers has become collaborative.
From the outset, we chose to work at the level of a Development Block ( An administrative unit below the district level, typically covering about 100-150 villages and a population of about 100,000-150,000), not a few schools. In Odisha alone, this approach now spans 19 blocks. The reasoning was straightforward: if every child must be in school, this must become a social norm, not a project outcome, and that requires scale. At the same time, a block is where the full system operates—administration, teachers, and communities. If change happens here, it has a chance to sustain. This also required long-term engagement, with a minimum commitment of five years, often extending to a decade or more.
As we stayed with the system, its structural gaps became clearer. Early on, we identified 44 habitations without a school within five kilometres. There was a stark mismatch between more than 30,000 primary schools and only around 1,000 higher secondary institutions at the time. Entire blocks had just one college, often without a science stream. Yet something else began to shift. With access to data, communities started engaging more directly with the system—writing to district authorities and even the Chief Minister, demanding transport solutions, and preparing school and Anganwadi development plans. This translated into more than ₹140 crores being mobilised for education infrastructure and improvements, with over ₹1,000 crores in planning pipelines. These were not new funds; they were existing allocations redirected through informed demand.
We did not begin with the language of systems thinking, but in practice, it shaped our work. It meant working simultaneously on access, learning, and governance; staying within the public system rather than bypassing it; demonstrating change instead of prescribing it; and allowing demand to emerge from within. During COVID, this approach enabled a lockdown learning program that reached over 135,000 children, later documented on global platforms and studied by international universities. This experience informed subsequent foundational learning efforts across thousands of schools.
There are no clean solutions in this work. Training does not work unless teachers seek it. Data creates tension before it creates alignment. Community participation requires tools, not just intent. Systems do not change through pilots—they change through persistence at scale. Perhaps the most difficult learning has been recognising that many have quietly given up on the public system, and on the children it serves. Our work has been, in many ways, an attempt to challenge that belief.
Today, the evidence lies not only in numbers but in shifts that are harder to quantify. Panchayats and blocks have begun declaring themselves child labour-free zones after ensuring that every child is in school. Communities track attendance and learning. Teachers seek training after seeing change. Even now, 926 children across 19 blocks are being supported to overcome documentation barriers to secondary school entry. These are not isolated outcomes, but signs of a system beginning to respond differently.
If there is one insight that continues to stay with us, it is this: systems do not change because we design better models but when teachers demand training, panchayats declare child-labour-free zones, and communities track every absentee—together.
Today our work in 39 blocks in 7 tribal districts spanning 4 states of India – Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and West Bengal, reaching over 1.5 million children is a testament that change happens when people within the system begin to see, act, and take responsibility—together. And that requires time, trust, and a willingness to work with the system, not around it.
About the author
Daya Ram is an education practitioner with over three decades of experience in strengthening public education systems in India. He is the Executive Director and Secretary of Aspire, and his work focuses on school improvement, teacher development, community participation, and educational inclusion for marginalised children.