About Kalyan Foundation in Kalyan thane, Mumbai

THE SCHOOL PROJECT
The mission of The School Project is to create a model for high-performing schools that redefines what is possible for children from low-income communities, and has the potential to drive wider systemic reform.
In India today, 96% of primary school age children are enrolled in school. The quality of learning indicators, however, is of persistently low levels– with low standards of education, up to 25% absenteeism amongst government school teachers, a 50% drop out rate between grade 1 and grade 5, and 90% dropout by grade 10.
A few years after the millennium, there began a trend amongst people living in low-income rural communities of putting their children into low-fee or ‘affordable’ private schools. Today, approximately only 40% of the children living in Vinchur attend government schools. In response, The Grampanchyat of vinchur acknowledged the insufficient supply of English-medium schools and have initiated setting up of new schools of this kind.
Based on this organizational history and environmental context, Foundation decided to step back and redefine its approach to its mission of equipping all children with an education that has the power to fundamentally transform their life trajectory.
In 2011, Vilas Rayate, Chairman of Kalyan Foundation, approached the local bodies to startt a school through the Kalyan Foundation (a N.G.O started by himself). The Grampanchyat granted permission to run the School, serving the scholarship students across the schools inLasalgaon and Niphad from playgroup and above. Although Foundation was initially an unofficial partner in this initiative, the seeds of The School Project were sown with the opening of the first school in June 2015 [proposed].
In the first year of the school opening, foundation is planning to chose administer , an assessment, fairly new at the time, taken by a small pool of elite private schools. On this baseline assessment, the children performed anywhere from 30-70% below the mean. Eight months later, the students had bridged an achievement gap of nearly 25 percentage points with some students performing near the mean. These promising initial results built confidence in the potential of schools to provide the kind of environment that children from low-income communities needed.