Piramal Foundation promotes ‘Education Leadership’ through Piramal School of Leadership

Piramal Foundation has set up its Piramal School of Leadership. B L Joshi, Governor of Uttar Pradesh inaugurated the school in the presence of Ajay Piramal, Chairman, Piramal Enterprises, Dr Swati Piramal, Vice Chairperson, Piramal Enterprises, Dr Raghunath Mashelkar and over 500 headmasters and headmistress.

“Through a unique model of educational leadership the headmaster’s competencies will be sharpened by enhancing their leadership skills. In our opinion, headmasters are uniquely positioned to influence behavioural changes in the school environment and in the larger community; the education leadership programme for headmasters in government schools will help develop their leadership capacity to facilitate school reform,” said Ajay Piramal, Chairman, Piramal Enterprises.

Piramal School of Leadership offers a unique three-year in-service ‘Principal Leadership Development Programme’ (PLDP) for government school headmasters to develop leadership skills and relevant knowledge by training government teachers, headmasters, resource persons and block/district administrators in order to positively impact the quality of education in schools. It facilitates headmasters’ growth on four leadership levels — personal, instructional, organisational and social. Each leadership level further corresponds with various growth areas that help the headmasters to set small, step-wise goals towards school development planning. Under the flagship of this programme, PSL intends to offer a Masters’ degree to candidates in the areas of education leadership, district education management, coaching for school improvement, instructional design, educational assessment and policy design

“This programme is designed to train school headmasters below the age of 50 years towards managing the complete gamut for operating the school, including the mandates of the Right to Education Act. The programme involves a voluntary application process wherein headmasters utilise the facility for workshops round the year under the supervision of qualified Piramal School of Leadership (PSL) staff. The programme would benefit around 250000 students,” said Paresh Parasnis, Head, Piramal Foundation.

Underlining the need for this innovative programme, Aditya Natraj, Head, Piramal School Leadership said, “Incorporating the learning’s from the last decade we designed the Leadership programme, along with Indian premium B-School IIM Ahmedabad, in order to help bridge the gap in the current school system by introducing education the leadership discourse in mainstream. We believe that providing the right kind of support to headmasters and teachers would improve school transformation as well as the learning process. Education system forms the backbone of every nation and through the medium of this programme we aim to provide overall educational training and development which we believe can contribute to a pipeline of future national leaders.”

PFEL in parallel runs a Piramal Fellowship programme where over 140 young students from top colleges of India to develop on-ground leadership skills as they go about roughing it out for two years in the remote villages of India. These Fellows are attached to school headmasters to assist them in formulating and executing programmes that have a positive and measurable impact on the school’s performance. PFEL currently works with 120,000 students through the Fellows engaged in 787 government schools across 666 villages of Rajasthan. To measure the effectiveness of this programme, Piramal Foundation is working with Education Initiatives (EI) on impact measurement in Student’s Learning Outcome. Baseline tests and end-line surveys would be conducted in regular intervals in all the Piramal supported schools to track the scholastic growth of the students.

EP News Bureau – Mumbai