English
Supporting children to ‘Leap Forward’ through early years
Project funding
Supported by the Yidan Prize project funds
Education theme
Foundational learning
Social emotional learning
Contents
Overview
Background
About the idea
Impact and results
Stories
More to explore
Strengthening, scaling, and supporting Pratham’s work with governments, communities, and parents to offer children quality early education.
500,000
children reached through Pratham's work
490,000
children reached through state governments of Punjab and Karnataka
7,000
children reached through direct work with 300 communities in Delhi
Data above as of June 2023
Quality early learning builds strong foundations—reducing the need to intervene and help children catch up down the road. ‘Leap Forward’ is Pratham’s early years strategy to support young children and their parents in India so the next generation can get the fair start they deserve in education.
Laureate(s)
Background
Children thrive on quality early years education—but some miss out on foundational skills
Learning is cumulative. And foundational skills such as basic literacy and numeracy are critical building blocks for future learning. Over the past 25 years, Pratham has been helping children catch up on math and literacy. Pratham’s ‘Teaching at the Right Level’ work has demonstrated that all children can learn to read and master basic numeracy in as little as 30–50 days.
If children miss out early on these foundational skills, they risk falling into a learning gap as the curriculum gets tougher. Even when children continue in school, they don’t progress at the expected pace. If they can’t achieve basic literacy and numeracy by the end of Grade 2 or the beginning of Grade 3, more schooling won’t automatically lead to further learning. And children are left believing that they can’t learn or that they aren’t good enough.
‘Leap Forward’ focusses on building those early skills—especially post-pandemic
Before the pandemic only about 30% of children in India who reached Grade 3 (eight years old) had an adequate level of foundational skills. In this context, the impact of COVID-19—school closures and learning losses—was all the more devastating. The 2022 Annual Status of Education Report shows that in India, children’s basic reading ability has dropped to pre-2012 levels, reversing the gradual improvement achieved in the intervening years.
Pratham’s ‘Leap Forward’ strategy for early years aims to significantly limit the need for catch-up with children, by building strong foundations for future learning. The ultimate goal is to support important progress in India and potentially other countries.
About the idea
Low-cost, scalable programs rooted in community engagement
Pratham found that when children experience similar teaching methods from pre-primary school to grades 1–2, this continuity helps them move more confidently to formal school, building a strong learning foundation. They call this a continuum model.
Pratham’s programs for young children are designed to adapt to different contexts and make the most of available resources. They focus on simple implementation of a play-based approach—engaging community volunteers to teach children in small groups. In return, the volunteers receive training opportunities on topics of relevance and interest such as digital readiness and hospitality through Pratham’s ‘Education for Education’ (EFE) courses.
They also focus on broader community engagement. These include keeping in touch with mothers by sending play-based learning materials through texts and online messaging, and building links between communities and schools through events like school readiness fairs.
Through demonstrating teaching and learning models with continuous advocacy, Pratham engages governments at state and district levels to enable scaling through system adoption. The team supports teachers and school leaders to use existing resources such as teaching and learning materials through training, and oversees implementation in the classroom, sharing feedback with governments.
Finally, they keep a firm focus on robust assessment and evaluation so that everything they do is evidence-based and effective. And with that body of resources, they can help strengthen and support larger government systems to make quality early years education more widespread in India.
Pratham is using prize funds to strengthen and scale the ‘Leap Forward’ strategy in four areas
Firstly, they’re focusing on bolstering their central leadership and support teams to build up their continuum model and create a package of content and activities used across the early years.
They’re also scaling up the impact of their existing programs—particularly the Anganwadi programs (supporting government-run early childhood centers), pre-schools, and pre-primary classes. Through these programs, Pratham reaches mothers, community volunteers, and Anganwadi workers to train them in engaging with children through play-based learning.
Pratham also works closely with local and regional governments, so their third area of focus is strengthening government systems’ capacity to develop robust early years curricula, and training teachers and Anganwadi workers to teach and carry out assessments.
Finally, they’re creating more free, publicly accessible original content—stories, texts, toys, and games in digital and print formats—and making it available in local languages. They’re particularly keen to support underserved communities in India who have lacked the same wealth of quality learning resources in their mother tongue.
Our 2021 laureate Dr Rukmini Banerji is using her project funds to support Pratham’s ‘Leap Forward’ strategy and programs from January 2022 to December 2024.
Impact and results
In 2022, Pratham’s early years programs directly reached over 40,000 children and 1,062 mothers across 1,259 Anganwadis in Delhi, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, sharing learning materials and teaching resources with Anganwadi workers and mothers.
Pratham also worked with the Women and Child Development Department in Karnataka and the Department of Education in Punjab, supporting 132,904 children across 8,640 Anganwadis in five districts of Karnataka* and 354,290 children across 12,855 pre-schools in Punjab.
Storytelling is central to Pratham’s early years programs supporting children’s learning and language acquisition. To expand their library of stories, Pratham ran story writing workshops within their teams and with governments across states and in different languages. They commissioned authors to write shorts stories for children in specific languages to ensure every child can see themselves and their local languages and culture represented in a story. In 2022, the team developed 404 original stories in print, out of which 147 were also recorded as audio stories.
*Pratham’s Anganwadis support program with the Women and Child Development Department in Karnataka is partially supported by the Yidan Prize project funds.