Written by Anupama Dalmia, Founder-Director of Seekho Sikhao Foundation

What do we want our schools to produce? Children who can pass examinations? Or children who are curious, who enjoy learning, and are confident enough to engage with the world around them?

If the answer is the latter, we have a pressing question on our hands. After decades of improvement in the school system in India, multiple education reforms, and a growing number of institutions to support them, why are we still not consistently seeing public school classrooms where this kind of learning happens?

We have invested in the infrastructure, curriculum, and technology, and yet, every one of these interventions ultimately reaches a child through education’s frontline: the teachers. The quality of that interaction between a teacher and their students is perhaps the most crucial determinant of whether a child memorizes a lesson or truly understands it, whether they simply attend school or develop the skills for learning.

The answer therefore lies in strengthening the last mile of education reform: enabling the existing systems to support teachers in the way that they’re meant to.

The recently released School Education System in India: Temporal Analysis and Policy Roadmap for Quality Enhancement by NITI Aayog reinforces what many working in the education ecosystem have been grappling with. India has more than 1 crore teachers working across nearly 14 lakh schools. Yet over one lakh schools still function with a single teacher responsible for teaching multiple grades while simultaneously handling administrative work, record-keeping, and non-teaching responsibilities.

Some of the report’s most important observations are about teacher support.

Teacher training frameworks cascade downwards from national and state levels to districts and blocks. By the time they reach the intended recipients, training has often become diluted, generic, and difficult to translate into practice. Professional development is fragmented, while mentoring is inconsistent, and teachers, particularly those in rural schools, are left to navigate complex classrooms without any real professional support.

In fact, India has not neglected teacher support structures. Teacher Collective Meetings (TCMs), Block Resource Centres, District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs), academic mentoring systems—our educational policy provides the architecture already.

Often, however, these platforms function primarily as spaces for compliance and administration rather than professional learning.

The truth is that teaching cannot be standardized across India’s classrooms. A teacher working in a multi-grade rural school, a tribal community, or an urban government school encounters entirely different daily realities. No single workshop or module delivered top-down can prepare them for their specific ecosystems. Teachers need opportunities to test ideas, discuss challenges, adapt methods, and learn continuously from colleagues who understand their context. Teacher development, then, cannot rely only on periodic training sessions alone. It has to become embedded within their everyday professional lives.

Research increasingly points in this direction. A recent national landscape study on in-service Teacher Professional Development found that teachers consistently value collaborative learning and contextual support, yet existing peer-learning spaces remain underutilized. It also found that mentoring structures intended to provide academic guidance have gradually shifted towards administrative oversight, while DIETs, designed to bridge policy and classroom practice, tend to remain occupied with implementing centrally determined schedules instead of contextualizing learning for teachers.

The question, then, becomes: how do we leverage these existing systems to act as they were designed and help teachers become better educators?

The experience of a teacher at Primary School Shivpuri in Uttar Pradesh offers a compelling example. When Abhinav Shukla first began teaching there, the fora meant to support teachers were largely used to communicate instructions and complete administrative formalities. What he needed was a space where educators could have an opportunity to collectively reflect on classroom challenges, exchange ideas, and adapt their teaching practices to their own contexts.

That changed when TCMs in his cluster began functioning as spaces for real professional dialogue and peer learning. Teachers arrived with classroom challenges they faced, shared activities that worked, discussed more ways to engage children, and returned each month with more reflections. From here, Abhinav gained practical insights rooted in classrooms that looked a lot like his own.

His own classroom changed for the better. Activity-based learning replaced learning by rote. Children were more willing to ask questions and participate.

A similar shift took place a few kilometers away in the classroom of Anjali Singh at Primary School Sarwa. Through a similar block peer-learning ecosystem, she moved beyond completing the syllabus towards competency-based teaching, while drawing parents more actively into conversations about learning. Lessons became more structured around learning outcomes instead of textbook completion, the classroom became more interactive, and attendance improved.

All of this, because existing government platforms began serving their intended purpose, and were activated around teachers rather than procedures.

This is ultimately the direction India’s education reforms must take. The goal ought to be teachers who have the professional capacity to respond to the children sitting in front of them: to cultivate curiosity, adapt lessons, encourage discussion, and create classrooms where learning is joyful.

It requires government, civil society, and philanthropy to strengthen existing institutions rather than creating parallel systems. Increasingly, philanthropy support infrastructure organizations are encouraging more philanthropists to do precisely this. Supporting systems that help teachers continuously learn, collaborate, and lead in their fields can create benefits that far outlast any individual intervention.

Because if India wants to encourage more young people to learn, it must support the systems where its teachers never stop learning.