Mission Impossible – Transforming Delhi’s Government Schools

Even the poorest in India understand that good education is a ticket out of deprivation and poverty. Even the poorest know that government schools are the unlikeliest places for turning such dreams to reality. Many of them dig deep into their pockets to send their children to private schools, while those who can’t, are forced to rely on government schools. While the Indian economy has grown commendably over the past three decades, much of this prosperity has failed to change the fate of our government schools. The number of successful political parties too has grown steadily in India since Independence, many winning elections at the state or centre on the promise of poverty eradication, yet none have made public education their calling.

From the day he assumed office in 2015, Chief Minister Kejriwal put education at the top of his government’s agenda. In Mr Sisodia, he was gifted with a perfect education minister. The son of a retired government school teacher who grew up studying in his village government school in Uttar Pradesh, Mr Sisodia was passionate about education and the role it can play in shaping society.

Within the first few months, the government declared a bold vision: their goal was to make Delhi’s government schools better than private ones. Mr Sisodia added, ‘the day I feel confident about sending my own child to a government school, I will consider myself a successful education minister’. The biggest hurdle for the government was to achieve this vision working with the same set of 50,000-odd officials, principals and teachers that were part of the capital’s failed school education system for decades. Most of them were either deeply cynical of the possibility of any systemic change, or were jaded with the many failed attempts by new ministers or bureaucrats who imposed their ideas upon them, without understanding the ground realities.

When Mr Sisodia and team got to work, they had little idea of how long it would take to transform the government school system as it wasn’t something that had been attempted before on this scale in India. There was no playbook. Yet, before the end of its first term, the AAP government managed to achieve the impossible—successfully changing the perception of Delhi’s government schools and significantly improving the outcomes for students.

The pass percentage in class 12 board results in Delhi’s government schools have risen steadily from 88 per cent in academic year 2014–15 to 97 per cent in 2023–24, consistently outperforming Delhi’s private schools. Another important metric of success has been an increasing number of Delhi government school students clearing the top engineering and medical entrance tests in the country, the IIT-JEE and the NEET. The number of government school students who passed JEE mains has increased from around fifty in 2015 to 783 in 2024—a fifteen-times jump. 1,414 government school students cleared the NEET-UG exams in 2024, about two-and-half times higher than the 569 students who had cleared the exam in 2020. Besides these measures, Delhi government schools have managed to considerably improve the foundational competencies—i.e. basic reading and math skills—of its students leading to a 10 per cent to 20 per cent annual improvement in students from classes six to eight. With improved outcomes, the total student enrolment in Delhi government schools has risen with 2.2 lakh students leaving private schools to join Delhi government schools over the past decade.

However, the true impact of the transformation in Delhi’s government schools was the change in perception of all its stakeholders—students, teachers, principals and parents. In just five years, the entire education system was revitalized and infused with a sense of pride, hope and belief that Delhi’s government schools are as good as private schools in every respect. In 2020, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) carried out an independent assessment of Delhi’s school education reforms over the period 2015–20. The study included surveys with 577 parents and 7,096 teachers apart from focus group discussions with principals, students, district officials and other stakeholders. The study found that 95 per cent of parents and teachers believed that Delhi’s education reforms had a significant positive impact. The BCG study stated, ‘the degree to which this has happened in Delhi is not something that we have seen in any other seemingly similar education transformation efforts across the country.’

So, what is the Delhi education model? The Delhi education model can be broken down into two overarching goals.

The first goal is that every child must have access to quality education, regardless of their ability to pay. Inequality in the quality of education is a defining feature of India’s school education system. Barring a few elite private schools or model government schools, the vast majority of Indian children receive poor quality education. The tragedy of our education system is that most teachers and principals have internalized the belief that underprivileged children, often first-generation learners, cannot excel so there’s no point trying. ‘Our education model is only breaking the mindset and system where 5 per cent get the best education and 95 per cent the worst kind,’ writes Mr Sisodia in his book ‘Siksha: My Experiments as an Education Minister’. Over the past decade, Delhi’s government schools have strived to set a minimum benchmark of infrastructural facilities and quality of education that every child gets that is comparable to the top private schools.

The second goal is to broaden the purpose of education beyond employment to build a more humane society with happy, public-spirited citizens. India’s entire education system is geared towards preparing human resources to contribute to the nation’s economy. ‘The current system aims to teach children everything from science to grammar, in the hope they find employment. But there is no stress on ensuring that the child does not participate in any kind of violence, does not contribute to pollution and does not spread hatred or corruption. Good grammar is assured but not courteous conduct,’ writes Mr Sisodia. The Delhi education model aims to use education as a means to raise the consciousness of the country and its society. In Mr Sisodia’s words, ‘we are imagining, planning and creating a system where on seeing an increase in violence in a city, the chief minister not only directs his chief of police to end the violence in two days but also directs his chief of education to make a plan for ending violent tendencies in people in two years.’

Besides lighting up the future of lakhs of underprivileged children, a significant impact of the Delhi education model has been that it has created space for education in India’s political discourse. Seven decades after independence, no political party in India ever campaigned on its track record of turning around a government school system, delivering better board results than private schools and getting lakhs of students from private schools to migrate to government schools. Mr Kejriwal did so in the 2020 Delhi elections and won handsomely. Ever since, the AAP has religiously included the promise of replicating the Delhi education model in all its election manifestos in state elections around India, partially contributing to its rise as a national party in 2022. If there is one party today that has become synonymous with high-quality public education, it is the Aam Aadmi Party.

Jasmine Shah served as the Vice Chairperson of the Dialogue and Development Commission, Delhi government. This article is an excerpt from his book “The Delhi Model” published by Penguin.