Interrupted Learning, Fragile Attendance and 'Out of School' Children in India (ILFA)

This research focuses on children who are enrolled in school but experience interrupted learning and fragile attendance (ILFA), which has negative impacts on their learning outcomes. Despite India's record of nearly universal primary level enrolment, ILFA appears to be a prevalent form of 'learning poverty' that is common across schools that serve children from highly socio-economically disadvantaged communities. There are, however, significant evidence gaps about the patterns and causes of ILFA that are implicated in an absence of systemic accountability for such children's learning. The project seeks to address these evidence gaps through qualitative research
that extends earlier work on conceptualising accountability in education systems as relational and socially contingent. The project's evidence will also productively challenge the binary in/out of school conceptualisation in global policy discourses around Out Of School Children, since despite the growing emphasis on 'invisible' children in these discourses, children who experience ILFA fall between the in/out of school distinction and challenge the concept of 'in school'.
ILFA addresses these issues through research that focuses on children in Adivasi (tribal) and other communities who are among India's most socio-economically disadvantaged and educationally marginalised people. It offers an in-depth, multi-scale study anchored in three school settings, straddling two development 'blocks' in Southern Rajasthan, a region where the RAISE project had previously worked. The study develops and applies a 'process tracing' approach with methodological innovations that enable deep articulation of the social relations that influence how marginalised learners access and participate in schooling, and patterns of ILFA. Methodologically, the integration of visual methods of network mapping and cognitive modelling alongside interviews, focus groups and participant observation, will enable an in-depth response to conceptually generative questions about why, in any one school, some children are more or less regular in attendance, and what explains a child's pattern of presence and absence. By applying this innovative process tracing approach, the study will show how stakeholders exercise agency and responsibility and influence children's attendance and sustained learning. These findings will help develop understandings of accountability and its influence on learning outcomes.
The 12 month project unfolds in two stages, beginning with qualitative process tracing which is augmented from month eight onwards by action learning that helps to identify possible points for scaled-up intervention. The project will build partner and government capacity to use research evidence via effective impact pathways that have positive effects for children's attendance and learning. It will generate two key outputs for Vidya Bhawan, our NGO partner: a co-designed institutional post-project plan of action, including capacity development, which will inform a large ongoing programme Vidya Bhawan is carrying out in over 60 government schools; and inputs for the initial teacher education programme that Vidya Bhawan provides, as well as research capacity enhancement. A further project output will be a policy-orientated Evidence Brief that brings together in an accessible format insights for policy communities that can contribute to ensuring every child's right to education. This Brief will be particularly useful to stakeholders who are concerned with the Agenda 2030 commitment to Leave No-One Behind and the achievement of SDG 4. Conceptual work on relational accountability from an ILFA perspective, and with reference to the right to education of marginalised children, will be shared via publications suited to academic audiences and practitioners in development agencies