Life Skills Collaborative (LSC)

ICRW is part of the Life Skills Collaborative (LSC) which aims to champion life skills for India’s young people to thrive. Life skills are considered important to empower children and young adults to prepare for their future and to ensure their wellbeing. However, one of the key challenges is the lack of evidence from Indian context using robust tools. The need, therefore, is to develop life skills assessment tools that are contextualized and focused that can provide useful information to education system for developing policies and interventions.

The Life Skills Collaborative is a group of program practitioner organizations achored by Sattva Consulting. The consortium comprises of 18 organizations including 4 donors that form the core group of the Life Skills Collaborative to define the methodology, create the tools for Life Skills and validate them on the ground. The LSC envisions that the public goods (standardized assessment frameworks) created by bringing practitioners, experts and strategic donors together along with a continuous engagement with the ecosystem to share insights and drive adoption will accelerate funding and government adoption of life skills resulting in the envisioned impact of the Indian education system delivering high quality life skills to every child.

ICRW’s Role

ICRW as an Assessment partner brings its research expertise and immense experience of life skills based interventions in India. ICRW’s extensive work with the education system and teachers laid the ground for taking on the task of developing systems’ assessment tool and teachers’ assessment tool for the collaborative. Both these tools will provide insights and inform the state governments on integrating life skills in public education system. ICRW is developing, designing and validating the tools across 4 states in India – Maharashtra, Mizoram, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand in consultation with the state governments.

Teachers’ and Systems’ Assessment Tool for Life Skills Education  

The tool development process started with an extensive review of literature and existing assessment tools. This review helped create a structure for teachers’ assessment tool. However, in absence of any tool for assessing the system, a formative study was undertaken to design the systems’ assessment tool. Based on the findings from the review, partner consultations and government consultations, it was decided that both teachers’ tool and systems’ tool will be developed in form of self-assessment tool. The systems’ assessment tool has been hailed as a pioneering effort as this is the first time ever that a system’s assessment tool has been developed in context of Life Skills education.

Both the tools have been validated by the government experts, followed by validation for contextualizing the tools for specific cultural contexts across states. The tools will be finalized after field pilot in all four states. ICRW will also develop user manuals for the government to be scale up the assessment in the state. supports the collaborative by engaging with critical stakeholders and developing guides work with other stakeholders towards implementing assessments.

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