46 city schools to become ‘hubs’ for academic mentorship

Kolkata: The state School Education department has started work for developing a Hub-and-Spoke model so that the ‘hub’ school provides leadership and academic mentorship to the ‘spoke’ institutes to facilitate a co-operative effort among the latter for improvement of their educational and administrative standards.

“It is an open secret that some schools have an edge over some others when it comes to quality of teachers, human resource like libraries, laboratories and infrastructure for sports and other extra curricular activities etc. These schools that are known for their academic excellence and best of infrastructure will be acting as the ‘hub’ and the rest that have certain gaps will be ‘spokes’. The mutual exchange between them is expected to bridge this gap,” a senior official of the state School Education department said.

The official added that the model has been rolled out from six districts — Kolkata, North 24-Parganas, South 24-Parganas, Bankura, Malda and Cooch Behar. As many as 127 schools have been identified as ‘hubs’ while 1,065 as ‘spokes’, which means that an average of eight to nine schools will be coming under a ‘hub’. As many as 46 schools in Kolkata have been identified as ‘hubs’.

“It is a unique concept. Every school has both positive and negative sides. So, if we can identify the negatives, then it can be mended with the positives. It will mutually help all schools in the model,” Papia Nag Sinha Mahapatra, headmistress of Sakhawat Memorial Government Girls High School, that has been identified as ‘hub’, said.

The activities that will be taken in the ‘Hub-and-Spoke’ model include sharing of organisational skills and practices, digital collaboration and resource sharing, teachers’ training, teacher exchange programmes, encouraging activity-based learning, development of co-scholastic areas and most importantly identification of deficit/drawbacks and rectification through discussion and harnessing available resources. The Education department has already started sensitisation of teachers for this programme.