The pandemic crisis has affected over 180 million children in India from pre-primary to elementary level of education due to school closures. A recent study highlights that children have not just lost curricular learning for the current year but also what they learned in the previous year.
This regression is alarming as 92 per cent of children have 'lost' at least one foundational ability, such as reading with comprehension, and 82 per cent have lost the ability to perform basic addition and multiplication. The school closures during the pandemic phase forced students to stay home, leading to a loss in their learning patterns.
Bridge Between Child's Learning & Keeping Parents Involved
To combat the prevalent issue, Top Parent was founded in 2020 by Sashwati Banerjee, which uses vernacular technology solutions to empower parents to deepen engagement with children and drive learning at home. It has pioneered a home learning app, an easy-to-use, parent-facing app to empower and equip parents to teach their children.
Top Parent provides a bridge between a child's learning and keeping parents involved and engaged in that process. Being a free mobile app, it equips parents from low-income communities with language, resources, and strategies to support their young children (3-8 years) to catch up on the learning loss and get ready for school and life.
Using Creative Forms Of Learning
The app deploys multiple learning systems to engage parents and children creatively, resulting in faster, deeper, and more effective learning. The curriculum uses the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) framework. It is competency-based (each competency is served through bite-sized multimedia resources: videos, worksheets, and continuous assessments).
While sharing the information with The Logical Indian, the company said, "The learning engineering backend captures child level performance to deploy personalised content that is level and competency-based and informs our engagement strategy to support parents and children through their learning journey via IVRS and WhatsApp."
So far, the Top Parent mobile application has crossed 2.8 lakh downloads and has a 1.4 lakh active user base, claimed by the company. Most users are active, with an average of 26 minutes of engagement. The aim is to expand the reach and benefit more parents and children in their learning journey.