Hyderabad, 30th January, 2019: Ignis Careers, a Hyderabad-based social enterprise providing capacity-building programs for teachers in government and affordable private schools, has today announced that it has developed a digital platform for imparting its Life Skills training program targeting first generation learners from low income communities.
This comes on the back of the funding of $ 150,000 it received from Atlanta headquartered education sector focused impact investor Gray Matters Capital through its edLABS initiative, paving the way for it to digitize the teacher manuals for improving classroom delivery efficiency.
Using customized content and interactive technology to teach English integrated Life skills
The Life Skills curriculum offered by Ignis Careers is unique in the sense that it integrates English language learning to help students not just get acquainted with the language but to also prepare them for employment opportunities in the future.
The digital platform developed by it will serve as an interactive multi-media enabled instruction manual that will help teachers understand instructions clearly and help them to enable a more interactive learning atmosphere in classrooms.
“We aim at breathing purpose into the Indian education system, weaning it away from practices of rote learning and mindless focus on marks. Our life skills focus would empower students with critical thinking, advocacy skills, situation adaptability skills and self-management skills so that the students would go on to build a purposeful life. By improving their English skills along with life skills, they learn to seek and access information for themselves, and eventually learn to make informed decisions in life,” said Rennis Joseph, Co-Founder and CEO, Ignis Careers.
Expansion Plans
Currently present in 9 centres in the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Delhi, Ignis Careers’ curriculum has been adopted by more than 200 schools benefiting nearly 57,000 students through capacity building of 1788 teachers.
Post the funding and the development of the digital platform, Ignis Careers will look to expand its presence to 16 more centres in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra by FY 2021, catering to 1.08 lakh students through 4400 teachers across 400 schools in the Affordable Private School (APS) segment and 100 government schools.
The funding would also be used to strengthen the leadership team by recruiting senior administrative personnel.
Rural Teacher Fellowship
Ignis Careers runs a Rural Teacher Fellowship program in partnership with Venture Capital Fund -Acumen and HDFC Bank, wherein teachers are recruited from the communities targeted for impact and trained in English skills and best-in-class teaching practices. These teachers then return to government schools in their communities to improve the skills of the students attending, thus creating a sustainable model of simultaneous teacher and student training.
