Residential Education for Disadvantaged Girls: An Alternate Field?

In this article, we engage with the experiences of students in a government-run residential secondary school that enrols girls primarily from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Through an exploration of the history of the programme, secondary evaluations conducted over the years and a month-long engagement with one such residential school, we probe how the categories of disadvantage—caste and gender— continue to operate, even as the state tries to obliterate them in this space. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theorization of ‘practices’, we describe daily informal interactions in the space, highlighting their role in reinforcing and sometimes challenging extant social differences. Drawing attention to the diversity that lies even within the formal category of ‘disadvantaged’, we describe the potential and the limitations of targeted residential schooling. Our work points to the need for greater sensitivity in the planning and implementation of state-run programmes targeted at the most marginalized and a re-imagination of efforts to offer an ‘alternate field’.

Demonstrating the effectiveness of a residential education programme for disengaged young people: a preliminary report

This article reports on the early results of using behavioural and educational data to evaluate a residential education programme. The programme serves male and female students between 12 and 16 years of age who have been suspended or expelled from school due to behavioural issues or who refused to attend school. Using measures of behavioural and educational progress during care and reporting these changes over time provided empirical evidence that the programme was achieving its primary aims of ‘behaviour change and educational gains.’ Collecting and reporting this data has empowered the programme to increase programme effectiveness through both data-informed decision-making and ongoing programme evaluation.