Nagaland has launched its first school quality assessment pilot, with 114 Government schools in Kohima district being brought under a new framework aimed at measuring school performance beyond examination results and using data to drive targeted improvements.
MLA and Advisor for School Education, Dr Kekhrielhoulie Yhome launched the pilot at the Capital Convention Centre, Kohima, on Thursday during an induction training programme for school heads and monitoring officers from the participating schools.
The framework, called School Transformation through Excellence in Learning and Leadership Assessment (STELLA), has been introduced under Mission SOAR, the flagship school education reform programme of the Department of School Education, Government of Nagaland, in partnership with Elevate Foundation.
The day-long training was conducted by Shikha Academy, a Mumbai-based education institute, which familiarised school heads with the assessment framework, the parameters it measures, the assessment process and how schools can use the resulting data to identify and prioritise areas requiring improvement.
Kohima district has been selected as the test case for the pilot, with the framework expected to be extended to the rest of the State based on the experience and findings from the exercise.
“This is not a penalty to anybody. This is now the standardisation of our school systems. School standards will be measured not just through examination results, but across a much wider range of parameters that help us understand and improve the quality of our schools,” Yhome said.
STELLA assesses schools against a range of parameters aligned with national school quality standards. Schools will submit information through a structured digital data-collection process, after which the system will process the information and apply algorithm-based scoring. The scores will be displayed on a central digital portal accessible to schools and State education officials.
The framework is also aligned with the national PARAKH School Quality Assessment and Assurance Framework (SQAAF), enabling Nagaland’s school quality assessments to be mapped to national standards without requiring a separate exercise.
Karishma Shanghvi, Director of Shikha Academy, Mumbai, said the enthusiasm shown by the 114 school principals in adopting the new technology was encouraging.
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“We were delighted with the enthusiasm of the 114 school principals to try a new technology and after today, sincerely believe that Nagaland has the potential to leapfrog to become one of the best performing states in education,” she said.
STELLA is designed not merely to generate a score but also to provide schools with practical recommendations based on their individual assessment results. The system identifies areas that need to be strengthened and helps schools determine which issues should be addressed first.
This approach is particularly significant for schools that are further away from prescribed standards and may require support in identifying and prioritising multiple areas of improvement.
“The Mission SOAR School Quality Pilot is purpose-built for Nagaland, and today we move from design into delivery. The Kohima pilot will show us where our schools stand, what they need to strengthen, and how we can build a stronger system of school quality across the state. For our principals and our monitoring officers here, you are the first entry point for every other school in Nagaland that comes after you,” said Kevisato Sanyü, Director, Elevate Foundation, Kohima.
The pilot covers 114 government schools and involves school leaders, teachers, monitoring officers and district education officials. Besides establishing baseline school quality scores against which future progress can be measured, the exercise will also test the effectiveness of the assessment framework itself.
The pilot is expected to indicate the readiness of schools and education functionaries to use the system, identify capacity-building requirements and highlight aspects of the assessment process that may need refinement before its wider rollout across Nagaland.
While school quality assessments have been undertaken in Nagaland in the past, STELLA is designed to make the process more systematic, repeatable and actionable. The State has opted to first test the framework in one district before extending it across the State.
