Sekolah Rangkul Keluarga (SRK)

The problem that we aim to solve through SRK is low teachers-parents’ involvement in teaching critical thinking and social skills to children/students.

Based on a study by the World Bank in Indonesia, one of the most prominent reasons for low parents’ involvement is because they lack the sense of self-efficacy to help their children learn. This information is also backed up by UNICEF, who stated that many parents lacked the capability and capacity needed to support their children at home. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic situation worsens the situation. Moving from regular at-school learning to full-time home learning changes parents’ routine and expectations at a great deal. Moreover, with gender inequality problems still deeply rooted in Indonesian society (72% of women stated that they are the main carers in the family), mothers have to shoulder additional burdens of supporting their children in remote learning. Most of them said that they do not know what is required to engage in effective distance learning.

This problem is hugely concerning because parents’ involvement is a crucial aspect in child education. The National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education said that students with involved parents are more likely to have better social skills and show improved behavior, to which the National Parent Teacher Association seconds. Fortunately, studies said that unoptimized parents’ involvement could be solved by equipping parents with necessary knowledge and skills to boost their confidence.  Furthermore, teachers, as an integral part of the education system, should be taking the central role in the efforts to ensure that parents are confident to be their extension in supporting child learning at home.

On the other hand, Indonesia also faces obstacles in regards to improving learning outcomes. According to Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), between 1999 and 2015, Indonesia’s mathematics scores had always been among the lowest of all participating countries. Similarly, based on the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores, Indonesia is ranked in the bottom 8 out of 78 countries for all assessed elements. There are no notable changes for these positions in the past 15 years.

OECD, through their 21st Century Skills concept, said that critical thinking and social skills play a huge factor in improving students’ learning outcomes. In the pandemic context, where students rely more on the information on the internet (which unfortunately is hugely unfiltered and containing a lot of hoaxes and fake news) to support their study and have limited social activities, the need to boost those skills is more pressing. However, with the assistance of the parents to grow critical thinking and social skills at home, children can thrive. But first, we need to ensure the parents are equipped with necessary skills, knowledge, and tools to be effective educators at home.

SRK assists schools in increasing parents’ involvement to develop children’s critical thinking and social skills at home. Specifically, SRK provides training, workshops, and self-learning modules for teachers and parents with a well-tailored curriculum so they can work together to support students/children to think more critically and adopt desirable social behavior.

We use a blended-learning approach, combining offline activities (training, workshops) and online activities (self-learning which is conducted through a learning management system). By using a learning management system, we also lift the administrative burdens from teachers to produce a progress report because the progress will be recorded in the system on a real-time basis. Furthermore, we leverage our more than 1,500 grassroots volunteers in 142 cities all over Indonesia to assist teachers and parents during the whole process to ensure effectiveness.

SRK works with teachers and parents within a school ecosystem. Based on our observation since the inception of SRK four years ago, we can conclude that schools do not have a structured approach in ensuring parents’ involvement in their children’s education process. Some causes we find include the absence of knowledge and skills required to make such an approach and the unavailability of time for teachers and parents to dive deep in creating an effective engagement concept.

That said, some schools do have allocated budgets for parent engagement purposes. Tapping these inefficiently-spent financial resources, we aim to provide a structured parent engagement program with a research-backed curriculum that focuses on 3M: method, mindset, and motivation. Moreover, we also identify what kinds of skills (in SRK’s case are critical thinking and social skills) that we want the teachers and parents to pass onto the students/children through SRK, carefully considering the local needs and global situation. By doing this, we hope to lift the burden of having to invent the wheel for an effective parent engagement program from teachers and parents.

Although SRK has only been operating for the past 4 years, my team and I have been working together with schools and families all over Indonesia for the past 9 years. Through these extensive experiences, we gathered insights and learnings that we have applied to improve our various projects, including SRK.

We understand that a small team headquartered in Jakarta cannot bear the responsibilities of having to monitor the schools that we want to target all over Indonesia. This is the reason we established RANGKUL, our grassroots volunteers with approximately 1,500 members in 142 cities. With the support from our volunteers, we are able to widen our impacts while developing a close-knit relationship with the target communities. We also can easily collect local insights and make adjustments to our approach to increase effectiveness. Since the establishment of SRK, we have worked with 1,303 schools. We are still actively communicating with them to problem-solve, implying our continuous support for and long lasting relationship with our clients.

In addition to having an extensive network of grassroots volunteers, we also have a strong relationship with other organizations and government bodies. For instance, to create critical thinking and social skills modules, we worked together with the team at Indika Foundation, a nonprofit organization specialized in delivering peace education programs. On other occasions, we regularly meet with relevant government representations to seek feedback and simultaneously to promote SRK.

Our main reason for applying to Solve is to find mentors who can provide perspectives to scale up our program’s impacts. While our program is tightly linked to the education sector, we need different points of views from other fields in order to increase the effectiveness of our program. For instance, we would need a parenting and a child psychology expert to enhance our existing learning modules. In another case, we would need a sociologist to better identify our next target schools. As such, with limited resources that we have, we can prioritize those who need our support the most.

Additionally, Solve gives us a chance to widen our networks. Solve provides the possibility for us to get connected with other organizations who work on similar problems, therefore increasing the chance for us to establish a global collaboration in the future.

Our solution is innovative because we use a blended-learning approach and put technology in the heart of our solution. Our approach combines training and workshops with self-learning mechanisms that are delivered through a learning management system (LMS). This LMS is accessible for teachers and parents who participate in our program, and by using LMS, we can effectively monitor the learning progress of the teachers and parents. Furthermore, in some of our learning modules, we use audio-based storytelling contents as learning tools (as opposed to conventional ones such as printed modules and powerpoint presentations).

To ensure that teachers and parents keep receiving guidance throughout the process, our extensive networks of grassroots volunteers called RANGKUL will accompany the teachers and parents in every step of the way, while observing and ensuring that the process is in accordance with the curriculum. From an impact sustainability’s point of view, this scheme will enable trained teachers and parents to not only adopt new skills and knowledge, but more importantly it will also change their paradigm towards parents’ involvement in child development, making the impacts of our program last even after the program has ended.

In the next one year, our goal is to increase parents’ involvement within the school-family ecosystem to teach critical thinking and social skills to children. To achieve our goal, we will collaborate with schools to deliver a series of training, workshops, and self-learning activities to teachers and their parents association members.

In the next five years, our goal is to make teachers and parents as agents of change who will promote the importance of being actively involved in developing children’s critical thinking and social skills both at school and at home. To ensure we can achieve the goal, we will create a training-of-trainer initiative for those who have participated in our program. Through such initiative, the teachers and parents can create a huge ripple effect at the grassroots level.

Our goal is to increase parent’s involvement in developing children’s critical thinking and social skills at school and at home. In relevance to UN SDG indicators, we substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers, including through international cooperation for teacher training in developing countries, especially least developed countries and small island developing States. To reach our goal, we will conduct various activities which include training and workshops for teachers and parents, self-learning activities delivered through a learning management system, and monitoring and evaluation process.

With regards to monitoring and evaluation, there are several initiatives that we will implement to ensure a robust measurement process. Firstly, we will do periodic direct observation and in-depth interviews with teachers and parents, conducted by our grassroots volunteers, at school and at home. This will act as our main qualitative measurement, from which we can extract further insights in the form of a story of change/most significant change. Next, every workshop and training will be monitored through pre and post surveys to measure increase in understanding towards the materials delivered. Additionally, through the learning management system, we will be able to collect quantitative data on the percentage of teachers and parents who have completed the course.

Going deeper into the indicators that we will set to determine whether our monitoring and evaluation results is in accordance with our goal, some of those indicators will include percentage of schools reporting increased involvement between school and parents, percentage of parents who reports an increase in their confidence to accompany their children in searching, evaluating, and summarizing the information, and percentage of parents who reports an increase in their confidence to teach their children.

IF teachers and parents are equipped with necessary method, mindset, and motivation to teach critical thinking and social skills,

THEN teachers and parents’ sense of self-efficacy to teach their children/students those two skills will grow

THEREFORE teachers-parents’ involvement in supporting children/students’ learning critical thinking and social skills will increase.

We utilize a learning management system (LMS) platform accessible by trainers, teachers and parents as our core technology. By using LMS, we can easily track the learning progress of teachers and parents. Furthermore, the materials that we put in the LMS are also innovative. For example, one of our modules that aims to educate parents on how to nurture peace at home is using audio-based storytelling contents as learning tools (as opposed to conventional presentation). That said, there are other various technological aspects that we use such as WhatsApp (for day-to-day communication), Zoom (for meetings and some of our workshops), and Google Drive (for storing documents).

From a management point of view, we are a woman-led team with more than 9 years of experience in the education sector. Most importantly, our lead Yulia Indriati is a parent herself who is actively promoting the importance of parents' involvement within the school-family ecosystem.

From an operational point of view, we have a quota system set in place in regards to gender. This applied to every workshop that we will be conducting to ensure our participants are gender-balanced in terms of number. Furthermore, with limited resources that we have, we carefully choose schools in conflict-prone areas to ensure our solution can cater those who need it the most. Lastly, our grassroots volunteers are of diverse backgrounds, be it in terms of gender, religion, ethnicity, age group, and profession.

From a financial point of view, we always strive to be as inclusive as possible to the schools that we treat as clients. We understand that some schools have a very tight budget that it would not be possible for them to provide monetary resources needed to collaborate with us. That is why we put tremendous efforts to secure grants from other organizations, so we can utilize the money to help underprivileged schools.

The SRK program follows a B2B model. We work together with schools as our clients.

In Indonesia, schools generally have a specific budget for parents' engagement-related purposes. However, many of them do not have the substance knowledge to ensure that their parents' engagement program is effective. This is where our program gives value and benefit to such schools. We fill in the gap by providing them with a well-tailored curriculum and subsequently relevant training and workshops to the teachers and parents’ association representatives. Furthermore, by leveraging our networks of grassroots volunteers, we will be able to tightly monitor the progress over the collaboration period, and give meaningful feedback for improvements.

Started in 2018, Sekolah Rangkul Keluarga (SRK) has been developing a B2B partnership model with schools for the past 4 years. After conducting extensive research, we set a fee of IDR 20 million (approximately USD 1,300) for each school to join our program. Last year, we began to pilot the B2B partnership model, starting with 21 schools as our clients.

On the other hand, we understand that some schools, especially the underprivileged ones, are struggling to pay our fees because of insufficient budget. This is why we also partnered with private companies to provide scholarship-like support for such schools so they can still benefit through our program without having to worry about the financials.

Lastly, we are also actively promoting our program by frequently joining government events as resource persons. We aim to build a strong relationship with the government and to continue advocating the importance of parents' involvement at school. Our ultimate goal is to partner with the government to massively implement our program in schools all over Indonesia.

Last year, SRK piloted the B2B partnership model, starting with 21 schools as clients. The results of our B2B pilot has been encouraging. We managed to convince the schools to allocate their budgets for SRK’s service and also we successfully maintained them to continue the program in the upcoming academic year.

Other than using the B2B partnership model, we also collaborate with private companies through their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives to increase our financial sustainability. For example, in 2021, we partnered with Paragon Technology Indonesia, who gave “scholarships” to five underpriviliged schools to join our program. The testimonials that we received from these five schools have been heartwarming. Many said that the school’s relationship with students’ parents are improving and started to be reflected in students’ grades. With funding support from MIT Solve, we plan to provide more scholarships for underprivileged schools.

This year, SRK plans to attract 100 more schools to join our program. Earlier this month, we kickstarted our promotional tour in Semarang, Central Java. We met with 12 school representatives as our potential clients and we are currently in the engagement process. Furthermore, those representatives were representing various types of schools, including Islamic schools, Catholic schools, and international schools.