Patna: A day-long state-level conference on “Promoting Adolescent Wellbeing in Every School: Bihar Leads the Way” was organised here on Wednesday to announce the collaboration between the state education department and CorStone, a global NGO, to expand a resilience programme across all government middle schools and Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBVs) in the state.
This three-year collaboration will expand CorStone’s Youth First and Girls First resilience programmes and deliver essential skills to enhance the holistic wellbeing and development of adolescents as per the New Education Policy (NEP), 2020. At full scale, the programmes are expected to reach approximately 35,000 government schools and 534 KGBVs, providing wellbeing skills to over 3.5 million students annually.
Addressing the conference, education department’s additional chief secretary Dipak Kumar Singh said, “It is our goal to take CorStone’s resilience programmes to all the schools and KGBVs in the state and make them (adolescents) mentally strong,”
State Council for Education, Research and Training (SCERT)’s director R Sajjan said that the department’s target is to ensure that resilience and mental wellbeing content enters the school curriculum in Bihar and we reach out to all the four lakh teachers in our state with resilience training.
Stressing on the importance of reaching out to adolescents across genders, Women Development Corporation’s chairperson Harjot Kaur Bamhrah said that girls did better than boys in all spheres of life till they reach adolescence after which they start doing poorly in various development outcomes. This is why gender is an essential ingredient in resilience and mental wellbeing training for adolescents, she said.
Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI)’s member-secretary P P Ghosh and Amity Institute of Behavioural and Allied Sciences’s director Rajesh Nair also addressed the conference.
The conference also included a session where students from the Youth First and Girls First programmes shared their experiences. “My parents told me to drop out after Class 10, because no one else in my village had studied beyond that. I had learned about communicating assertively in the Girls First programme. I told my mother that if I become the first girl in my village to go to high school, other children will see me and be inspired to study further,” said Uganti Kumari, a Class 11 student of KGBV Maner High School.
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