Octava Foundation

🌍 School Leadership Matters Summit 2024 (Our Recap) School leaders are essential in enabling environments supportive of teachers and students. Launching the 2024 GEM Report UNESCO at the School Leadership Matters Summit, the importance of professionalizing school leadership for local education systems took centre stage in the discussions. Together with Global School Leaders we review the insights from this summit - captured in Day 2's panel moderated by Octava Foundation's CEO Raman Sidhu, drawing from experiences of school leaders from Latin America, India, and the UK. The panel discussed the GEM Report's four dimensions of professionalization, the diverse strategies of training and development, and the specific local conditions informing professionalization. From bridging theory into practice and navigating cultural contexts, read on for our summary of takeaways. #LeadForLearning #SchoolLeadership #GEMSReport2024 #EducationLeadership Global School Leaders Anna Penido Centro Lemann Steve Kariithi Dignitas Project Baidurya Bhusan Sen Alokit Agustin Porres Varkey Foundation

UNESCO has just published the #2024GEMReport, focusing on the crucial role leadership plays in driving education forward, underscoring how school-level, systems-level, and political-level school leadership (e.g. principals, teachers, school management committee members, civil servants, legislators, and the wider society) can steer much-needed progress in the right direction.   Our partnership with Starfish Education's Future School Transformation Program shares this vision. It is grounded in the belief that investing in school leaders capacity through professional training and offering quality mentoring and coaching to school leaders- can help them to set clear priorities and expectations for the school, prioritise learning outcomes for learners, and empower their colleagues to work towards a shared goal of learners’ learning and development.   Read on to see how this 3-year pilot is designed to support local school leadership in Thailand. Raman Sidhu Prae Nanthaporn Seributra   #SchoolLeadershipMattersSummit2024 #GlobalSchoolLeadership #2024GEMReport GEM Report UNESCO #Leadingforlearning - Photo credits: Starfish Education (Future School Leader Kick-off Event, July 2024)

Octava Foundation supports this statement of commitment to ‘enabling all children to develop a broad range of foundational skills’. Moreover, we’ve hardwired Dual Outcomes - Academic outcomes and Non-cognitive & Cognitive skills development outcomes , in our Young Learners Fund’s investment strategies, measurement processes and partnerships with SHINE Children and Youth Services Playeum Starfish Education The Majurity Trust Research For Impact Charlotte Goh Charles Tan Lee Seng Meng Felicia Lau Joanne Yoong Sherria Ayuandini Jin Yao Kwan

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The Future School Transformation Program marks Octava Foundation’s first partnership in Thailand -- and we’re thrilled to partner Starfish Education, an organisation that shares our vision for closing the learning and skills gap for learners in low-resource environments. 🌱✍️ This is a multi-prong program that will integrate three key projects: school leaders transforming their schools, teacher knowledge and competency improvements, and providing high-quality resources for teaching and learning. All elements work towards delivering quality foundational learning outcomes for learners, including breadth of skills such as creativity, critical thinking and communication. ✍️🗣️💭 By collaborating with Starfish Education a local partner with deep understanding of Thailand's educational system and its challenges, the program approach is grounded in real needs and will maximise impact through engagement with districts and local government stakeholders. The program design includes a robust evaluation to garner insights that would help refine the program further and to poise it for scale and replication across more districts and schools. Our work is literally just beginning. 💡 Prae Nanthaporn Seributra Mark Cox Raman Sidhu Francesco Conrotto Caruso #EducationEquity #Partnership #FutureSchoolTransformation #OctavaFoundation #StarfishEducation

Amidst Covid-19 that further exacerbated the systemic complexities of educational inequality in Southeast Asia, we organized the Octava Social Innovation Challenge in 2020 with MIT Solve with the purpose of identifying and supporting EdTech solutions to address educational disadvantage. With the majority of work in Singapore before the Challenge, this project was by far our steepest learning curve - from understanding the landscape of educational equity in Southeast Asia, assessing the promise of EdTech, designing ways to support innovators, to developing partnerships through zoom calls! We have taken rich lessons from this deep dive, and it continues to inform our work in education and in the region. To this experience, our ‘critical friend' and evaluation partner Research and Communications Group (RCG), has penned this reflective piece articulating some of our biggest takeaways from engaging with the prize philanthropy approach towards social innovation. 💡 To read: https://lnkd.in/gpC-BC3M Octava Social Innovation Challenge: https://lnkd.in/gdN-enz6 #EdTech #Prizephilanthropy #socialinnovationSEA #EducationEquity

👏 Congrats on this milestone work from our friends at Playeum, in collaboration with Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) (A/Prof Sirene Lim 林美莹, Dr Cynthia Lim, Dr. Kaveri G, Ms Samantha Tan). Octava Foundation sees the potential for play as a tool for equity in so many areas of a child's life - in education, health, social development. Play is powerful- share this white paper and join the work to bring in back! https://lnkd.in/g3vsNsmX 💥

How much of #EdTech can be an equalizer for education? If so, how can philanthropy harness opportunities in service of equity gaps in education across the globe? This week, International Education Funders Group (IEFG)'s latest episode of Brains in Gear, features our CEO Raman Sidhu in conversation with Guilherme Cintra from Lemann Foundation, Seiji Isotani, and Cate Noble of Better Purpose on this emerging but rapidly evolving field. Dig into the conversation here 🎙️ https://bit.ly/BIGedtech4 📚 #EducationEquity #ResourcingLearners Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/edtMZMqM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eEPzdYK6 Amazon Music https://lnkd.in/ei-vzjgn

🤸♂️ Octava Foundation X Playeum Partnership 🤸♀️   We firmly believe adults play irreplaceable roles in providing the right environments for children to thrive and learn. Today marks the 1st UN-declared #InternationalDayofPlay, and we cannot be more thrilled to announce our new partnership with Playeum. This partnership seeks to boost learning environments for children, by giving more trusted adults the skills for play. Because beyond bringing joy and fun, play is an integral part of a child’s learning process. It is a creative lever for the development of socioemotional competencies - self-regulation, emotional intelligence, problem-solving and social skills, these all arise through play. Yet in high-pressured societies today where academic performance is prioritized, children are left with less and less room for play. And the adults - parents, teachers and other caregivers – need systems and support to bring play back to homes, schools, communities. As Octava Foundation continues to bridge the learning gaps of our young in the early education space, we hope to find more of such work in the ecosystem that builds adult capacity, enabling our children to navigate the world in a more resilient, expressive and creative manner. #UNESCO #WorldPlayDay #TrustedAdults #PowerofPlay #SocioemotionalCompetencies #RighttoPlay #APlayfulSingapore

From 2020 to 2022, Octava Foundation had the opportunity to support a study led by NUHS to study the effectiveness of an autism screening tool, to identify children who potentially could be on the autism spectrum. Following this study, the screening tool, the M-CHAT-R/F questionnaire is currently offered as part of the routine 18-month childhood developmental screening in all the seven polyclinics under NUP.   The study was successfully published in a leading peer-reviewed international scientific journal, Autism, and picked up by news channels recently, highlighting the tool's performance in local polyclinics: a 5-10 minute checklist for caregivers who bring their toddlers in on their developmental check-up, can detect children at higher likelihood for autism with about 90% accuracy.   With the tool facilitating systematic screening and earlier detection, more children on the autism spectrum could receive help at a crucial period of their development - to hone skills for language and cognition, which will benefit their later years at school, at employment, and at life.    Proving the local effectiveness of this checklist has led to successful adoption at these polyclinics, thus impacting lives of persons on the autism spectrum which stands at about 1% of our population. For philanthropic organizations like ours working to support equitable education and skills development, this is a winning testament to the importance of building local evidence.   Belatedly, we congratulate Dr. Aishworiya Ramkumar, Dr. Ruth Zheng and the National University Polyclinics and National University Hospital teams on the successful delivery of this study. #Localevidence #Equitableskills #Autismscreening   https://lnkd.in/giXXtm-h