Overview

Institution: A CBSE-affiliated secondary school in Andheri West, Mumbai (name withheld at institution's request) Programme: Dheya School Partnership — Stream Selection Track Cohort Size: 340 students (Class 9, academic year 2024–25) Duration: September 2024 to February 2025 Primary Outcome: 73% reduction in regret-driven stream changes between Class 10 results and Class 11 enrolment

The Problem: A Decision Made in the Wrong Order

Every year, the same pattern repeated itself.

Board results would arrive in May. Parents would call the school within days — sometimes within hours. Conversations that had been deferred for two years would suddenly become urgent. Science or Commerce? Engineering or medicine? CA or MBA?

The school's principal had been tracking stream-change requests — students who enrolled in one stream in Class 11 and then requested a transfer within the first three months — since 2019. By 2023, the number had reached 47 out of approximately 290 students. That is roughly one in six students making a significant course correction within weeks of a decision they had supposedly made deliberately.

"The stream change requests told us two things," the principal told us. "First, students were choosing based on what they thought they should want, not what they actually wanted. Second, the actual choice was being made under tremendous time pressure — two weeks after boards, in an emotionally charged atmosphere. That is not a good decision-making environment."

The school had tried career aptitude tests before. Printed, mass-administered booklets that produced generic reports. Most students filed the reports without reading them. Teachers found them unhelpful because the outputs were too abstract to act on.

The school approached Dheya in mid-2024 with a specific brief: could career assessment be integrated into the academic year in a way that actually changed the quality of the stream-selection decision — and reduced the churn they were seeing every May?

The Approach: Assessment as a Semester-Long Conversation

The Dheya team's first recommendation surprised the school's leadership: do not run the assessment in April or May, when it would feel like one more exam. Run it in September of Class 9 — eighteen months before the decision has to be made.

The logic was deliberate. When the assessment is temporally separated from the decision, students engage with it differently. There is no pressure to produce a particular answer. The results become a resource for reflection rather than a justification for a choice already under pressure.

The RAPD assessment — which measures orientation across four dimensions: Relational, Analytical, Practical, and Directive — was administered to all 340 Class 9 students over two sessions in September 2024. The online assessment took approximately 45 minutes per student.

What followed the assessment was structured in three stages:

Stage 1: Individual Profile Reports (September–October 2024)

Each student received a personalised RAPD profile report in accessible language — not a technical psychometric document, but a narrative description of their dominant orientations and what those orientations tend to mean in terms of career environments, learning styles, and work preferences.

For a student with a high Analytical orientation, the report described careers where deep, independent intellectual work is rewarded. For a student with a high Relational orientation, it pointed toward fields where human connection and communication are central. The language was concrete and specific enough that students could see themselves in it.

A critical decision: Parent reports were generated alongside student reports, and a joint parent-student session was offered to all 340 families. Approximately 68% of families attended. The goal was not to tell parents what stream to choose, but to give them a shared vocabulary with their child for the conversation that would eventually need to happen.

Stage 2: Teacher-Counsellor Integration (October–December 2024)

All twelve Class 9 class teachers attended a half-day Dheya workshop on interpreting RAPD profiles in an educational context. The goal was not to turn teachers into career counsellors but to give them enough fluency to notice alignment and misalignment in their classrooms.

A Math teacher who understood that three students in her class had very high Analytical scores could watch for whether their engagement with abstract problem-solving confirmed or complicated that profile. A Languages teacher could notice whether students who showed high Relational orientations in their RAPD were indeed the ones most engaged in communication-intensive activities.

This integration created what the school's head of guidance described as "a living assessment" — one whose validity was continuously being tested against observable classroom behaviour.

The school also trained two counsellors in Dheya's career mapping methodology. These counsellors conducted individual forty-five-minute sessions with students who showed either ambiguous profiles (where no single orientation was dominant) or who had expressed confusion about their interests during group activities.

Stage 3: Stream Guidance Sessions (January–February 2025)

In January, four months before boards and stream selection, the school ran structured small-group sessions of twelve to fifteen students each, guided by the two trained counsellors. Each session used the students' RAPD profiles as a starting point, mapped those profiles to the three available stream options (Science, Commerce, Arts/Humanities), and walked students through the implications — not just for Class 11 and 12, but for the undergraduate degrees and career environments each stream typically leads toward.

Students were encouraged to ask questions that parents often find uncomfortable to answer: "What if I choose Science and hate it?" "Can someone with my RAPD profile do well in Commerce even if my parents want Science?" "What careers are genuinely available in Arts that aren't just teaching?"

The sessions were recorded (with student consent) and transcribed. The school found that the quality of questions students were asking in January 2025 was significantly more substantive than what the same age group had asked in previous years.

The Outcome

The Primary Number: Stream Changes Down 73%

In June 2025, after Class 10 board results, the school tracked stream change requests in the first three months of Class 11. The result: 11 requests out of 340 students, compared to a historical average of approximately 40 requests per year. That is a 73% reduction.

The eleven students who did change streams were not failures of the programme. Seven of them had changed for reasons unrelated to career clarity — parental pressure reversals, a friend group moving to a different section, one student who moved cities and re-enrolled with different options available. Four changed because their board results had genuinely surprised them (one in each direction — two students performed better than expected in Science subjects and upgraded; two performed worse and recalibrated).

"These are rational changes," the principal noted. "What we eliminated was the irrational change — the student who chose Science because they felt they had to, spent three months miserable, and then came back to ask for Commerce. That is what we don't see anymore."

Parent Satisfaction Scores

The school administered a brief survey to parents of Class 10 students at the end of the academic year. On the question "I feel my child has a clear direction for stream selection," 81% of parents agreed or strongly agreed — compared to 34% who had agreed with the same question in the previous year's survey.

This is arguably the more significant metric. A student with a clear direction is one whose parents have been brought along in the process, not one who has simply been told what to choose.

Teacher Observations

The head of guidance summarised the classroom change in a phrase that stuck with us: "The students stopped asking us which stream is better. They started asking us whether they were right for a particular stream. That is a completely different conversation."

What the Assessment Revealed at the Cohort Level

One finding from the RAPD analysis of the 340-student cohort deserves specific mention, because it has implications for how Indian schools approach stream guidance.

42% of students who initially stated a preference for Science had RAPD profiles that were primarily Relational or Practical — orientations that are typically better served by Commerce or Humanities environments, respectively. This misalignment was not a surprise to the Dheya team; it reflects a well-documented pattern in India where Science stream carries social prestige independent of individual fit.

What was notable was what happened when these students received their RAPD results and attended the joint parent session. In post-session surveys, 71% of those students reported that seeing their profile helped them have a more honest conversation with their parents about their preferences. Many described the profile report as "permission" to want something different from what was expected.

Replicability: The Workshop Model

The school has formalised the programme into what it now calls the "Stream Clarity Semester" — a structured six-month intervention beginning in September of Class 9 that other schools can adopt.

The model requires:

  • Two trained in-school counsellors (Dheya offers a two-day certification programme)
  • A minimum of two parent engagement sessions
  • Teacher integration workshops at the beginning and middle of the semester
  • Individual follow-up for students with ambiguous or conflicted profiles

The school has shared the model with three other CBSE schools in the Mumbai metropolitan area that expressed interest after the results were published. Dheya is currently supporting a multi-school rollout across those institutions for the 2025–26 academic year.

Reflections from the School

The school's principal offered this summary at the conclusion of the partnership evaluation:

"We spent years trying to solve the stream change problem by improving our counselling at the point of decision — better guidance in April and May, more one-on-one time with counsellors. The results were marginal. What Dheya helped us understand is that the problem is not the decision itself, it is the quality of preparation going into the decision. When students arrive at the decision point with eighteen months of reflection behind them, the decision becomes obvious. The argument with the parents has already happened, in a calmer moment. The doubt has already been worked through. What is left is just confirmation."

That shift — from crisis counselling at the point of decision to developmental preparation well before it — is the core insight that this programme has demonstrated at scale.

Dheya partners with schools, colleges, and educational institutions to design and deliver career guidance programmes grounded in psychometric assessment and structured mentoring. For information about school partnerships, visit /for-institutions or contact our institutional team.