Supporting APS sector in India Lessons from building LEAD

GSF member LEAD shares their experience of supporting schools in India’s huge Affordable Private School sector to harness technology in the classroom.

According to a Study by FSG, 86% of children from low-income households in urban India attend Affordable Private Schools (APS). The demand for good education is high from aspirational parents hoping for a better future for their children, who are often first-generation learners. However, APS schools can sometimes be limited by the lack of good quality teachers, academic rigour, and best practices in pedagogy and learning. LEAD works with APS to help tackle these challenges – and have learned several important lessons along the way that we would like to share with the GSF community.

Contextualising for India
A key learning of our founders when they first began their mission-critical journey to revolutionise school education in India was that English (or rather the lack of it) was a barrier to learning other subjects. When they started their own school in rural Gujarat, they quickly found that children were experiencing learning challenges in science and mathematics because English was a language that even their teachers were not comfortable conversing in.

Children living outside urban areas just don’t have the access to English that their peers in the big cities organically stumble upon - from signage in public spaces to words on buses and shopfronts. Recognising this, we developed “English Language and General Awareness” (ELGA) , an approach that sees English taught as a skill rather than as a subject taught and learned in silos. ELGA was the first of our solutions tailored to the Indian hinterlands, where nearly 70% of the population lives. These regions have also been largely ignored by innovators in education, due to barriers to entry and affordability factors, but have become the focus for LEAD in our mission to democratise the best learning practices and make them accessible for every child in India, no matter where they live or how rich their parents are.

Getting every stakeholder on board
From the beginning, we knew that we wanted to work within the school system rather than build solutions outside it, given that children spend large amounts of their day at school. We keep the child at the centre of the solution, and bring together all stakeholders - parents, teachers, school-owners, and principals - using technology, to ensure visibility, more transparency, and a combined effort to do good by our students.

Teachers access their lesson plans and a Teacher Mobile App, students can interact with lessons, quizzes, and personalised nuggets of learning on their own Student App. Parents, on the other hand, have an exclusive dashboard on the Student App to stay abreast of their children’s learning indicators. 

Learning indicators, and not exams, are the driving force behind the personalised education every child at a LEAD-powered school gets. We blend world-class curricula (our academic excellence team scours best practices across the globe and contextualises it for our target audience) with innovative technology to help enable our partner schools to close learning gaps and impart education that takes into account every child’s unique needs.

Supporting teachers and parents
We also have a team of Academic Excellence Managers, who work closely with teachers at every school to help them plan their lessons and use the many tech-powered tools to bring their classrooms alive. Just this month, we launched the LEAD Academy, an initiative to provide systematic training to our teachers beyond the workshops we conduct a few times a year. Available on their Teacher Mobile App, the courses aim to help the teachers use the LEAD solution effectively to teach students.

Parents are never left in the dark either, as they can keep easy tabs on their app with real-time snapshots of their child’s performance as well as the ability to reach out to teachers with questions. Principals, especially, have been very happy with this feature as they are able to allay a lot of parents’ fears and doubts right from the app. Helping school owners with the LEAD branding and marketing efforts has also helped institutions in remote areas increase their admission rates.

Learning in the time of COVID
This obsessive focus on the needs of the child solutions came in especially handy while dealing with the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, where schools that had previously used hardly any technology faced unprecedented changes in operations. During the pandemic, we have helped to keep children learning by providing access to remote learning for children from low-income households. For students from places where internet connectivity is intermittent or sporadic, we have developed offline workbooks and quizzes. The pandemic, however, has provided the impetus to us, as technology enablers, to constantly innovate and come up with creative and resilient solutions for the future.

To tackle learning loss associated with the pandemic, we’ve developed a new summer programme, designed to help nurture planning, organising, decision-making, and problem-solving skills, while addressing a lot of the learning losses from lockdowns, school shutdowns, and the limitations of remote learning. The programme took place over the course of six week, aimed to keep learning fun and was less resource-intensive, aimed at using whatever is available in the household.

Reflections 
We believe bringing about a sustainable change in the APS segment requires providing institutions with an optimal blend of technology and classroom learning. The right balance of teachers and technology opens the doors to higher-order thinking, creativity, and better academic results. For all this to take place, empathy needs to be at the heart of creating solutions. Technology must always be seen as a facilitator and not a replacement to education. The focus should always be on the child, and how we as technology enablers, as parents, teachers, principals, and schools can help every child in India get the education they deserve.