How to improve Affordable Private Education in India? | Our Action Plan
Improving schools that serve the bottom strata of our society
Through this guide, you will get to know
about our experiences with school education
how do we identify problems in Affordable schools
how we see school education improvement possibilities
and how we want to partner with existing & new solution providers
Please note, it is a dynamic guide and we will look at it in the following sequence
The term Affordable Private School Education looks like western terminology to us.
In the west, the majority of students go under public education and only a very selected few are able to opt for very expensive private education
That’s the way the term affordable private education came into existence
When we tried to see it in the Indian context, it was not easy to draw a parallel.
A large chunk of Indian students are already going through private education and the quality of this private education is in question
When the last time India wrote PISA, an international test of 14-year-olds on Reading Writing, and Arithmetic, we were 73rd in the total of 74 participating countries.
And instead of focusing on improvement, we ban PISA in India.
Initiatives by the Indian counterparts said the same results, but still, no one cares
The reality is that Indian education for the masses is in shambles.
So we tried to classify Indian schools for the bottom of the strata as per their annual fee & expenditure
Budget Schools (Below INR 18,000/-)
Above Average Fee Schools (From INR 18,000/- to INR 35,000/-)
Moderate Fee Schools (From INR 35,000/- to INR 60,000/-)
With such a small increment in fees, the problems of the schools change substantially.
If you are trying to improve a school in any of these 3 demographics, you may start with
Chapter 1 | Idea Collection
Nobody knows everything, especially when we are trying to solve complex social problems.
Having the humility to learn from others is a must and one should definitely start by collecting ideas.
We are creating various ways to collect ideas and we will keep adding them here later. Let us share one example
EdMonks Deliberations
It is a 12-week invite-only cohort for education leaders, experts, and entrepreneurs to share their thoughts on improving affordable private school education
We are creating EdMonks Deliberations as a 12-week cohort to think of solutions to problems in improving Affordable Private Schools.
Why should one join
These Deliberations are designed to help the cohort members to gain onÂ
Networking
Influence
and Learning
Who can become a part of this program
We may take at max 50 people in the whole thing with the following distribution
School Owners, Directors, CEOs | up to 8.
School Principals, Vice Principals, Principals between jobs | up to 8
Pedagogues | up to 8Â
School Solution Providers | entrepreneurs, company representatives | up to 8
Subject Matter Experts | up to 8
Government, NGO, Researcher | up to 8
EdMonks Founder | 1
Volunteer Community Manager | 1 (If we could find one to do it pro bono)
How will it work
Here, in the first 12-week-long cohort, we want to create 12 videos in 12 weeks.
Each video can have a team of at max 2-5 people that will be called the Topic X Core Team, Where X is the Topic Number.
One invited guest expert can be a part of only one Topic X Core Team.
Once a person is accepted into the team as an invited guest expert, one is expected to pick their topic of choice from this list
Before we start working on each of the videos, we will invite all the cohort members (invited guest experts and other enthusiasts) to an online video meeting that we call EdMonks Deliberations.
Here everybody can share their thoughts on that topic with the core team.
Every Cohort member is expected to participate in a minimum of 4 Deliberations.
The core team (of 4 people) will then have a couple of meetings to finalise the flow of the video and necessary video recordings.
and once it is done, the final editing will be managed by EdMonks
The video will be first distributed on the internet through EdMonks Facebook and LinkedIn Social Media channels.
After a month, it will also be shared on EdMonks YouTube channel.
The whole thing will be supported by a WhatsApp group with no-nonsense forwards.Â
My School My Pride
This is another idea collection project (in making) that will be released in a couple of months, where we will involve elite innovative schools
to give back to society (as the content made by this project will help school leaders to implement innovation in their schools),
to help their students to learn a whole lot of life skills
and to gain substantial publicity.
We are trying to find more such ideas to collect ideas and you may also think of the same.
Chapter 2 | Research
The next step should be nothing but Research.
Once you have ideas, you would now need to find what works and what does not.
In this calendar year, we want to do a lot of research
Some of the projects that we are planning to work on are
Standard Operating Procedures & Data Flows in schools
Improving Reading in Affordable Private Education
and we are looking for partners to fund this work.
If we will not get partners in some space, we will fund it on our own or through product partners (small teams that would work with us as co-founders for that product).
Chapter 3 | Creating MVPs
After the research, you should ideally make a product as a solution that you want to test.
After looking at various ideas, and looking at the students of the target school zone, we identified specific areas to build our MVP
We will not try to reinvent the wheel and might look for existing providers as we want to use existing work and research to create a solution.
We call our MVP, the School Innovation Unit which right now has four parts to it
A program to give confidence to these students
A bare minimum reading program
a task-based teacher improvement program
and finally a Word of Mouth campaign
Chapter 4 | Execute a Pilot
We realized that it will be very difficult to build scalable products and programs without actually testing them on the ground.
So we started a Pilot Project
We wanted to achieve a lot in a very small time
and so we were going very fast
but we could not gain the trust of the stakeholders
and we failed miserably in the first week itself. Read full story
It was a big lesson for us and we decided to go slow
So we improvised our MVP and called it School Innovation Unit and structured it into 3 levels
Level 1
At Level 1, a one-year-long program, we will focus on building a conducive environment for change, to gain the trust of the stakeholders by showing them quick results.
Level 2
By now, we must have improved the lives of teachers, they must have started enjoying the classroom. Students would be better readers and speakers. Parents will be participating in school activities
and now for 2 years, we would implement a Data Flow system, a week-wise bare-minimum curriculum, and a rigorous teacher training program. We will also add clubs, collaborative projects within the school, and collaboration with other schools.
Level 3
At this level, we will start adding new programs to the curriculum as per the needs. that can be added to the bare minimum curriculum.
We will also introduce innovative programs
Chapter 5 | Building a Team
Today, even the survival of an affordable private school is in question, if it tries to do it alone.
They buy everything expensive and they are not being offered many things despite being able to pay.
We want to build three kinds of teams
A team of enthusiasts who want to help us in this cause, whom we will not be able to hire at least for the next 5 years as we will not be able to add a lot of schools and we cannot charge high to these schools
A team of schools (we want to reach upto 5 in the next 3 years)
and A core operations team
And you see, it is a huge challenge. Let’s see how will w be able to do it and who will come forward to help us grow these teams.
Chapter 6 | Scaling up
So you see, right now, we cannot even think to scale.
There are already many slips between the cup and the lips.