LEAD-ing the way: This model helps affordable pvt schools improve learning

Affordable private schools (APS), which have sprung up in small towns as an alternative to the free and poor-quality state schools, are often only marginally better than the latter. The educational outcomes in these schools, which are anywhere between 200,000 and 400,000 in number, are mostly abysmal. And unfortunately, neither the NGOs nor entrepreneurs in the education technology space have much time for them.  

That’s the gap Sumeet Mehta (whose parents were both teachers based primarily in smaller towns) and Smita Deorah have attempted to close through their LEAD schools system. Both felt that no one  was addressing the challenges that the APS in smaller towns faced and they decided to do something about it by setting up their own schools.

They took the plunge in 2013 when a friend offered them some land in Mehmadabad, Gujarat. They used their own savings to set up the Shanti Niketan English School, starting with just a handful of students and slowly going up to around 25.  They hired a few local teachers and gave them some training.

But the Mehtas soon realised that bringing quality education to mostly first generation learners was easier said than done. Students might recognise the alphabet or identify letters, but they had trouble constructing a sentence. Similarly, while they could solve a math problem by applying a formula, the moment they saw the problem set out with English words, they drew a blank.

The couple also realised that most APS schools that followed the NCERT curriculum had become prisoners of their own timetable. Learning had become secondary — it was the timetable that was sacrosanct.

A third gap they noticed was that unlike government schools, where teachers were “high skill, low will”, in the APS, teachers had “low skill, high will”. Many of them were women and Mehta says, “We found them eager to learn and improve.” Yet no amount of training seemed to be enough. Training imparted in June was forgotten by September and the teachers reverted to the way they had been teaching earlier.

The husband-wife team them decided to design a “Netflix” of sorts for training — content that would be available on demand. So an app was designed that allows the teacher to find everything under a single roof, so to speak — a vertical integration that enables her to do her job better. 

Once the three main issues — the focus on English, a more flexible timetable and a more equipped teacher – were taken up, the LEAD school team found that students who were first generation learners leap frogged and covered gaps quickly. A Class III student, who, when he joined was at Class I level, managed to cover the gap quicker than they expected. The tweaking of the timetable, along with an app for the teachers, ensured that learning outcomes soon outstripped the parents’ and their own expectations.  With their efforts paying dividends, the LEAD team expanded. Four more schools were added in tier-III and tier-IV towns in Maharashtra. Today, they have 5 schools, with more than 2000 students, who  pay a fee of anywhere between Rs12,000 to Rs18,000 a year. 

By 2017, LEAD was making a profit (schools are usually a profitable business) and raised one round of funding of $10 million. But five years had flown by since they started out and the duo could see that what they had achieved wasn’t even a drop in the ocean. If they persisted with their current strategy, they would at best reach 75 schools in their lifetime. 

That’s when they began toying with the idea of offering their “school system or solution” to other schools in the same space and seeing whether the franchisee model could work. And so the LEAD school system was rolled out in 2018. 

At once, their expansion speeded up, with over 750 schools adopting the system in just over one year. A new round of funding is now on the cards to help finance the expansion. LEAD now has 550 employees.

C R Mahesh, who runs the CAMFORD schools in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, and who has adopted over 15 different school systems before this, has not found any one fully satisfactory. However, he says that the LEAD system, which he adopted in three state board schools for 3,600 students in 2018, has worked very well. “The fact that the system is developed from their own experience with running schools in a similar area helps,” he adds. The average fees for his schools are in the range of Rs18,000 to Rs20,000 annually. The LEAD system costs them Rs2,500-Rs3,000 per student in a year.

But not everyone is convinced that quality can be delivered consistently. Amitav Virmani, CEO of Education Alliance, says that while the LEAD team has set a rapid pace of growth and is well positioned to deliver, in his experience, maintaining quality while setting a pace of sharp growth remains a challenge for many players in India. Most either achieve “scale” or “quality” — few manage to do both. 

Gaurav Singh, who heads the Mumbai-based 321 Foundation, which works with teachers’ training, says that the APS segment is quite challenging. “The students, teachers and school leaders have problems that need constant support. Some of these problems are similar across schools and some are unique to each school, and any of them could make your programme ineffective.” This, Singh argues, is the challenge that every provider, including LEAD, has to surmount.

But Mehta is keenly aware of the challenges. He hopes to overcome these by using his own schools as the “testing ground” for solutions they offer others, an approach that has so far delivered results. His larger goal — to transform the APS and expose small town students to quality education — drives him to keep his targets high.