Priya Lakhani
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Twenty years ago, I founded a social enterprise.
I wanted to change the world.
And we were funding millions of meals to the underprivileged.
We were providing tens of thousands of vaccines across parts of Africa.
And we were funding schools in the slums of India.
Now, I thought that I was doing quite a good job and having a lot of impact in all of these areas.
Until one day ...
I was working with ministers in the UK, and they said that 20 percent of students leave secondary schools in the UK, and they're not able to read and write well enough.
Now, I thought, with brick-and-mortar schools and qualified teachers, if they're not able to do that in the UK, then I'm not having the impact that I wanted to have in those schools in the slums in India.
So what's going on?
What's the problem?
We need to fix it.
So I went to schools.
I went to schools and I asked lots of questions, and I found two critical problems on the front line of education.
The first is that they continue to have the one-size-fits-all delivery of education to a classroom of around 30 to 35 people.
The second, I think you will agree with me, should be headline news every single day.
Seventy-four percent of teachers want to quit their jobs in the next three years.
Why?
It's because of workload.
They spend so much time micro-marking, micro-assessing, trying to figure out where every child is at.