STiR Education

Having been born in India, I was frustrated to learn that despite increased access to education, children in India were not thriving and learning. It seemed teachers were seen as the problem, not the solution, so I founded STiR Education in 2012 to change that narrative. Over the past eight years, our reach has grown from 25 teachers in Delhi to 200,000 teachers across India and Uganda.

I also currently serve on the Education Commission’s workforce group. Before starting STiR, I was founding CEO of Teaching Leaders – an initiative that raised $25 million in government funding to increase attainment for every disadvantaged secondary school in the UK. I was also Head of Social Ventures at eBay UK, a Project Leader at Booz & Co, and a Senior Manager at Action Aid. I have been awarded an honorary doctorate for my contribution to global education from the University of Roehampton.

Children and young people today face a world of ‘unknown unknowns’. To succeed, they need to develop a love of learning. And education systems need to support them by building the foundations of lifelong learning. But many systems are currently failing to address this need. Governments are spending hundreds of dollars each year on educating children – but not preparing them for a future citizenship and workforce.

At STiR Education, we support education systems to reignite intrinsic motivation in every teacher and official, to role-model the foundations of lifelong learning for every child. Our approach is designed to build these foundations sustainably and at scale within education systems, by strengthening the capabilities of teachers and officials at all levels. We’re working towards our vision of a world where every child develops a love of lifelong learning – and by 2030, we aim to support 300 million across the emerging world. 

The need to prepare children and young people for a world of ‘unknown unknowns’ has been increasingly widely observed. Future generations will need to learn and adapt as they move between sectors, jobs and settlements, and many emerging countries have recognised the importance of lifelong learning in their development plans. Recent research from Ethiopia has shown that 90% of children are expected to find jobs in the informal sector.

But despite increased recognition, education systems are failing to address this need. Governments are investing in technical interventions – ‘seeds’ – without preparing the ‘soil’ of lifelong learning to enable them to take root. The Education Commission found that by 2030, more than 800 million children will lack basic secondary skills. And this matches the experience of leading employers. The Confederation of Indian Industry found that more than 50% of school leavers were unemployable.

So despite progress in other areas, children are reaching young adulthood without the most basic skills needed for success in the modern world. STiR’s contribution is to prepare the fertile ‘soil’ of lifelong learning throughout education systems, and ensure that these improvements are seen at all levels to transform the lives of children around the world. 

We’re working to develop the core foundations of lifelong learning. These include socio-emotional outcomes that children develop, like engagement, safety, self-esteem, curiosity and critical thinking. They also include the intensity and intentionality of the teaching that children receive.

We believe the most sustainable way to build these foundations is through strong role-modelling and trusting relationships at all levels of an education system – between a child and their teacher, and between teachers and the school leaders and officials who support them. But effective role-modelling doesn’t just happen: desired behaviours from teachers and officials must be defined, and we need to be clear on how to promote them.

Our key ingredient is intrinsic motivation. This is based on instilling autonomy, mastery and purpose in every member of an education system. We support governments to employ practical strategies based on each element. We introduce peer networks for teachers, school leaders and officials to share practices and enable higher-quality interactions with children. They determine how best to put these practices into action, supported through monthly coaching and high-quality feedback, while regular alignment meetings at district and state levels provide opportunities to reflect, analyse data, share learning and develop plans together to strengthen delivery. 

Teachers are critical agents of change. They offer the main in-school opportunity for role-modelling in a child’s life. So if we are to make an impact at child level, we have to support teachers to become intrinsically motivated lifelong learners first.

And it’s not enough to develop lifelong learning at teacher level alone. Extensive evidence shows that line managers are the most powerful agent of change in the workplace. So for this change to be sustainable, we also need to develop a love of learning at all levels of the system. This includes school leaders, and the state and district officials who support them. The relationships at every level are necessarily two-way to understand needs, based on openness and a commitment to a common goal.

Working through existing government systems is absolutely critical if our intervention is to succeed. They provide the best opportunity to ensure that our work can be sustained over the long term. So we work in partnership with governments to deliver our model. We run the approach together, tailoring it to best align with the unique priorities of each system, and aim to step back our involvement over time to ensure ownership and long-term sustainability. 

We’re totally committed to the long-term sustainability of our work. There’s no point doing something – no matter how impactful and good – if it can’t be sustained for a decade or more after we exit a system. So unlike other interventions focused on preparing young people for the workforce of the future, we’re addressing this issue while children are still in school, at scale through government systems. Our work so far in India and Uganda has shown that it is possible to change behaviours and reignite intrinsic motivation at all levels, to build these essential foundations of lifelong learning. 

Having been born in India, I was frustrated to learn back in 2011 that the Indian government had built one million new schools, but its children were not thriving and learning. It seemed teachers were seen as the problem, not the solution. I thought this was wrong, so I started STiR to change that narrative.

We began as a small pilot with 25 teachers in Delhi. At that point we focused on finding promising micro-innovations from teachers. The pilot taught us that this focus was misplaced – but by complete accident, our interactions with teachers reignited their intrinsic motivation.

This wasn’t a brilliant insight from us. It came from the teachers themselves, telling us that our work had restored their love of teaching. We decided to host an event and invited 400 teachers to attend. We didn’t expect many, but 340 showed up. This trial gave us the confidence that our focus on intrinsic motivation was right.

We’ve learned a great deal in the intervening years, but that focus on intrinsic motivation has remained core. It’s a missing ingredient from most education systems, but we’re now showing that it can be reignited at scale and cost-effectively in partnership with governments.

As a father of two boys, I was always haunted by the story of a boy who was told by his own teacher that ‘the son of a donkey will always be a donkey’. I recognise that but for an accident of birth, my sons would be facing similar problems. In my own education, I was lucky to have teachers who really believed in me, and who helped me get to where I am today. So I’m proud to be making a difference by ensuring that more teachers become excellent role-models and instil a love of lifelong learning in millions of children – especially in India, the country of my birth.

I’m also deeply passionate about intrinsic motivation, which I believe is at the heart of many of the biggest challenges in the world today. Although my role at STiR is evolving to become Founder & President, with the appointment of a new CEO, I’m continuing to explore new ways to apply the principles of autonomy, mastery and purpose to all areas of human life. I’m excited about the opportunity to develop practical solutions, in order to help as many people as possible to live more meaningful and fulfilling lives.

Over the past eight years, I’ve become one of the world’s leading experts on how to reignite intrinsic motivation in education systems. I’m currently writing a book on this topic (to be published by the Hachette Group in 2021), and I have grown my organisation STiR Education from a pilot with 25 teachers in Delhi in 2012, to reaching more than 200,000 teachers across India and Uganda today.

I was educated at Cambridge and Oxford Universities and received my MBA from INSEAD. I was also awarded an honorary doctorate for my contribution to global education by the University of Roehampton. I have served on the Education Commission’s workforce group – the pre-eminent organisation, founded by Gordon Brown, looking at the future of education. I was also elected as an Ashoka Fellow in 2014 and was named as one of the ‘Ten of the Best’ in the UK Social Entrepreneur Index in 2019.

I have also built a fantastic team at STiR to deliver this project. Our cross-cultural group of 70 professionals has backgrounds in the private, public and social sectors, working across six offices in four countries. We’re supported by a Board which includes Andreas Schleicher (Director for Education and Skills at the OECD) and Rachel Hinton (Team Leader of the Research and Evidence Division at DFID). We bring a blend of skills to our partner governments including design, learning, monitoring and evaluation, quality assurance and implementation support. All guided by our strong values of humility, openness, ownership and purpose. 

In 2016, we approached the Delhi government to scale up from 70 to 100 secondary schools. We were surprised by their answer – frustrated by too many NGOs working in small groups of schools, they wanted us to scale to every government school in the state (1,025), or not to scale at all.

With just three months to plan this transition, this was a nerve-racking challenge. We had to completely rethink our delivery model, because there was no way we could directly work in so many schools ourselves. So we needed to find a way to train the government’s own officials to run and manage the approach with our support. And we had to bring our team on this journey with us, with huge changes to their roles.

This was the biggest challenge in our short history, and there were many bumps as we settled into our new way of working. We learned huge lessons about alignment – when to be influenced by the system, and when to hold our nerve and push for changes. But ultimately it was a huge success, and it still drives how we work with partner governments today. 

A couple of years ago, we discovered a payroll fraud incident which caused a significant funding gap. This was obviously a huge shock and I was very disappointed by this loss of donor funds.

The following week, I was due to complete a series of meetings with our US-based donors. As our COO and Finance team were still investigating the fraud, we didn’t have all of the information about how and why this had happened. But I was certain that I couldn’t hold the meetings without immediately informing the donors about this issue.

It wasn’t easy to tell our donors that we had lost some of their money. But the trust and faith we had built over the years made it an open and honest conversation. Each partner appreciated hearing the news first-hand from me, especially since the investigation was still ongoing.

This was precious donor money and I wasn’t prepared to ask them to fill the funding gap. So my Chief Programme Officer and I took a salary sacrifice, and the entire STiR team agreed to take no annual increment that year. I’m incredibly proud of how we came together as a team, and as a truly values-driven organisation. 

We’re not the only organisation thinking about the skills needed to thrive in the modern world. Many great interventions are focused on directly preparing young people for the workforce of the future. But it can cost hundreds of dollars to prepare a single child after they have left school. And these interventions often come too late. They struggle to achieve sustainability, because they are not role-modelled throughout education systems.

We’re doing things differently. By addressing this issue while children are still in school, at scale and through government systems, we’re able to make a significant impact for less than USD $0.50 per child per year.

We also believe that our government partnerships are innovative. We develop deep learning partnerships with state and national governments because we don’t want our approach to be dependent on us. We tailor the approach to best align with each education system, and our team supports officials to ensure that the approach is increasingly prioritised. We find that the engagement of officials at state level helps to provide credibility and accountability to district officials. This buy-in can accelerate behaviour change among teachers at large scale. 

Education systems today must prepare every child, everywhere, to thrive in a world of ‘unknown unknowns’. We’re working towards a world where every child develops a love of lifelong learning, by developing the foundations of lifelong learning.

Our theory of change has three distinctive characteristics. Firstly, we use the principles of intrinsic motivation (autonomy, mastery and purpose) to prepare children to become lifelong learners. Our model is based on a number of activities that take place within a system. And each of these activities is designed to increase the intrinsic motivation of all stakeholders. This is the critical ingredient to help the foundations of lifelong learning to grow.

Secondly, we focus on role-modelling and relationships as the most sustainable way to build these foundations within systems. We understand role-modelling to be the demonstration and promotion of behaviours and attitudes that you wish to see in others. This is overlooked in most education systems. But it’s been our biggest organisational strength and source of success.

Thirdly, our approach is guided by our national and state government learning partnerships. We work through existing teachers, school leaders and officials to deliver our model, and build deep and trusting relationships with senior officials to tailor our approach to best align with each system.

And so at each level of the system, our termly learning improvement cycles introduce peer networks, action and feedback, and reflection. First, district officials are introduced to the content for the next term in a three-day training meeting. Then they lead training sessions for school leaders to build their confidence and capability to lead teacher network meetings. Teachers will learn new practices, to enable higher quality interactions with their children and create safer and more engaging classrooms.

For every level, we introduce monthly coaching and support to enable high-quality feedback. And regular reflection at district and state levels provide an opportunity for all stakeholders to analyse data, share learning and develop plans together to strengthen delivery. Through this work, children, teachers and officials will see improvements in engagement, safety, curiosity and critical thinking, self-esteem, learning time and the quality of teaching.

At present, we are reaching 160,000 teachers and 4.6 million children across three states in India (Delhi, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu) and the national education system in Uganda.

By June 2021, we hope to be reaching at least 180,000 teachers and 5.6 million children, by starting new projects in Indonesia and Ethiopia and increasing our reach in India.

By 2025, we aim to have reached at least 2 million teachers and 40 million children in at least six countries. 

Our objective over the next five years is to significantly increase our scale, while ensuring that our model achieves high-quality government ownership and long-term sustainability. We’re ultimately targeting 2030 as the year by which we need to have made a meaningful impact for hundreds of millions of children worldwide who lack the foundations of lifelong learning – subject to maintaining quality, generating learning and living in line with our values.

We’re about to start our first project in Indonesia, providing the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in a new world region. Over the next year, we’ll expand to a few districts in East Java, and by 2025 we hope to work with every teacher and child in three provinces. We’re also launching in Ethiopia in the next few months, and we’re looking at Brazil and Egypt as probable future countries in the coming years.

Within India, we’re looking to expand our approach too. But we also want to ensure a sustainable exit from Delhi by 2022. And we’re having a similar conversation in Uganda, where we aim to hand over our approach to the government by the end of 2023.

Finally, we want to ensure the quality of our approach. We’re partway through a 4-year longitudinal study, and we hope to see this demonstrating significant behavioural changes in each geography. We will share our data widely with the sector, and hope that intrinsic motivation and lifelong learning will be better recognised as critical to all education systems. 

The current Covid-19 pandemic presents a substantial barrier to our work. We’re finding opportunities to support our government partners through this period, but technological challenges in each of our geographies make it very difficult to reach teachers and children.

As schools return, we also need to ensure that our focus on intrinsic motivation and lifelong learning is not lost amidst efforts to help learners to catch up on missed content. We’re currently supporting by developing content that will help teachers to better meet the need of learners returning after a prolonged period outside of school, but need to rely on the strong buy-in from our partner governments to ensure that we can maintain momentum and continue to build the foundations of lifelong learning, in alignment with other valuable initiatives.

Funding also presents a barrier. We’re pleased that in our current systems, governments cover all programme costs, including the full salaries of every teacher and official engaged in our approach and the costs of running all peer networks. This makes our model is incredibly cost-effective (USD $0.50 per child per year in India), and we expect this to fall as we scale. But we still need to cover the costs of our team, which is donor funded to maintain our independence. We’re addressing this by asking government partners to actively fundraise with us, using their networks to drive local philanthropy. This will allow our global catalytic funders to support growth to new geographies, while local funders sustain our work over time. 

Our most important partners are our governments – the Ministry of Education and Sports in Uganda, and three state ministries in India. They refocus existing human and financial resources to support our approach over five years, and we step back our involvement over time to ensure long-term sustainability. We aim to build deep and trusting relationships with senior officials with mutual vulnerability, in order to best align with each education system and respond to their unique priorities. We also connect states and countries in our network so that leaders can learn together, and we’re increasingly working to co-customise and co-design content for each geography.

We’re proud to be backed by some of the world’s leading foundations, donors and corporations, including the Mastercard Foundation, DFID, UBS Optimus Foundation, Dubai Cares and the Peery Foundation. We’ve been working with many of these organisations for a number of years and engage closely with our partners to develop our strategy, including in our annual Funder Partner Strategy Group meetings.

We also collaborate with a wide range of other pre-eminent organisations. These include other NGOs working in the same education systems, to identify opportunities to amplify their interventions through our approach. We’ve also partnered with Ichuli and Education Development Trust to support our monitoring and evaluation activities, and work closely with global leaders at the Education Commission and UNESCO to increase the profile of intrinsic motivation in our sector. 

In our business model, we work with our partner governments to help them to introduce our approach of learning improvement cycles. All of the activities in these cycles are led by school leaders and officials within the existing government system, and all of the costs are borne by the governments. We supply a maximum of one person per district to provide training, coaching and data to senior district officials, helping them to run and manage the approach with increasing levels of intrinsic motivation, confidence and quality. Our focus from the outset is on building government ownership in order to ensure long-term sustainability, and enable our eventual exit from each geography.

We select geographies based on a strong leadership and financial commitment from governments. Each geography is assessed using our system partnership diagnostic tool, which looks at conditions such as a stable middle tier of officials, evidence of existing interventions in the system and the likelihood of recruiting a strong in-country team, to give us the best possible success in any new location. And our fundraising strategy is increasingly focused on growing local funding, especially for our work in India, to decrease our external dependency and increase regional support. 

Our model is already incredibly cost-effective, costing less than USD $0.50 per child per year in India, and we expect this to fall further as we scale. Every donor dollar into STiR currently leverages $24 from our partner governments as they cover the full costs of the programme, including the full salaries of every teacher and official engaged in our approach and the costs of running all peer networks.

So our only cost is our team, which is donor funded to maintain our independence. In our newest engagement in Indonesia, we’re keen to explore the potential for the government to pay for these services, which will further reduce our need for donor funding. But in our other geographies, especially in India, we want to build a stable base of local philanthropy to support our activities over the long term. We’re asking government partners to actively fundraise with us to harness their networks, and we’re working to increase CSR funding from our own contacts. We’re grateful to be supported by a sustained group of global donors and foundations, whose unrestricted funding allows us critical flexibility in ensuring our long-term financial sustainability.  

Our annual budget for the most recent completed financial year (ending 31 March 2020) was approximately $4.5 million USD. This funding is provided through grants from leading foundations, donors and corporations, including the Mastercard Foundation, DFID, UBS Optimus Foundation, Dubai Cares and the Peery Foundation.

Our annual budget for the 2020/21 financial year is $3.3 million USD. 

Covid-19 presents the most significant challenge to global education in a generation. We’ve been working with our partner governments to understand where we can best provide support. But we recognise that the current situation is part of a broader trend towards an increasingly uncertain future, including the climate crisis, increased inequality and rapid technological changes. So it’s more important than ever to build the foundations of lifelong learning in children, to equip them to manage life in this world of ‘unknown unknowns’.

We believe that the Elevate Prize can have a huge impact on achieving our 2025 vision, providing an opportunity to raise the profile both of our organisation and the issue we are working to address. The media and marketing campaign would help to ensure that the importance of these foundations is more widely recognised by governments and partners, both in existing and new geographies. We hope that the prize would open doors with senior policymakers in new states and countries, and to increase the funding available for this critical objective.

We also hope that the support from the Elevate Prize network, including the professional capacity building services, can help us to move our organisation to the next level of its maturity. As we start to work in more countries, our work at a global level is increasingly complex, and we hope to learn from others who have undertaken a similar journey to help us to remain lean and agile even as we deepen our engagement in more geographies.  

We believe that the most valuable area for our work would be the marketing, media and exposure, as we only have one member of staff focused on communications as this would be game-changing for our organisation and our key objective. We also believe that the funding would be able to leverage significant support from other donors. But in general, we are excited by the potential for this prize to improve every area of our work, and we hope to have the opportunity to work with MIT Solve to further explore how your resources can increase our impact. 

We are aiming to partner with new governments in Ethiopia, Brazil and Egypt, as well as to build new connections with state leaders across India. We also want to build more partnerships with major NGOs working in these geographies, to help us to understand the local context and identify opportunities to collaborate. And we’re keen to partner with more of the leading figures in international development, to increase the profile of intrinsic motivation as a mechanism to develop the foundations of lifelong learning within education systems.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been embracing technology to a greater extent to enable our work to continue. For example, we’re exploring virtual networks and coaching in our work in Delhi, and experimenting with video content in Tamil Nadu, and we’re excited by the levels of engagement that we have seen. We’re already working with partners on some new tools including an improved mobile app to collect data directly from teachers and officials. But we would be keen to partner with more technology providers to identify areas where technology can enable us to have a wider impact without increasing our costs.