Peepul (Registered as Absolute Return for Kids)

Peepul is working to tackle one of the globe’s biggest challenges, inequity in education, in India, the world’s second most populous country. We take a grounded, practitioner-led approach to large-scale system transformation.

Our context:

We are currently on a non-linear growth trajectory, where we have crystallized and proved the efficacy of our core model, and are getting significant traction from various Indian states to replicate and scale our work.

We believe that our pioneering and unique approach has the potential to form a global blueprint for transforming school systems, relevant across all developing countries. And at this time, when the whole world reels from the COVID-19 pandemic, with the poor worst-hit, we believe that our work holds more significance than ever before.

Why the Elevate Prize:

The Prize will provide a global stage to share our work – enabling policy-makers and decision-maker in education to learn from our road-tested best-practices. Also, it will be a catalyst, allowing us to:

1. Hire the high-quality talent required to power and sustain our growth and impact journey
2. Unlock critical mentorship and support, helping us further refine our model, and calibrate it for wider, potentially global relevance.
3. Leverage the Elevate community’s knowledge,expertise and networks

When it comes to improving learning outcomes in India, we have no time to waste.

After a 13-year stint in the corporate sector, I decided to dedicate my life to improving education for the poorest communities in India, eventually founding Peepul. At Peepul, we work to create a world where every child is enabled and supported to reach their full potential – through public schools that provide education at par, if not better, than private schools. We pursue this dream by partnering with governments in transforming their school systems, so that the children of the poorest of the poor receive an excellent, holistic education.

For us, the ‘doer’ and ‘payer’ at scale is the government: armed with the experience and proof from our Exemplar Schools (our innovation labs), we support the government design and run large-scale school system strengthening programmes. Today, our work directly impacts 100,000+ schools, 300,000+ teachers and 10 million+ students across two geographies in India:

To truly tackle the problem, we seek to grow/ replicate our successful approach across India, and the developing world. To this end, we build effective partnerships with and share our codified knowledge and experience to governments and other non-profits. 

The Crisis:

India’s children are going to school,but are not learning:

The system falls woefully short on student learning outcomes,as schools spend very little time on academic activities,with school-administrative tasks taking precedence.An interconnected web of poor policy,implementation,and governance compound this.

The school closures associated with COVID-19 have further exacerbated the problem,with the impact of the learning loss threatening to reverberate for decades to come.

Our Solution:

We work deeply with government school systems to improve student learning outcomes.This happens through four interventions at the level of school-networks,state-systems and national policy support.

The four interventions of our model are:a core high-engagement classroom practice toolkit that enhances learning,supported with timely teacher upskilling,academic mentoring and aligning incentives and accountability across government school system.

Our Programmes:

We test,innovate and demonstrate this model through three Exemplar Government-Partnership Schools,supporting 1200 children (from the poorest families in Delhi).These bright spots show the excellence possible in public-school systems,with costs comparable to normal government expenditure.

We have scaled our model through deep systemic programmes with governments; currently,we work towards enabling this model across ~300,000+ teachers and 10 Million+ students.

"Our journey explained in no better words than those of India's former Secretary, Ministry of Education" 

UNIQUE APPROACH:

We are an education practitioner that works on school system transformation at scale,innovating a “practitioner-driven approach to school system transformation”.With first-hand knowledge of what works/doesn’t in a government classroom with all its pressures and complexities, we co-create scalable solutions for school systems with the government. Such an approach is unique in India:we are among a handful of organisations focusing on both learnings from direct interventions on one side,and large-scale capacity building of the government system on the other,with government adoption as the final goal.

PIONEERING WORK – EXAMPLES:

1. First Public-Private-Partnership(PPP) school in Delhi:This catalysed the formalization+expansion of PPPs in the municipality, with ~25 schools now supported by various entities.
2. First at-scale successful Government Digital Teacher Training programme in India: In response to COVID-associated schools closures, we worked to equip and skill the workforce for when schools reopen, through a state-wide Digital training programme. Training ~300,000 teachers effectively, this was recognized by the UN.
3. High-profile National CLink to UN SDSN Reportommittee: I am part of a select Committee to develop India’s guidelines for incentivizing Private/Philanthropic activities in Education.
4. Developing SOPs for 10,000 “model schools” in Madhya Pradesh, leveraging codified practices and processes in our exemplar schools.

Peepul is working on improving the learning outcomes of over 9.5 million children currently, with aspirations to ensure access to high-quality education for 166 million children in India. The sheer scale of our reach underlines the significance of our work in the context of humanity. 

The children we serve belong to families that fall in the bottom 20% of India’s population by income –typically from marginalized and vulnerable backgrounds, and first-generation learners. For these children, government schools are the only institution that can provide an opportunity to receive education (as it is fee-free).

Vignettes of impact:

• -Our PPP schools cater to 1200 students from some of the most vulnerable, underserved communities with monthly incomes under ~80$. These schools have created a benchmark for the wider public education system, with 85% students meeting/exceeding grade-level expectations.
• -Our teacher development programme, CM Rise, has disrupted the teacher development ecosystem in the country. It has been able to reach out to ~300,000 government schools teachers, recording 90%+ course enrolment and completion rates – numbers that have never been heard of in the teacher professional development domain.

Recognitions include by the UNESCO, Niti Aayog, national Ministry of Education, World Bank, etc.