The Queen's English

Improving future employability of southeast Asian youth through high-quality Spoken English lessons accessible to every child for $1/month

Across Southeast Asia ( Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand ), only 8% of people speak fluent English. This lowers their earnings as it reduces opportunities to acquire future skills - such as learning to code, being a data scientist, etc. as learning material is usually only available in English.

We are providing South East Asian school children and young adults with affordable, high-quality, spoken English programs to transform the life chances and future earning potential of the youth in these countries through their speaking fluent English.We currently do this by working with community groups, schools, and colleges online and offline in Vietnam and Indonesia and looking to expand to Thailand, Malaysia, and Phillippines.

Our solution is to give teachers completely scripted spoken English lessons backed by decades of research and proven to take students from zero English to fluent English speakers. These scripts dramatically lower the entry bar (and cost) of qualified teachers - anyone with basic English fluency can deliver a high-quality spoken English lesson. We augment these teachers' output by giving them ongoing coaching. Students are placed at the appropriate learning level after a baseline test and get exposed to approximately 3000 words in a lesson. 

Additionally, students can practice their speaking on our app, using ML/AI that gives immediate live feedback on their spoken English which allows them to perfect pronunciation and sentence structure. Our app works in low-data scenarios and on the world’s cheapest smartphone. If required this product can be implemented without any tech. 

We are addressing the challenge of future employability by improving the Spoken English fluency of South East Asian Youth. English is a gateway language - it opens up not only jobs that require English, but also skills like coding that can only be learned if you speak English. Male English speakers earn 4x  more than non-English speakers, female English speakers earn 5x non-English speakers, both skills adjusted.

Out students come out of our lessons not only with expanded vocabulary and grammar but with the confidence and comfort to use them in fluent sentences. This boost to self-esteem is crucial to them in terms of future employability - it will raise their ambition and ability when looking for jobs and upskilling opportunities. 

As per United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, skill development is crucial to achieving these goals as highlighted in SDG4, SDG8( decent work), SDG 1( eliminating poverty), and SDG5( achieving gender equality). According to the International Labour Organisation, access to high-quality training programs for youth is an issue in South Asia Countries. Moreover, most of the skill gaps are realized and attempted to fill later on in their education life.  We start early from the age of 6 and build a lifelong skill that impacts future employability. We are not only solving the problems of this generation of young job seekers in South East Asia but pre-empting the problems that will occur in the next generation, too.

Our solution serves students aged 6+ in Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand. It will help them become fluent and confident speakers of English.  47% of our student base comes from marginalized communities and 55% are girls.

Our problem and solution directly align with  The Challenge’s purpose to improve the quality of life of the most marginalized individuals in SEAsia through the lever of education. Most products currently in these countries don’t directly address the bottom of the pyramid. We are, for the first time, making high-quality spoken English teaching available to everyone in South East Asia, allowing them to get THE gateway skill that will transform their employability and upskilling chances now and in the future. The challenge is looking for solutions that address a wide demographic and are affordable. Our solution incorporates accessibility and affordability through the use of low-tech, low-cost scripted lessons delivered effectively by high-quality teachers. As per the Challenge’s requirements, we are unconstrained by the requirement of digital skills or teacher capacity. Our solution can be delivered entirely offline using no devices. The entire English-speaking population of South East Asia becomes a resource to tap for teacher hires, which given the region’s population is a significant number - where online is available, the teachers can be anywhere in the world. 

The team lead is Sandeep Mallareddy, our Chief Operating Officer and part of our senior leadership team. Our CEO Jamie Martin, and Head of Student Learning Outcomes Madhumita Subramanian,  will be supporting him. 

Firstly, We are solving the employability challenge by identifying an intelligent key lever, Spoken English, which serves as a gateway to employment opportunities. Most competitors focus on upskilling in technical areas or soft skills, however, these training sessions are meaningless unless the candidate is able to speak English fluently. Additionally, we are not waiting for the problem to manifest in a child’s life, we are proactively plugging the gap by starting as early as Kindergarten for children at the bottom of the pyramid. Learning a new language as an adult is a difficult endeavor that only the most motivated succeed in and which then inherently limits those who could have had access to high-skilled jobs that demand English fluency. By being proactive and identifying an otherwise overlooked skill we are being innovative in our approach

Yes, we have tested our solution’s approach in Vietnam and Indonesia through partnerships with NGOs and Tutoring companies. 

Our core technology is powered by an advanced Voice to Text software that can analyze spoken English responses and provide live feedback at the phoneme level to help students practice and improve their pronunciation and grammar. Existing VTT technology has two limitations (1) the accuracy of recognizing Asian accents (2) evaluating responses to open questions

 Since our curriculum and the accompanying practice problems are meticulously scripted, it overcomes both the above-mentioned deficiencies by limiting the universe of responses - thereby improving the accuracy of assessing responses and providing the right feedback.

Unemployment is a rampant issue in South- East Asia. Access to skill-building that will improve employability is limited by income levels of the individuals. Almost all white-collar, high-skilled jobs and training programs require English language fluency which those from the bottom of the pyramid have limited access to. Schools focus on writing and reading, but employers require high proficiency in spoken English. Competitor English programs are at a price point that is unaffordable to those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Our high-quality, live classes delivered by skilled teachers at $1/ month immediately open a gateway to future employability for a population that is otherwise underserved. Through this live coaching supplemented by out-of-class practice on our app,, students from K-12 in South East Asia, learn to speak English not just fluently but also confidently and enter the workforce prepared to realize their potential.

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Our impact is measured via accessibility metrics as well as student outcomes.47% of our students are from marginalized, at-risk communities who otherwise would not have the opportunity to learn to speak English fluently. Moreover, 55% of our students are girls which reflects the  dire need for equal gender-based access 

We conduct robust, rigorous assessments every 15 classes that test oral comprehension, pronunciation, grammar vocabulary and confidence.97% of our students have already learnt and used 700+ English words while 67% have learnt 1000+ words. 75% of our students consistently score 4+/5  on the confidence metric as rated by independent assessors. 

We aim to build a student force of articulate, English orators. This translates to an academic mastery goal on each assessment of 75%. Our target MOM is to improve the % of students who score >=75% by 10%

Additionally, we aim for all our students to complete the program and clear the end of the program test with a 75% mastery. Improvements in these metrics are attained by conducting revision classes, providing ongoing feedback to teachers on their ability to check for understanding, maintain high energy and build a strong bond with their students. We also conduct extra classes 1:1 for students if they show successive low performance. If the content is too high rigor we might move them down a level or two so they can build their foundation, and our curriculum is designed for this flexibility. A student can always find a lesson level mapped to their current ability to speak English. We never leave a child behind. 

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The main barriers to our growth are partnerships and technology, as well as data and measurement.  

On the partnerships side, they offer a route to both B2C (via channels) and B2B customers. We are currently able to build partnerships in both, but it is time-consuming and often unsystematic. Making this more formal, and have a quicker sales loop, will be integral to other growth. 

We also, currently, struggle to build partnerships with government and large NGOs that will allow us to get to a very large scale and to reach the very bottom of the pyramid. These are enormously resource and time-intensive to build, very slow, and often hard as a new organization to even begin. 

We also have technical barriers to growth. We need to ensure that where internet and devices are present, but very low quality, our product can work as well as it does where they are high quality. We also need to work at improving our offline solution, for example building more offline accessible content into our app practice. 

Finally, on data and measurement, we collect a huge amount of data which we probably underutilize. This will become a challenge at scale, and then a challenge to further scaling. We need to conduct a full randomized control trial of our product but lack the expertise and support. We need to use the sound files we capture on our app to improve the machine learning of our response to students. We need to ensure a best-in-class business metrics and monitoring system if we are to run an organization that works with 200,000 students per month and makes $20M in revenue per year. 

The Queen’s English has been operational since August 2020. In January 2020, we raised seed funding led by Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowan’s Emergent Ventures. Currently, we are serving about 4000 paying customers and delivering 6000 classes /month currently across South East Asia. 

The market for Spoken English especially in the Base of Pyramid populations is extremely high. The customers are willing to pay for a quality provision, however, these markets are overlooked by the traditional EdTech players - who focus on the more elite markets. 

Further, the products available to these markets are not contextualized to meet their need ( English enrichment is what most Edtech players provide versus English acquisition which the customers need), affordable, evidence-based and ensure learning outcomes. To meet this unmet demand, we have created a product for the BoP markets that can affordably scale while guaranteeing learning outcomes.  

We have a total of 24 members in the solution team. These include 6 people in the leadership team, 5 in the Education team, 5 in Operations, 2 in Product, and 6 in sales

Our team consists of people with diverse and deep-rooted backgrounds in Education and Technology. They have decades of experience in creating, implementing, and scaling educational interventions at the base of pyramid populations. Sandeep has 15 years of experience scaling and implementing quality education interventions in underserved communities at scale across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and studied in an affordable private school in India. Madhumita has 13 years of experience in education - a masters in education from Harvard, a Teach for India fellow, and led a teacher vertical at one of the biggest Edtechs in India. Charlotte co-founded a very successful school for underprivileged children in London and Jamie Martin worked for 15 years in improving education across the globe and founded Injini - Africa’s first edtech accelerator of early-stage startups. 

In addition to the core team’s experience, a majority of our team are educators who taught BoP populations. Additionally, our Chief Technology Officer, Ravi has studied in a vernacular language public school and learned English at the age of 25, post which his career skyrocketed. All of our team members have either seen the transformative power of English in the students they taught or experienced its impact in their lives. This makes the team uniquely equipped to empathize with our customers and marry their rich experiences with customer needs to create a highly effective product.

Our team lead Sandeep has rich experience in Education and has been on the founding teams of many nonprofit and for-profit educational organizations working across the globe. A recent example of an initiative has been to acquire customers for Queen’s English in the Affordable Private schools at comparatively low costs - so we can keep the cost of delivery. For this, Sandeep conceptualized FACT ( Fluency and Confidence test), an automated scalable assessment to assess the English language proficiency of students in these schools.  We have implemented this test as a pilot with 10 schools reaching about 4000 students and plan to expand it to 300 schools reaching out to 120000 students in India in about 30 days. Further, we plan to expand it to Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand as a way to increase awareness and find new customers.

A Better Vietnam  - We empower local tutors in Vietnam to teach Spoken English to rural Vietnamese Youth

Hocmai - A tutoring center in Vietnam

Yonah - A tutoring center in Vietnam

Schoters - An Indonesian EdTech startup that helps provides English learning for young people to  study abroad

It is great to have (!) the funding is not our main motivation for applying to the challenge. 

We believe that the partners, mentors, coaching, and learning are the main assistance for us. They will help us scale and overcome barriers we perceive to that scale. 
 
As mentioned, partnerships will be crucial to our scale. We believe that participation in the challenge will unlock support in reaching, and working with, large NGOs and governments in a way that will be transformational to our ability to gain scale in southeast Asia and reach students at the very bottom of the pyramid. 
 
Measurement is crucial to our business - we would make great use of the monitoring and evaluation track. We would love MIT Solve/Octava’s support in setting up both quasi and in-time full randomized control trials of our product. Furthermore, we believe firmly in using extensive data to make better business decisions. 
 
We really value peer-to-peer learning. We would love to be part of a network of organizations solving similar challenges in southeast Asia. It would be wonderful to be able to engage with and learn from them in the structure of also having formal learning modules provided by MIT Solve. This could be crucial to some of the technical innovations we need to make to ensure the highest quality (especially offline) learning for our bottom of pyramid users. 

In order to efficiently reach the very bottom of the pyramid in terms of poverty and opportunity at a large scale, we will need to work with governments and large NGOs. These organizations are hard to work with without introductions to senior-level people from influential organizations. We believe that Octava/MIT solve will be able to get us these introductions and mean that we can achieve a much higher scale, and reach far lower in the pyramid of opportunity and poverty sooner, than without them. 

Moreover, Octava/MIT solve will enable us to reach more of other types of organizations important to our growth. Channel partnerships with private sector organizations (e.g. tutoring groups, school chains) are an important part of our customer acquisition (as above). 

Finally, we will need continued funding if we are to scale as rapidly as we plan and the market needs us to. Introductions to venture capital, impact investment, and grant funding beyond our existing network (which is significant!) would be incredibly helpful.