Future learning: Democratising schooling through ed tech

Like many in the past 18 months, it’s had to adapt and adapt again to coronavirus, especially to ensure the wellbeing of its pupils, staff, and the wider community of parents.

From embracing online learning and remote working to transforming the physical experience inside classrooms to ensure safety, schools have been at the forefront of coping with Covid’s impact. Few industries have been put to the test like education with its customers, the pupils, facing examinations that shape their own personal futures.

So while the students continued to learn, what lessons has the industry taken on board during the pandemic?

Dino Varkey, the CEO of GEMS Education, sat down with Arabian Business to discuss how the use of technology and innovation has accelerated in his business.

AB: What’s your helicopter year, tell us where you think education is at, and talk to us about the challenges that you’ve faced over the last 12 months.

DV: The pandemic has been, as I’ve described it to a number of people, perhaps the most unnatural social and economic dislocation of our lifetimes. For schools. Yes, there was a significant and rapid transition to a different mode of learning, but I always like to look at the silver lining. It’s an inflection point that caused the acceleration of technology adoption in education.

Technology has always been a part of education, but you could argue that the education sector has been notoriously slow to adapt and change to the needs of our world, both today and in the future. So I certainly think that it has been an inflection point that’s caused this acceleration of adoption. And that’s something that from a GEMS standpoint, we’ve always believed in, and we’ve invested heavily behind our technology infrastructure.

But I think the interesting point, which is important for everyone to understand, it isn’t just about technology, though. The ability for schools to be successful during this period, is actually a function of not just the technology, but having a consistent set of expectations across your people, your pedagogy, and your process.

So that’s certainly what I think the state of education is, as far as the impact of the pandemic. If I think about the challenges that we’ve had to overcome, teachers have had to innovate and be creative and do more than they ever thought was possible. Our students have had to adapt a different mode of learning, sometimes disconnected from the most important things in their education process, which is their peer group.

Technology has always been a part of education

As school administrators and school leaders, we’ve had to ensure that above everything else, our schools and our student communities are safe. I’m incredibly proud of what our schools have achieved.

When around the world the general sentiment around education is one where people are talking of learning loss, how students have been adversely impacted by the pandemic, we delivered our best ever academic results. And I think we’ll do it again. So when I think about our relative performance, it’s one where we’ve actually extended our position over our peers.

AB: What have you taken from the last 12 months has actually improved schooling, something perhaps you seen an opportunity to continue?

DV: If I think about teachers, as an example, before the start of the academic year, the idea that a teacher could effectively engage with students in their classroom, both in class and online simultaneously, it’s something that even if you spoke to me I would have questioned the efficacy of it.

And yet we’ve seen it day in day out, our teachers ability to evolve their practice.  That’s certainly something that I think, is here to stay, the idea that you can have students in perhaps different settings still able to collaborate effectively.

And this is an interesting idea that we’ve certainly talked to the regulators about. Dubai and the UAE has an exemplary education system, I don’t think people realise just how high performing it is, especially when you look at the private sector.

Well, when we think about the UAE it is an exemplar for many things, so there is this really interesting opportunity to be able to extend access to our schools here in the country to families and students and other parts of the world that haven’t had the same benefit. And for me, that’s a really interesting attraction principle for Dubai and the UAE, and certainly something that I know that they’re looking at.

That’s certainly a trend that we are forecasting, because continuing to build new schools is incredibly capital intensive. This perhaps gives a different form and format that’s perhaps a little bit more efficient, that allows you to extend access to your provision. And that’s exciting.

Dubai and the UAE has an exemplary education system

AB: How would you flesh that idea out? So people will no longer have to attend physically, but they still extract the qualification?

DV: To be honest, it’s something that’s already been in place over the course of the last 12 months.

If you think about the reality of, and the challenges around, mobility we’ve certainly had instances where we’ve had families and students that hadn’t been able to get back into the country, that have been accessing their education for a month or two, perhaps longer. We’ve had teachers in certain instances that have been unable to get back into country that are still delivering great lessons, they just aren’t in Dubai.

Today, the issue is that’s on an exceptional, circumstantial basis, can it be something that’s more structured and systemic? I think that’s probably the next step.

AB: There’s a lot of investment in the ‘Ed Tech’ space right now especially from VCs. How exciting is that for you at GEMS?

DV: Very much. I think it’s one of these interesting things where in our history, as I said, we’ve always invested heavily in our own technology platform and our own technology infrastructure. We’ve invested in ideas and concepts and in companies outside. We failed and we’ve been successful, we’ve been across the spectrum.

I think where there’s perhaps been the most interesting innovation it’s actually been our own intellectual property. So our technology, infrastructure and platform is something that we’re seeing a lot of demand for, from different parts of the world. I suppose because the way that I describe it is we’re not a technology company, developing a solution for the education sector, we’re an education company, with 60 years of legacy behind us, that’s coming up with a technology solution.

AB: How are you using that ability to teach remotely through the work of the Varkey Foundation which we know is there to help children in more challenged parts of the world?

DV: The purpose of the foundation is common to the purpose that drives GEMS Education. We’re driven by ensuring that we can provide a quality education to every child no matter where they are, but within a commercial model, there are limits to how far we can extend that purpose.

The foundation’s mandate was to provide quality education to children that really cannot access or afford education. We are primarily focused on doing it by building teacher capacity, so our focus has always been around Teacher Training and Education Leadership initiatives.

When we focused on girls and female empowerment. One of the programs was about ‘making Ghanian girls great’. It was essentially a model where we built two studios in Accra, onboarded exceptional teachers, and every day across 10,000 girls in rural communities across Ghana, they would teach English, maths and female empowerment. And that was incredibly successful.

It’s a model that we’ve asked different development agencies and others to take on board, because we actually think it could be an incredible solution for those students that are displaced in conflict.

So those children that are today in refugee camps displaced as a result of war, this model is something that anybody can take, it’s pretty simple. Because, again, you invest in the studio, you need great teachers, and that student can be anywhere, it doesn’t have to be in country.

GEMS Education provide a quality education to every child no matter where they are

AB: What’s the one thing that’s exciting you the most right now?

DV: The moves that we’re making in technology incredibly exciting, because I actually think that it gives us an opportunity to democratise access to quality education, or to provide more equitable access to education in different parts of the world, or around the world, at a pace that’s faster than what we could have done if we were simply going out and building more schools in different parts of the world. 

And I think the trajectory and the possibility of what we can do in that space, is probably the second thing. That’s exciting.