'At school learning is core to education': LEAD co-founder

LEAD

, a

school ed-tech

startup founded by

Sumeet Mehta

and Smita Deorah, raised $28 million in a Series C funding round in 2020 led by

WestBridge Capital

along with existing investor Elevar Equity and followed it up by raising $30 million in Series D in 2021 by GSV Ventures and WestBridge Capital.


Mehta, co-founder and CEO of LEAD talks to TOI about the post-pandemic path for ed-tech and schools. Excerpts:

What is the on-ground reality of schools and what is needed to deliver quality education?
Covid-19 has impacted school education, especially the delivery of quality education as well as classroom-based teaching and learning. It has become one of the major concerns for parents in India and around the world.

Over 130 million students who go to government schools were deprived of any learning.

‘At school’ learning is core to education and critical to impact learning outcomes of the 270 million students in the country.

However, it is woefully underrepresented not only in terms of the attention given within ed-tech but also in a lot of players/startups trying to solve the problem at ground zero.

Most of the investment today in the education sector is being prioritized to solve the secondary problem of ‘supplemental education.’ Schools must focus beyond academics in schools.

Do you think schools will go back to their old ways once physical schooling starts completely?
While the learning losses across grades cannot be measured, it has allowed school owners, educators and teachers to transform education – not to the pre-Covid-19 days, but a post-pandemic new normal backed by a robust school ed-tech. Schools have to integrate technology into every aspect of education, whether in the classroom or at home and give the students the best of blended learning.

What is your vision for schools in India?
We want to transform the arc of education with superior technology solutions. The new normal – driven by school ed-tech – is an opportunity for schools everywhere to recoup learning loss, infuse digital technology into pedagogy,

revise curricula

to maximize high-quality learning and become innovative in how we teach students.

Schools can – and must – reimagine the classroom, transform schools into tech-based centers of excellence, make learning both engaging and exciting for children, and revolutionize the education system.

What are the future plans for LEAD?
We aspire to reach 26 million students and 60,000 schools by 2026. We want to fundamentally reimagine schooling for these schools through school ed-tech and hence we are looking at making the back-end technology much more intelligent and modular.

Secondly, we are looking to deliver teacher delight so that she has more time to teach. LEAD will use AI & ML to automate homework checking which takes up 20% of a teacher’s time.

Lastly but most importantly, LEAD wants to enhance personalization, both for the teacher to build her skill and for the student - both by making the classroom instruction better and at home where we have a perfect match of what a student needs and what is delivered.