Education today is grappling with a quiet but significant shift. From imparting knowledge to building capabilities, from chasing marks to nurturing meaning. As conversations around digital inclusion, future-readiness, and learner-centric models take centre stage, the real challenge lies in moving beyond intent to sustained, systemic change.
For Kanak Gupta, Director, Seth MR Jaipuria Schools, this change begins with questioning long-held assumptions about technology as a silver bullet, entrepreneurship as a buzzword, and exams as the ultimate measure of success. Drawing from deep experience across Tier 2 and 3 India, Gupta argues that real transformation is less about tools and more about trust, empathy, and ecosystem-building.
In this insightful exchange with ETEducation, he shares why digital equity must be viewed through a human lens, how curriculum must evolve to accommodate non-linear career paths, and what it takes to shift parental mindsets without alienating them. His perspective challenges the education community to rethink not just what we teach, but how and, more importantly, why. Here is an edited excerpt:
Despite digital infrastructure growth, equitable tech access remains a challenge. How should private school groups rethink their role in reducing the digital divide, especially across Tier 2–3 India?
The question isn’t just about giving access to devices—it’s about bridging aspiration gaps. The digital divide is not just about internet access—it’s also about confidence, context, and continuity. A laptop without a learning ecosystem is just an expensive distraction.
Private school groups have a responsibility to become enablers, not just educators. This means investing not only in devices and bandwidth but also in training for teachers, orientation for parents, and contextualised content for students, especially in Tier 2 and 3 areas, the prime area of work for us at Seth MR Jaipuria Schools. We have learned that access without agency doesn’t go very far. So we look at digital equity not just as a hardware problem, but as a human problem—one of inclusion, empathy, and sustained support. We run teacher upskilling programs, offer blended and bilingual digital content, and focus on digital literacy over digital glamour. We also work with parents—especially first-generation learners—so that the ecosystem around the child becomes enabling.As the education fraternity and also as a Society, we need to stop viewing digital access as charity and stop glamourising the marginalised sections of society using whatsapp, Google Maps and UPI. Times have changed and technology is a hygiene factor. Digital learning is an investment in shared futures. One school’s innovation can become another school’s blueprint. Collaboration, open-source sharing, and community partnerships are the way forward if we truly want to democratise digital learning.
Many schools claim to foster ‘entrepreneurial thinking’—but without structural curriculum support, is this just a buzzword? How can schools move from intent to implementation?
Entrepreneurship isn’t about launching a startup in school. Launching a startup is probably the most in-vogue thing to do, and perhaps, the easiest part of an entrepreneurial journey. Entrepreneurship about learning how to solve problems, take risks, recover from failure, and think independently.
Entrepreneurial thinking has less to do with starting companies and more to do with cultivating a mindset of problem-solving, resilience, and adaptability. To move from intent to implementation, we need systemic scaffolding: time in the timetable, teacher training, assessment rubrics, and real-world exposure. It’s not about one annual event—it’s about embedding entrepreneurial values across disciplines. The moment we allow students to ask better questions, own their learning journeys, and pitch ideas with purpose—we begin to move away from jargon and closer to authentic outcomes.
At Jaipuria, we’ve embedded this mindset structurally—through design thinking modules, student-led events, social impact internships, and entrepreneurship cells where children pitch and execute real projects. The key is to create psychological safety: a space where trying, failing, reflecting, and pivoting is celebrated. Only then does the spirit of entrepreneurship go beyond buzzwords and become a way of being. Typically, our students get into discussions with ‘what is the problem I can solve’?
There’s increasing demand for competency-based assessments, yet implementation lags. What are the biggest operational blockers, and how can school chains like yours catalyze change?
Competency-based assessment is conceptually sound but operationally tricky. The biggest challenge is that our systems are still wired for content recall, not application or reflection. The biggest blocker? It’s not tech or time—it’s mindset. Competency-based assessment demands that we move from “Did the child score well?” to “Did the child understand deeply?” And that’s uncomfortable in a system where marks feel safer than meaning.
For real change, we need three things:
- Educator capacity-building—not just training, but mindset shift. Forget the mandate of hours as per norms; make upskilling a culture
- Parent sensitisation—because many still equate marks with merit. Not their fault; the parents of today are kids of 1990s and 2000s, where marks reigned supreme
- Policy push with implementation support—frameworks are not enough without models that show “how”.
As a fraternity, I believe the intent is there. What’s missing is the infrastructure of understanding. At Jaipuria, we’re re-training teachers, redesigning rubrics, and building internal tools for observation-led formative assessment. We’ve created subject-wise frameworks aligned with NEP 2020 and NCF 2024 and piloted them across campuses. It’s slow work. But it’s meaningful work. And as a chain, we have the scale to standardise and the flexibility to localize. That balance is key to catalysing real change.
With the gig economy and portfolio careers on the rise, is our current school model preparing students for nonlinear career paths—or are we still grooming them for outdated trajectories?
Let’s be honest—we’re still catching up.
The world has changed faster than our report cards have. Careers today are not ladders but lattices. Kids won’t have one job—they’ll have many roles, passions, and gigs across a lifetime. In the short run (next 2 years) and the long run (tops 10 years) we will need to shift:
- valuing skills like emotional intelligence and collaboration as much as test scores,
- providing exposure to diverse work formats, and
- celebrating individual learning journeys rather than rigid career boxes.
We need to reshape school around skills, not just subjects. Communication, collaboration, creativity, and curiosity—these form the base of everything we do, from theatre in classrooms to student podcasts, from AI clubs to internships with entrepreneurs. Our aim as educators isn’t to predict careers. It’s to prepare kids for a world where change is the only constant—and where they feel confident navigating ambiguity.
In a system driven by board results, how can large school chains shift internal metrics of success toward holistic, purpose-driven learning—without alienating stakeholders like parents?
The key is to shift the narrative before shifting the metric. Academic excellence and holistic learning can co-exist—but only if we change the conversation. The trick is not to pit one against the other.
It’s not easy. We can’t expect stakeholders to embrace holistic education unless we show them what it looks like, how it’s measured, and why it matters in the long term. To say marks do not matter would be a travesty, but to focus only on marks is unpardonable. Yes, we must honor, value and celebrate academic achievements based on exams- they give some glimpse into the student’s skills. However, the marks give a small glimpse only! Parents, and I say this with some responsibility, need to be better sensitized; their conditioning is of job seekers, structured tasks, etc. because of their own schooling. They are not wrong in their own perceptions, but as educators, it is our social and moral responsibility to patiently counsel parents. Back in the day, most of us knew that admissions at top end colleges is a sure-shot ticket to life success. You know, my biggest grievance with the competitive exams is that we are creating a culture of pressure, expectation and sadly, trauma. Further, many students are at sea after they crack these blue-chip exams. They know how to get the better of the aptitude ‘tests’ but don’t know what to do post!
At Jaipuria, we’ve started showing parents evidence—not just report cards but portfolios, reflections, passion projects, mental wellness data, and even values-based metrics. We’ve integrated SEL (Social Emotional Learning), arts-based learning, and 21st-century skills into every grade—and trained our teachers to document this meaningfully. Academic rigour and holistic learning are not seen as trade-offs, but as companions. This isn’t just school transformation—it’s social transformation, and it begins with trust. In the long run, we’re not just preparing children for exams—we’re preparing them for life.
