In this episode, RISE Research Fellow Julius Atuhurra speaks to Anustup Nayak, Project Director for Classroom Instruction and Practice, at Central Square Foundation (CSF) in India. Anustup retraces his educational path in India, Africa and the US, and links to his career in foundational learning.

He reflects on the FLN context in India and why he is hopeful about the future. Anustup gives an in-depth explanation of CSF’s work and their broad collaboration with state governments and other similar minded actors to improve the teaching and learning experience in the classroom.

They also touch on Anustup’s involvement with some of the work strands at RISE and his ideas about future directions. Anustup reflects on India’s position as both the 'hotbed' for FLN problems and ‘go to’ place for solutions to the global learning crisis.  

Links

• Central Square Foundation (webpage)
• Demystifying the Science of Teaching: A 'Structured Pedagogy' Approach to Improving Foundation Learning (article) by Anustup Nayak and Priyanka Upreti
• A Million Children Learning – Improving Elementary School Education at Scale (article) by
• RISE Community of Practice (webpage)
• CSF’s Experience of Working with the RISE Diagnostic Framework in North India (blog) by Jasmine Dhingra, Isha Shingte, and Garima Grover
• How to Rapidly Improve Learning Outcomes at System Level? (blog) by Luis Crouch
• RISE Annual Conference 2022 (event)
• Michelle Kaffenberger (webpage)
• Understanding Education Policy Preferences: Survey Experiments with Policymakers in 35 Developing Countries (working paper) by  Lee Crawfurd, Susannah Hares, Ana Luiza Minardi and Justin Sandefur
• System (In)Coherence: Quantifying the Alignment of Primary Education Curriculum Standards, Examinations, and Instruction in Two East African Countries (working paper) by Julius Atuhurra and Michelle Kaffenberger

Guest biography

Anustup Nayak

Anustup Nayak leads the Classroom Instruction and Practices (CIP) team at CSF. In his role, he works with multiple CSF partner organizations and state government agencies to support the implementation of the FLN mission. Prior to working at CSF, his work involved supporting and scaling up an entrepreneurial venture named XSEED Education. Anustup joined CSF to pursue his passion to improve public education at scale. He did his master’s in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Public Policy at Georgia Tech. He is passionate about equipping teachers with the right tools and skills to succeed in the classroom. In his free time, he enjoys listening to podcasts and is constantly on the search for the next viral meme. 

Julius Atuhurra

Julius Atuhurra is a Research Fellow for the RISE programme at the Blavatnik School of Government. His work focuses on educational development, specifically curricula effectiveness analyses and iterative adaptation of local solutions to the learning crisis in developing countries. 

He recently completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Prior to that, he worked at Twaweza East Africa, a regional civil society organisation operating in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Early in his career, Julius worked at Uganda’s national tax body from where he moved to Japan to pursue postgraduate studies and subsequently altered his career path switching focus from public finance to international development.

Attribution

The continuation of the RISE Podcast has been made possible through funding from the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. The Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford supports the production of the RISE Podcast.

Producers: Julius Atuhurra and Katie Cooper

Audio Editing: James Morris

Hello and welcome to the RISE podcast series, where we aim to explore the stories behind education, research and practice as part of the multi-country Research on Improving Systems of Education endeavour, funded by UK aid, Australian aid, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Hello, and welcome to the RISE podcast. I am Julius Atuhurra, Research Fellow at RISE. Today I'm speaking to Anustup Nayak. Anustup is the Project Director for Classroom Instruction and Practice at Central Square Foundation, which is an organisation working to bring down learning poverty in India through a radical prioritisation of early learning. In this episode, we talk about Anustup's story, linking his educational path and career. We delve into the basic education context in India, and examine why foundational literacy and numeracy, commonly abbreviated as FLN, is fast becoming a key driver of the learning agenda in India. We take a deep dive into the work of Central Square Foundation, and peer into what goes on inside primary school classrooms in India. We touch on Anustup's involvement with some of the work strands at RISE, the relevance to his practice, and his ideas about future directions. Anustup shares his dual view of India's unique position in efforts toward understanding and solving the global learning crisis. Anustup's story and views are super inspirational. It's my sincere hope that you, too, will find this episode as insightful. Anustup, thank you for making time for us. And welcome to the RISE podcast.

Thank you, Julius, it's a great pleasure to be on this show. And thank you for making time for me.

Terrific. Let's start with your story. And more specifically, your education and career path. Where does it all begin? And how does your education journey connect with your career trajectory thus far?

Very well. I have to go back many years. And I've never thought about it in this way. I was born and raised on the eastern coast of India in a small state called Orissa. Both my parents were government servants and they made an early decision that education was a priority. So when I think of my journey, I must thank my parents for investing in me early on. But at another level, I think my parents also did lots of educational experiments on on me as now I think about it. They first put me in a school that was more of a free progress progressive school, which was run by the disciples of Sri Aurobindo, who was an educational philosopher in India, and they believed that children should have more freedom while learning, a lot more unstructured compared to some of the other schools. So that was, I would argue, a very brave decision on their part that was followed by homeschooling when we moved to Africa for a couple of years, in the 80s. And I was out of school, but I was learning at home. And then when I came back to India, I studied again, in a government school, which was really struggling in some ways, in terms of infrastructure, and I wanted, my parents wanted me to experience the real India of how most children go to school. So looking back, I think those kinds of educational experiences shaped me as a child. And as I was growing up, it became very clear to me that I had to do something beyond just educating myself, getting a good job, which was a priority. And like most young people in the 90s, I went to study engineering, which was kind of a preferred option in India. But two years down that road, I found out, I was never going to make a very good engineer. So I thought, maybe try my hand at social sciences. So I moved to the US and got a scholarship to study public policy at Georgia Tech. I tried to get a job in the nonprofit sector and couldn't get in. And that was the time of the technology boom in the late 90s, and the early 2000s. So I worked in the corporate sector in America. But in two, three years, I was craving for a change because I was missing some kind of meaningful work in the corporate world. I wasn't really sure I was making a difference in any other person's life other than mine. So I thought I'd bring something else and I decided to go back to school again to study education, and I was at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and that's where I think my life took an interesting turn. Three, four things happened. To me one was that I came to terms with my own ignorance, in spite of the fact that I had a lot of good education and degrees and credentials behind me. It became very clear to me that a lot of my early education was very fragile in terms of understanding. I remember taking a class with Professor Eleanor Duckworth, who was a student of Piaget, and a very famous professor at Harvard, and she gave us this simple problem, I remember it still. She said, four of you are going to the movies and sitting right next to each other. What are all the possible ways in which you could all sit together? And I being trained in the Indian education system, having learned math all my life, quickly, I calculated the formula for factorial and the answer 24 came to my head, and I said, you know, it's 24 because it's four factorial. But then she asked me, Anustup, can you show me how this happens, she gave me a bunch of beads. And I realised I actually didn't understand what I had just learned as a formula. And that hit me really hard. And I was thinking at that point of time, that even though I came from a, I wouldn't say a very privileged background, but I was still privileged in the form of education I had got. And I was still rote memorising most of the things that had supposed to be mastering in school. And if that was the case, for me, then millions of other children are probably missing out on good educational opportunities just because the kind of education system we had. It was around the same time that I ran into a fellow student named Ashish Rajpal, who also had come from India and had led a successful corporate background in Europe. And we ran into each other as fellow classmates at the Graduate School of Education. And he had a very inspiring dream to go back to India and set up something in the field of elementary education. And I followed him back to India, and over the next couple of decades, worked with him and a bunch of other colleagues who joined us later to build an organisation called XSEED Education, whose mission was to improve the quality of elementary school education. And for the first five or six years, we really struggled like any startup would. And we struggled not just financially, but also we struggled in terms of finding out what was the right model to improve education. We tried many things like setting up, you know, schools for for people who are setting up new institutions, we tried lots of teacher training. But after delivering hundreds and hundreds of hours of teacher training in all kinds of schools, rich schools, private schools, poor schools, affordable private schools and government schools, we came to the conclusion that training alone wasn't really changing much in the classroom, teachers went back to the same old practices that they started. That was the time my colleagues started teaching in the classroom. And it became very clear that unless a teacher has clear step by step instructions on how to teach better, and those instructions are backed by evidence based practices, you won't expect change in the classroom. So that's how the idea of the XSEED programme was born, which is now called structured pedagogy. But it kind of stumbled on to this by creating our own lesson plans and materials for students. And over the next eight or 10 years, we took this programme to scale to about 2000 affordable private schools in India we began to see remarkable changes in learning of students, and also in the capacity of teachers. And I think my own journey was defined by really helping teachers succeed in the classroom every day. Often times in education, teachers are really ridiculed especially in our country as being under skilled, random motivated, or or just people who really are not very competent. But if we start treating teachers as professionals and provide them with the right tools, the right training, they can succeed in the classroom everyday and that was, what the XSEED journey taught me. By the time I reached kind of my early 40s, it also became clear to me that the organisation which I was part of as has grown beyond me, and I was ready for a second innings. And that's when I took a sabbatical, thought about what else is happening in India and I started thinking hard about the public education system in India. India has a million plus government run schools, which educates most of our children, especially coming from poverty ridden backgrounds. And when it comes to the learning outcomes, they are incredibly poor, and lots of people, very, very smart people have been working on this problem for many, many years. And yet, we hadn't seen change. And that's when I decided to work for Central Square Foundation. I had known of their work for a very long time through their founder, Ashish Dhawan, who was a very famous philanthropist, and started off as a venture capitalist, and then entered philanthropy. And I had known him since my entrepreneurial days. And they were working with the public education system as a partner and working on systems reform. So the last three years of my journey has really been about working with the public education system, with Central School Foundation. So that's a little bit about my journey so far, in education.

Thank you very, very exciting journey, Anustup, going to Africa, but to India, move into the US. And then this challenge at Harvard, the professor who challenged you, and then you discovered how much you're learning, but not probably individually taking it as your own benefits. So I mean, it's like many of us, we always get challenged in life, like this challenge that came back to you to make real meaning of what you are learning. And translating that, this is the real thing that we were focusing on when we say learning should make meaning to the children. Children should not just be in class too, show that they have performed or they have passed the test. And yet, in reality, they cannot translate this into their real lives. So really exciting to hear that, but also your transition from the corporate world into going back to India, and then moving into the public sector. That's really exciting to hear. So thank you so much. So let's progress a bit and move on zeroing in on the basic education context in India, especially on foundational learning. So from my personal experience, in sub-Saharan Africa, my understanding of that setting is that our work is cut out to make foundational learning meaningful for every child as a springboard for their educational and overall life success. It's a gigantic task. What is your understanding of the current context in India? And what makes you hopeful about the possibility of achieving FLN proficiency for every child in India, say in the next four to five years?

On thank you for that question. There are many challenges that we face. Of course, it will take ages to describe these challenges, but I'll pick the top three or four, which I think are very essential to solve in the short run. One important thing to know about the Indian education system is the sheer size and complexity of the system. India has almost quarter of a billion children going to school. The states of India are the size of other countries. For example, Uttar Pradesh, which is India's largest state, is almost the size of Brazil as a country. You can imagine therefore, the complexity of making shifts in the system are very, very big. And there is no one centralised authority that can push all the changes because India at the end is a federal system. So every state takes responsibility for the operations of its own education system. So that's the first thing I want to talk about the Indian education system. The second is the fact that while in the last 20 to 30 years we've made remarkable progress in terms of children coming into school. We are still very very far behind when it comes to learning outcomes. Studies like ours, and other kinds of studies including the government's own studies, show that almost 50% of Indian children, especially by the time they they finish the early grades, are unable to attain the foundational literacy or numeracy skills. And therefore what tends to happen is that when they get into middle school, they fall further and further behind because they're learning trajectories are flat. So they might have, let's say, take reading, for example, if they haven't learned to read by grade three, or grade four, then they cannot read to learn. So something like reading a social studies textbook or, or a science textbook becomes difficult for them. The second is the curriculum itself is quite complex and ambitious. And the methodology of teaching, which is often not spoken about that much in in global circles is largely rote chalk and talk one way transmission of knowledge to children, and often not informed by what works in terms of evidence of how to get children learning better, and learning faster. So those are some of the big challenges that we face as a country. The second aspect of solving this challenge relates to the capacity of the state. The Indian state, often has been referred to by people like Lant Pritchett, as being a flailing state, that it is a state, which is kind of quite mixed in its capacity to respond to the demands being placed on it. On one hand, it does certain things very well, for example, India runs one of the largest elections in the in the world, right, the Indian democracy, in terms of the sheer size of its ability to marshal people into an election every five years or so. And do it reasonably well is often lauded across the world. On the other hand, if you look at the delivery of basic services, like health care or education, we often struggle because our state is not always equipped to have the right skills, have the right motivation, the political will, the right data systems, all of that coming together, so that we can deliver well, and that's true about the school education system. So those are some of the challenges. And the other challenge relates to the capacity, specifically of our teachers. Teachers come into the classroom relatively underprepared in terms of both pre-service training, which is largely theoretical in nature, and the in service training, which is almost sporadic and often disconnected from classroom practice in the classroom materials, so on and so forth. So, if you take all of this, one would almost run away scared from attempting to improve this section, but what keeps us going, I think largely, there are many many good things happening in India. One is there is enormous interest now in improving education in India at all levels, whether you look at the national education policy, which is been proposed, the national curriculum framework, which is talking a language which is derived from very, very strong principles of good literacy and numeracy. So on paper, we have a really good policy document that sets the stage for for good instruction. In the classroom, we have the NIPUN Bharat mission, which is a national mission to focus on foundational literacy and numeracy which was launched with much fanfare. And which promises that by next two to three years of its execution, we would want to get all children in India equipped with the basic literacy and numeracy skills and we have even set numerical targets for something like oral reading fluency for an entire country. And that gives us great hope, because when the political and administrative system is energised, at the top, it is more likely that the entire system would move in the right direction. The second thing that keeps me extremely hopeful is the fact that parents in India care about education in general. They value education as a factor of social mobility. So that's, that's always hopeful. So when I talk to parents in every home that I visit, I see that they have aspirations for their children to better in school. And the third thing which gives me a lot of hope is the work that many like minded organisations are doing to improve foundational literacy working together under a common umbrella. I can see that happen in our ecosystem with CSF Central Square Foundation, which I work for, working very closely with the government, working very closely with technical support organisations like Language and Learning Foundation, Room to Read, Madhi Foundation, Vikramshila, these are all like minded organisations working together, others like Pratham. And actually, many other organisations are doing great work. So all of these organisations working together also creates a supply side push of good quality learning programmes, many of which have been shown to have great evidence at some degree of scale. So all of this makes me really hopeful that in the next two to three years, we will make progress on our calls.

Thank you. listening to you talk about the challenges in India and obviously, as someone coming from the Global South, I can relate with many of those challenges. And the issue of teachers is really critical. This pre-service training that they get and very little practice in the classroom. When they get into the real classroom, it's like they're thrown into the flip side of things, and they have to figure it out on their own. So they really need a lot of support. And this really connects to your work at Central Square Foundation, which I think we are moving into next. So exciting also to hear about the NIPUN Bharat mission in India and how the politics is working to really put foundational learning at the centre of all learning to make sure our children get strong foundations from the very beginning for their learning to make meaning. We will now take a deep dive into CSFs work, what it means for improving education systems and your central focus on what goes on inside the classroom. Also, the fact that CSF works heavily through coalition's technical partners and government. Can you explain CSFs work in India? And how does CSF contribute to improving what goes on inside the classrooms, and what that means for the education system in India.

Our work starts on innovation, it goes on to policy, then to practice. And our final objective is to ensure that there is change at scale in terms of working on quality school education for children. And especially, our focus is on system led reform. There have been many attempts in the past to transform Indian education systems. And we and our coalition's are not the first ones to do it and hopefully not the last. But one of the things we have realised is that working through the system, to enable its capacity to enable its ability to deliver on its promises is very, very critical. Rather than working as an external agency, only your running pilots or running experiments that will not lead to scale. That's really our focus. When you look at our impact areas, we work on three critical areas. One is of course foundational literacy and numeracy. But we also work very closely with the government on early childhood education, which is a key priority for our country because many children aren't coming in with the right kind of school readiness. We also work on education technology, because we believe that learning at home especially with low cost devices, and contextualised edtech solutions can have a big impact on children's learning and it's a great complement to what happens in school. We work with 12 Indian state governments. We also work with the national government and in one way or the other, almost 70% of all children studying in government schools in primary grades across the country, are somehow affected and impacted by our programmes that we support. Let me come a little bit into the how of our work. When we think of our work, we think of it almost like a house with four pillars in it. And the four pillars being, ensuring that we set clear goals and communication for the system. There is a structured pedagogy approach that ensures good quality teaching and learning in the classroom. There is capacity building for the whole system. And there is a focus on governance and data and all of these working together is how CSF and its coalition's are driving change efforts and this looks different when it hits the ground. There is a setup phase that we have experienced. I think that phase lasted from 2021 to about the current time period when we were trying to set up the States for FLN reform. And in that there were four or five things we were trying to do. One is to influence the reform decisions, because when the states make definitive decisions on the kind of learning outcomes that they want to target, the kind of curriculum materials that they want to create, they unlock budgets for that, then it sets the ball in motion on an irreversible path. The second is to design the reform inputs with the state. And there are two kinds of design inputs. One is governance inputs, and the other is academic inputs. The academic inputs are largely around structured pedagogy, which ensures that there are clearly defined learning outcomes. There are detailed step by step lesson plans and Teacher Guides made available to teachers and they are informed by quality instructional design, around balanced literacy approach or the concrete pictorial approach in numeracy. And there is also a very clear definition of what formative and summative assessment looks like. So that struggling learners are identified early on and also continuously through their journey. On the governance side, there are incredible challenges to be overcome, which include ensuring that there is adequate availability of mentors, their own time is focused on teaching and learning support as opposed to doing administrative work. There is a lot of work going on to improve the time on task of teachers and unburdening them from other responsibilities that lead them away from teaching and learning. And there is a lot of focus on setting up the state to actually hold the entire system accountable, then, the rollout of the monitoring system is very, very critical. So what we have been working with the states on on all kinds of data collection, data reliability and data driven decision making, so there are key performance indicators that we have set up with the with the state, for example, what percentage of teachers are using Teacher Guides, if they are using Teacher Guides, what practices are they actually following? What is the number of visits that the mentors are making an arduous visits, actually driven by protocols, so on and so forth, and then using this data to then inform the state's administrative decisions. And then we are trying to build a high degree of salience in the political and bureaucratic circles, because unless the people at the very top, continue to believe that this kind of investment is going to yield returns, they're not going to keep moving the wheels, and that's very, very important. And then now we're getting into a phase where we want to institutionalise this FLN system reforms. So the first thing we're trying to do is to build district capability, because while the state is the working, you know, unit for all kinds of decision making, but the actual implementing unit is the district. And that's why we want to ensure that there is a trickle down effect to individual districts to build their capacity. So we're helping districts build their capacity to execute on on both administrative and academic fronts. We're also trying to influence the community led demand for FLN. And that's aspirational, because getting parents, especially parents who come from underprivileged backgrounds, to understand what their children are learning, support them at home, demand better from the school, all of that would ensure that there is a pull effect apart from the push that they're doing. And the big focus is on improving data quality, and then ensuring that as we are going through this, we've also made mistakes, and learned and iterating the design. And in summary, if I were to give ourselves kind of a progress report on the work done so far, what has really worked well is I think, there is very strong political and bureaucratic buy-in in all the states that we are working in. Both at the central level, there is the NIPUN Bharat mission, there is the NEP, the national education policy and in large number of states that taking it really seriously. The other thing which makes me personally very, very excited is that when we go into to the classrooms, there is acceptance and adoption of structured pedagogy and the balanced literacy and numeracy approaches, because one of the big risks in all of these reforms is the kind of pushback one gets around adoption of new practices. So when we go into classrooms, at least 40% of the teachers are using the Teacher Guides, they are beginning to understand the kinds of practices that those Teacher Guides and assessments have. And there is intent and design for changing the teacher professional development, there's still miles to go in terms of improvement in both the capacity building of teachers. But I think there is a strong attempt to fix that process. There is also a strong focus on assessments and monitoring. And there is data being collected on students learning outcomes, the mentors are certainly visiting the schools a little bit more. And needless to say, all of this is the result of this collaborative coalition approach, because on one hand, you have partners bringing in technical expertise from different organisations, and on the other hand, we have government counterparts, who are actively working to institutionalise this fund. So this seems to be working. But there's a host of things we need to problem solve for in the way ahead. And there are many such things. But if I were to pick four or five areas, one is we have to constantly guard against what we call internally, as declaring victory through show. One of the ways in which India works is that everybody is catalysed into action when we are working on this mission mode. So everybody is talking about FLN reforms right now. But the fear is that people would want to declare that most children have achieved these competencies would want to make make the system look good. And therefore we may not get a real bearing on the truth of where we are on this journey. So you have to constantly guard against that. The second thing, which is a big challenge in the Indian context, is that the political and the administrative layer, which currently is sympathetic to these reforms, has taken many brave decisions, constantly gets churned through the process of elections and transfers and how do we ensure that when individual officers or individual political leaders are moving on their successors are taking the reforms equally seriously. And the real shift which we have to do is really behaviour change in practice change in the classroom by teacher? So one of the challenges we see is that when you have a support system for teachers, there may be initial adoption in terms of compliance driven behaviour. So people may do something because they're being told to do it, or the materials or the checkboxes, they have to fail. But is it actually leading to practice change? Are children really learning our teachers really transferring the Gradual Release of Responsibility to the children in terms of of the learning work, unless that happens, it remains a ritualistic, you know, kind of an implementation. And the last is to build demand from parents and community because that is the hardest one to crack. Because parents are, of course, busy, they're challenged in their own ways, trying to eke out a living. And on top of that, how do they provide support and demand better from schools that those are the kinds of things we're struggling with? And we have, we have a lot of work to do in the next two to three years.

It's a lot, it's a lot under scope. Yeah. So thinking about the collaborative approach, really exciting to see that several players in the sector coming together and agreeing to look at this challenge of foundational learning, and looking at it together as as a group or a coalition, including government. That cannot be easy, how to get all these different actors to look at the problem in the same way and agree on a similar way to approach it. I find that really so powerful. And also I think that really helps a lot to drive what actually happens in the classroom in terms of the teachers. My experience is that you find that teachers really want to see this coherence of different players, all speaking with the same voice and pointed in the same direction. So they don't feel like they have to comply with what CSF is thinking. But maybe what CSF is bringing on the table does not really match properly with what the government is asking. So this issue of not pulling teachers in different directions can be achieved big time, once all actors are really pulling the same direction. We also touch on the community and parents, that's another critical one that I really feel very strongly about. And I think parents and communities have a very important role to play. But how to get that to be actualized is something that I think this is a space where we still need to get a lot of insight on how that can be done in the best way to benefit children's learning. Yeah, so I think let's move on. As we draw towards the end of this podcast, we talk a bit about your connections with RISE. So CSF is one of three organisations that have since earlier this year assumed the role of leading the RISE Community of Practice, which is a group of organisations, or individuals that are working to create systemic change to raise children's learning levels globally. Also, CSF has recently been involved in piloting the RISE education systems diagnostic tool, and at a personal level for you, you're quite well versed with various strands of RISE work in India and elsewhere. So from where you stand, what does success look like for, for example, for the RISE committee of practice over the next two years, as you are a member of this community and of the steering committee? And what key insights have you picked from RISE work and what do they mean for your own practice?

Well, that's very important, but a very difficult question. And a lot of people far wiser than me should be on this. But when I think of RISE, I really think of RISE as real watering hole for like minded thinkers, doers, practitioners, who can come together and really make change happen at a much larger scale, and really push the boundaries of both thinking and doing in the domain. So whenever I have listened to different experts at RISE, attended RISE events, and especially the Community of Practice, which I'm personally very close to, and working with people, such as yourself, and Michelle (Kaffenberger) and others, I have learned a lot personally, because when I came into this domain, three years ago, I was really a newbie in the whole foundational learning space. And there are lots of things I have learned from RISE. I mean, I can take a few examples. So for example, if you look at Luis Crouch's work, and Luis advises CSF and is on also on our board. You know, think of an article like the one he wrote on how to rapidly improve learning outcomes at the system level. That's the kind of study which encapsulates a lot of latent knowledge in the sector and says, here's the three or four critical levers of making change happen at scale, that there needs to be some kind of a why and initial motivation for change. And you need to have some kind of what, which are the design features and the how of the implementation. And if you could relate it to what I just shared in terms of CSF strategy, it wouldn't surprise you that many of these elements are are drawn from the work of the RISE Programme leaders, right. So in many ways, RISE has been an important inspiration for the work we do at Central Square Foundation. And it's a place to go back, I think, when I think about RISE, as an institution as a specific institution, but more importantly, the research community in general. I think I have a wish list as well. I think the first challenge we are facing and we discussed about it last year at the RISE Conference quite a bit is how do we become more and more relevant to the practitioners and the policymakers? While we have generated a lot of evidence, while we have created an interesting body of work on on what works and what doesn't work. I think we need to do a lot more to get on the radar of policymakers and implementers and to ensure that they digest all of this information. And we aren't really speaking in an echo chamber of experts who largely agree with each other in principles, maybe there may be some differences in methodology or ways of looking at the world. But largely you have a like-minded group of people, or how can we bring in people who are the people who are making decisions. If you remember a study that was done by the Center for Global Development, where they quizzed a lot of mid-level policymakers on their understanding of FLN, you see the kind of differences that people have, in terms of the people at the front lines, so making change happen on education. So the work that you and Michelle and others have done, on the coherence of curriculum and instruction and assessment, that's a very important body of work, Julius, and I have personally benefited a lot from that work. But how can we take that to the director of the curriculum bodies in my country? And get them to think differently about curriculum instruction? I think that's the real problem we're facing. The second problem is a slightly more methodological in nature. Which is where I think my bigger wish is, in terms of the kind of studies that we need to see more and more of. I think we've seen a lot of studies that show that some programmes work and other programmes don't that, you know, largely stop at the impact of this programmes. But I think we need to push the boundaries on really opening the black box of what happens inside the classroom. If you remember, there was an interesting paper by last year by Joanne DeJaeghere and others on studying teachers in Vietnam, where they actually videotape the practices of teachers and understood what were some of those practices that were really high leverage in terms of moving classroom outcomes. We need more studies like that, which really opened that black box. And that means that we get to collaborate much more across disciplines, into education specialists, and economists and behaviour change experts all coming together and trying to focus on all aspects of a problem. I think we need to see that kind of research more and more coming out of the RISE Programme, which really looks at teacher practices. And I have been obsessed with teaching as a verb, not just teachers as a noun. But what is the work of teaching? What kind of decisions do teachers make on a daily basis inside the classroom? What's the difference between the transacted curriculum and the intended curriculum? What is the level of student engagement in the classroom and why that is? So I think these are questions that keep me up at night, and I don't find enough evidence to guide me on a daily basis. So that is my real wish for RISE is one to become more relevant to policymakers and implementers and then guide them in a more pragmatic manner. And the second is to really open up the black box of what happens in the classroom, and really share the narrative of the connections between teaching and learning as verbs.

Thank you, that's really great. You're throwing a challenge back at RISE and whatever successor programmes follow on from RISE, to take all this wisdom, to actually where this wisdom needs to be where the rubber meets the road, in the classroom, for the children, for the teachers, for the people making those very important decisions that really impact children's learning. Anustup, we now moving to the very final part of the podcast, and we have a tradition. For this podcast every episode, this question is asked: what is one thing you wish other people knew about the education system in India? Or about education systems broadly? Could be one key thing in your arsenal for overcoming the learning crisis or improving outcomes for children? What is that one thing you would want to share with the world?

I think a lot of people know about the problems of education in India and they're well understood and the perfect explanation of that or summarization of that is something that Karthik Muralidharan offered, that we have not an education system, but a filtration system. So all the ills of the system are often talked about. But I think what the world is not privy to enough is the incredible ecosystem of innovators in education that is working out of India. India is a hotbed of all the problems. It's also the Silicon Valley, so to say, of education and innovations in every sector, whether you talk of education, technology, there are of course many companies and many organisations working on that. Of course, it's going through a downturn right now hopefully, we'll learn something and come back. There are many organisations which are working on improving schools as a whole both in the private sector and in the not for profit sector. There are organisations which are working to improve the way government as a whole works. There are all kinds of solutions in India that are being driven by incredible organisations. Just look at our own partner ecosystem in, you know, on on one hand, we have organisations working on large scale system approaches, due to teaching and learning and literacy and numeracy. We have a whole host of edtech solutions coming out of India working in the direct to child space. Our affordable private school system has many solutions working on improving that sector. So what I want the world to know is that, yes, India is the hotbed of all the problems, but also the go to place if you want to try out new solutions, if you want to find an incredible array of social entrepreneurs who are trying to shift the needle.

Great, India as a hotbed of all problems, but also all solutions. Anustup, thank you so much for appearing on the RISE podcast.

Julius, thank you so much for giving me space to air my views. I'm really grateful to RISE.

Thank you for listening to our podcast today. And if you liked it, be sure to check out our research at riseprogramme.org or follow us on social media @RISEProgramme. You can find links to the research mentioned and other work shared under the description for this podcast episode. The RISE podcast is brought to you by the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE Programme) through support from the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.