Building enduring change in schools
This article is authored by Santosh More, founder, Mantra4Change and Pratibha Narayanan, co-founder, Involve Learning Solutions Foundation.
A new policy, a shiny app, a fresh training module, these are often seen as signs of progress in education. But real transformation doesn’t begin and end with a single intervention. If we want to see sustained improvement in how children learn, we must move beyond quick fixes and commit to long-term, layered change. Because in education, the first step is only the beginning.
When we ask what it takes for a child to thrive in school, the answer is rarely simple. A great teacher or lesson plan helps, yes. But what truly fuels meaningful learning is a web of support—starting at home, extending through the classroom, and reinforced by the school and broader education system. Classrooms, schools, and communities are deeply interconnected, each playing a unique but overlapping role in shaping a student’s learning outcomes. The classroom is where daily teaching, peer interaction, and immediate learning take place. Schools create a broader environment—through leadership, resources, and culture—that enables classrooms to thrive. Communities influence both by providing crucial family support, local resources, and shaping social norms that value (or hinder) education. When these three work in harmony—with teachers engaging parents, education leaders fostering supportive policies, and communities championing learning—students benefit from a strong, interconnected web of support that drives both academic and personal growth.
This is why public education cannot be viewed as a machine to be repaired or replaced. But in reality, it is a living system—dynamic, interdependent, and relational. That means change cannot be piecemeal or temporary. It must be embedded at every level and nurtured over time.
The State-4-Student (S4S) Model offers a powerful way to understand this. Developed and implemented by civil society organisations working in partnership with government systems, the model positions the child at the centre and shows how three key environments—the classroom, the school, and the community—interact to shape learning. Each layer is influenced by people, policies, norms, and resources.
Too often, school reform is approached like a patch job—fix a hole here, plug a gap there. A new teacher training, a tech-enabled solution, an infrastructure grant. While well-intentioned, these isolated efforts rarely add up to sustained change.
Why? Because education is an ecosystem. Improvements in one area can’t thrive if the others are left behind. A motivated teacher, for instance, needs a supportive school leader and community. If a teacher wants to create a cozy reading corner in their classroom to encourage independent reading, they need administrative support for furniture purchases, maintenance staff to help rearrange the space, and perhaps collaboration with the librarian to stock appropriate books. Without these supporting elements, even the most well-intentioned efforts can falter. A reformed classroom, thus, needs alignment with the school’s larger vision and parental engagement at home. Community members can contribute by collectively donating furniture, other items like mats, coolers, volunteering to help with setup, or sharing books from their personal collections to enrich the reading selection.
We see this ecosystem approach in action through women’s leadership, where mothers, anganwadi workers, and local women leaders are taking charge of conversations about education equity. By mobilising communities, they challenge social norms, co-create local solutions, and ensure that girls are not left behind. Their leadership ensures that the school’s progress is sustained and supported beyond the classroom walls.
Youth, too, are emerging as powerful anchors in this ecosystem. Groups of National Service Scheme volunteers in Puducherry, for example, are organising activity-based learning sessions and digital training in schools. Young people are proving that leadership is not bound by age. Their creativity, energy, and ownership are sparking school improvements that cause ripples of change, shaping the future of public education.
The State-4-Student (S4S) model emphasises this very point, that transformation happens when all layers of the system align. From state budgets to classroom interactions, each decision and every actor plays a role in shaping a child’s learning experience.
This is exemplified by the Punjab Education Collective’s systematic approach to school improvement. In Punjab, instructional leaders conducting daily school visits identified that teachers across 150 schools in one district required specific coaching in pedagogical tools, through their classroom observations recorded on the digital platform. This bottom-up data analysis enabled mentors to design targeted capacity development programmes, and measure improved student learning outcomes in subsequent classroom visits. The state government, recognising the effectiveness of this data-driven approach to teacher development, allocated a budget for such leadership development initiatives and organised learning visits to Karnataka to study successful models, ultimately scaling evidence-based pedagogical improvements across the entire network of 19,000 schools.
At the heart of this system are people. Not just policymakers or principals, but everyone who touches a child’s education journey.
The S4S approach foregrounds the importance of distributed leadership—empowering actors at every level to lead with clarity, empathy, and purpose. When leaders both inside and outside the system are trusted and supported, they foster strong teaching and a clear school identity. When district officers lead with insight, they provide timely coaching and direction. And when state-level decisions reflect ground realities, they unlock meaningful reform at scale. Crucially, when students are recognised as active participants in their own learning journey—given voice in classroom decisions, opportunities to lead peer learning, and agency to shape their educational experience—they become partners in transformation rather than passive recipients of instruction. Just as important are the small steps school leaders take each day—whether reorganising a classroom to encourage collaboration, setting aside time for teacher reflection, or building trust with parents. These seemingly modest actions, sustained over time, accumulate into significant school improvement.
This approach of making small changes, or micro-improvements, is rooted in the principle of agency, helping stakeholders break down ambitious school improvement ideas into clear, actionable, feasible projects that can be implemented within their locus of control. These micro-improvements enable leaders to come out of inertia, restore their lost agency, and catalyse decentralised improvement across the education system.
Leadership, then, is not a title; it’s a responsibility that must be cultivated across the system, over time.
Reimagining public education doesn’t mean starting from scratch. It means strengthening the relationships that already exist: Between teachers and students, schools and families, policies and practice.
Consider classroom reform. Without mentorship or school-wide alignment, even the most inspired pedagogy can fizzle out. Or take programs that push for parent participation. If they ignore cultural barriers or economic pressures, they risk excluding the very communities they hope to uplift.
The S4S model challenges us to move beyond surface solutions and ask deeper questions:
- Are we improving how classrooms function—not just what they deliver?
- Are we nurturing healthy school environments with strong vision and leadership?
- Are we creating space for communities to partner meaningfully with schools?
Public systems are often dismissed as slow or ineffective. But on the ground, there is a different reality, one of quiet commitment, resilience, and a deep desire to do right by children. What’s needed is not a workaround, but a companion, someone willing to walk alongside.
The S4S model invites us to do just that. To listen, to adapt, to build solutions that make sense in real contexts. To invest not just in change, but in continuity, ensuring that what begins as an intervention becomes a way of working.
But this approach isn’t just about fixing today's challenges—it’s about building educational systems that can evolve with tomorrow's realities. When we create structures that learn and adapt systematically, we’re preparing our schools not just for current needs, but for futures we can’t yet fully envision.
When we do this, we strengthen our schools and make an effort to prepare students for their future. We reaffirm the dignity of teachers and leaders. And most importantly, we ensure that change doesn’t stop at the first step, but continues to grow, layer by layer, child by child.
Because the future of public education won’t be built on isolated wins, it will be built on the system’s ability to evolve.
This article is authored by Santosh More, founder, Mantra4Change and Pratibha Narayanan, co-founder, Involve Learning Solutions Foundation.
