India has one of the world's largest education systems, yet millions of children still learn through textbooks, blackboards, and memorisation. Everyone knows it has to change. Changing it in every classroom is the hard part.

In this episode of the EdVance Podcast, Smita Deorah, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of LEAD Group, shares how her organisation built one of India's largest integrated school learning systems, partnering with around 9,000 schools and serving over four million students across India.

She explains why standardisation is not the answer to scaling quality, why teacher education needs a complete rethink, what schools are getting wrong about AI, and the leadership principles that have shaped one of the world's largest school learning systems.

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Education is one of the only sectors where a failed product doesn't cost money. It costs a child a year of learning they never get back.

In this episode of the EdVance Podcast, Hernan Carranza, Chief Innovation Officer at Intercorp, shares how he helped grow Innova Schools into the largest K–12 private school network in Spanish-speaking Latin America, and what it took to innovate inside a sector with almost no margin for error.

He built an AI tool in-house for teachers and tested a new personalised learning model in a smaller market before scaling it, choosing small experiments over big rollouts at every step. Hernan explains why strategy can never be handed off to outside consultants.

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China has over 13 million students sitting for the Gaokao every year - a university entrance exam so competitive that a single score can shape a student's future. Behind China's world-leading academic results is a system where parents, teachers, and school leaders work together to ensure every child succeeds. But that success often comes with immense pressure.

In this episode of the EdVance Podcast, Shiny Wang, Vice Principal of Beijing No. 4 High School, International Campus, shares how one of China's most prestigious schools is rethinking what success means. From future-focused learning and cross-disciplinary innovation to projects built around real-world challenges, he explains how schools can prepare students not only for exams, but for life.

Shiny reveals what the world often misunderstands about Chinese classrooms, how schools and families partner to support student achievement, and why helping young people overcome perfectionism may be one of the most important responsibilities teachers have today.

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Brazil has 1.7 million public school teachers. Most of them start their careers underprepared, walk into classrooms of students with multiple learning profiles, and are left to figure it out alone.

In this episode of the EdVance Podcast, Ana Ligia Scachetti, Executive Director of Nova Escola, makes the case for what it will take to change that. Under her leadership, Nova Escola has grown from a printed magazine into a digital platform reaching one million teachers every month across Brazil. Their AI assistant built on WhatsApp has now reached 200,000 educators, including teachers in the most remote corners of the Amazon.

Ana reveals why teacher support in Brazil has failed for decades, how one state produced 70% of the country's best schools, and why the most powerful thing a school leader can do is simply believe their students can run the world.

Building a school culture that outlasts generations is a decision made every single day. Institut Le Rosey has been making it for 146 years, and the alumni it produces have taken that culture into some of the most consequential rooms in the world.

In this episode of the EdVance Podcast, Christophe Gudin, Director General of Institut Le Rosey, is clear about what is happening to education and who is letting it happen. What begins as a conversation about phones in schools quickly becomes a harder question about ownership: who decides what children learn, in what order, and through whose lens, and why that decision is drifting quietly toward EdTech companies that have never taught a child.

He leads a school where no single country ever accounts for more than 10% of the student body, teachers live on campus with their families, and the entire school relocates to the mountains every winter. Every one of those decisions keeps education in the hands of the people closest to children. Christophe knows what happens to schools that hand that responsibility to someone else.

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India has over 1.4 billion people, a quarter of a billion children in school, a record number of teachers, and a system that, by its own admission, has not cracked what actually happens inside the classroom once the children sit down. The people who understand that gap most clearly are the ones who have spent their careers building inside it.

Shreyasi Singh, Founding Managing Partner of Jetri, built one of India's most talked-about education companies, sold it in six years, and now advises the philanthropists deciding what Indian education should look like next. She believes the problems are fixable. But first, India has to stop looking away. In her own words, India should be far more unsettled by this than it currently is.

India has produced some of the world's greatest minds. It has also left hundreds of millions of children behind. Shreyasi Singh has spent her career trying to understand how both things are true at the same time.

He was once told his entire class ranked in the bottom 10th percentile of their age group. He calls it one of the strangest things a school ever did to a child. He now runs 100+ schools. And that experience sits behind every decision he has made about what education should and should not do to a young person.

In this episode of the #EdVancePodcast, Ng Yi Xian, Group CEO of EtonHouse International Education Group, gets direct about what the sector consistently gets wrong on culture, AI and affordable education. The discussion unpacks why financial buyers keep failing in education when operators succeed, why most ed tech has spent years building solutions for problems schools do not actually have, and why the schools winning in Asia right now are the ones that chose curiosity over efficiency when it was still an unpopular position to take.

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Efficiency is often the enemy of real education. In an age of instant answers and AI shortcuts, we are tempted to prioritise the "output" over the "process." But intellectual growth requires friction; if we let robots do the heavy lifting in our classrooms, we aren’t innovating - we are simply making our students, and our systems, weaker.

In this episode, Olli-Pekka Heinonen, Director General of the International Baccalaureate (IB), challenges the "top-down" approach to school reform. The discussion unpacks why classroom change cannot be imposed from above, why culture matters more than charisma, and why the most successful leaders in 2026 are those brave enough to "swim against the tide."

This is a sharp, blunt conversation on what AI can do, what it must never be allowed to do, and why the future of education depends on building systems that are actually worthy of the teachers within them.

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