16 February

This image is extraordinary. In India, there is huge pressure to pass high school exams. Cheating and corruption is widespread, and that’s what you can see in the photo. This is parents, relatives and friends climbing through the windows of exam centres to provide answers to students taking exams inside. Exam supervisors are often bribed to leave the room while this happens. There are 6.5 million exam-taking students in this particular state of India. When the authorities announced they were going to crack down on cheating, over one million of these students left school immediately. The bigger story for me here isn’t ‘India’s education is corrupt’. It’s that we don’t understand in the rich world just how important education is, we take it for granted and fund it almost grudgingly. The Indians know how important it is, for them it’s the difference between a life of poverty and a chance at a better life. Here we even tell students exams don’t matter, education doesn’t really matter all that much, there will always be another pathway for them etc. True in some ways, but the implicit message we’re giving them is that going to school is pretty much a waste of their time. They act accordingly, and our educational outcomes on global measures are going backwards. School SHOULD be challenging, it should cause a degree of discomfort, it should be hard work and you should have to be outside your comfort zone when you learn. Otherwise you won’t learn a thing. How ‘stressed’ our students are should not be the measure, school was much harder even when I went to school, and stress was lower. So we’re not understanding that stress, it’s not about how hard school is.