Technology Enables Transparency and Efficiency in School Systems, Say Educators

The 2nd edition of ASMA’s School Education Leadership Conclave was held on 12th February 2021. The virtual event was held under the topic ‘How Technology Can Help Make School Education More Accessible & Affordable’, powered by Financepeer.

The event examined how technology partners can bridge the gap between parents and schools while helping them to find innovative solutions to the navigate challenges they face in various stages of the education process.

The panel was moderated by Kiranpal Singh Chawla, Chairman, Career Point World School, Bilaspur and comprised Dr Rosetta Williams, CEO, Dalmia Vidya Mandir, Dr Sarvesh Naidu, Executive Vice President, TRINS Institutions, Dr Kavita Bajpai, Director & Co-Founder, The Thrissur International School and Swati Sagar, Customer Success Head, Financepeer.

Sagar also made an interesting industry presentation about how Financepeer is helping parents and schools gain easy financing for education.

Opening the discussion Dr Rosetta Williams remarked, “Technology brings in a lot of transparency, especially when it comes to enrolments and admissions, transparency and a time-efficient process is what we are all looking for. It also helps to better manage data in terms of control and security”.

Adding her thoughts to how technology partners help schools increase enrolments and admissions during the post-pandemic economy, Dr Kavita Bajpai, Director & Co-Founder, The Thrissur International School added, “The pandemic has certainly taught us how technology can be an integral part of education. Other than transparency, I feel the efficiency increases and the entire programme becomes structured.”

She continued, “Many times schools do suffer from attrition, either in the administrative part, or the teaching part, but when we bring technology platforms on board, the entire organisation becomes system-driven and does not remain people-driven, so the system remains unaffected”.

Commenting on how Financepeer can help schools improve admissions and enrolments, Swati Sagar, Customer Success Head, Financepeer said, “It’s a very quick process for enrolments. When Financepeer comes into the picture, we take care of the complete process; schools do not need to go through the hassle of collecting fees monthly from parents”.

Sharing his thoughts on if schools need the help of technology partners to widen their reach in the age of social media, Dr Sarvesh Naidu, Executive Vice President, Pathways Schools opined, “You can never be totally self-sufficient. You have to be dependent or various forces and various sources. The four keywords that we are focusing on today are technology, school education, accessibility and affordability. These are like the four wheels of a car; if any one of them stops functioning efficiently; however good the other three are, it’s not going to get the car moving efficiently. Technology is something that we must all recognise now as a friend of schools. The year 2020 has taught us that we cannot survive without it”.

Dr Naidu continued, “Most of our school education has focused on pedagogy; the teacher being the ‘sage on the stage’ and that remains, but by default and by evolution, we have moved to focus on the learner. We must all accept that technology is accessible to everyone – to the learner – whether you’re there as an educator or not. So we have become guides.”

He added, “If the whole purpose of education is learning, then technology brings in relevance, quick access of information and it is ‘as is where is’. And you always need teams to provide support, because schools cannot evolve themselves on the technological front because there are various providers that are specialised in that”.