I have spent close to 20 years building and leading organisations in international education. Our job, in many ways, has been to make other countries’ schools feel worth wanting.
We tell families in Mumbai, Chennai and Gurugram why the British system builds independent thinkers, why an American degree lets a 17-year-old change her mind twice before graduating. We are the bridge to all of that.
Last month, students and teachers took to the streets across India, including in New Delhi, where I had the chance to spend time among some of them, listening to the questions they were asking.
It started over leaked exam papers and grew into something bigger, a conversation about accountability, assessment, student pressure, trust in institutions and what a fairer education system could look like.
But it struck me how familiar the questions were. They were the same questions I have built a career answering, just usually about somewhere else.
Most of us in this profession built our entire careers this way. We studied what works elsewhere so we could explain it well, and somewhere along the line, explaining it became a livelihood. Whole lives were built promoting the best of overseas education systems to Indian families.
So, when a moment came that was really about bringing better practice to education at home, using the very same knowledge we spend our careers sharing about other systems, it felt like something more than a news story. It felt like a chance to give something back, to show up, listen, and stand alongside the same students, teachers and families we spend our working lives serving, just this time a little closer to home.
And yet, I noticed a certain quiet. Not silence exactly, more an absence of the fluency we usually bring to these conversations. I still find that curious. Maybe it says something about how we see our own role, maybe nothing at all. I don’t know the answer. But it’s the kind of quiet that makes you sit with a question rather than rush past it.
Our sector is good at showing up for each other. So many conferences, the receptions, the familiar faces at every event. I found myself wondering if this could have been another one of those gatherings, just for a different reason: a place to show up, ask questions, and listen.
I am not saying that everyone should have shown up. That takes its own kind of conviction, and it isn’t mine to ask of others. What I keep coming back to is smaller than that.
I found myself wondering if this could have been another one of those gatherings, just for a different reason: a place to show up, ask questions, and listen
We spend our days explaining what works elsewhere. This was a moment when that same knowledge could have gone somewhere closer to home, in a conversation, an article, a few honest recommendations or maybe just showing up. Not necessarily to endorse every demand or take a political position, but simply to contribute something useful.
Home was just as deserving of that attention. A lot of what we actually do is judge whether an institution is credible, not just well marketed, and look past a transcript to understand who a student really is.
We also spend years learning what helps a young person settle into a system that isn’t familiar to them yet. None of that needed a position on assessment policy in India.
It just needed us to notice that the same care we bring abroad could have shown up here too: sitting with the students and teachers asking these questions, hearing them out, and helping them shape what they were feeling into something clearer, a way to name the problem and start thinking about what might fix it.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. Some 20 years in, I still believe deeply in what this work does. But I keep thinking about what it might look like to occasionally point all that expertise homeward, not as a stance, just as a way of showing up.
