Arghya Banerjee is founder of The Levelfield School in Suri (pop. 80,000) in the Birbhum district of West Bengal. The school was promoted in 2010 by the Levelfield Trust whose mission and objective is to “level the playing field” and make quality education accessible and affordable to middle class households in tier-II and III urban habitations.

Newspeg. In May, Banerjee was in Mumbai to explore opportunities for replicating and expanding the reach of the Levelfield Trust to Maharashtra (pop. 112 million), India’s #1 industrial state. “A metro city school and four-five tier-I and/or II schools will give us a ‘hub-and-spoke’ model enabling us to rotate teachers. Since our teachers are mostly from the metros, a metro city school will help us retain them throughout their careers. Otherwise, we tend to lose trained teachers to family, marriage, etc,” he says.

History. An idealistic alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur and IIM-Ahmedabad, Banerjee began his career in ICICI Securities.

Subsequently, he worked with a Chennai-based equity research firm Irevna Pvt. Ltd (now a division of credit rating agency CRISIL) where he experienced first-hand the poor communication and English-speaking skills of India’s ‘educated’ workforce. This disillusionment with the education system was compounded when he began evaluating schools for his daughter aged four in 2008, prompting him to return to his roots in West Bengal and promote the trust and the CBSE-affiliated Levelfield School with an initial investment of Rs.50 lakh.

Since then, this K-VII school has grown, attracting 300 students mentored by 12 teachers. By introducing innovative practices and processes, Banerjee and his wife Asima, a science alumna of Mumbai University, have succeeded in keeping tuition fees (Rs.2,000 per month at the primary level) affordable for the neo middle class. Among them: intensive training of fresh graduates recruited as teachers and in-house development of teaching-learning programmes and materials.

“Our policy is to adopt projects and applications-based education as opposed to rote learning,” says Asima, who supervises teaching materials development at Levelfield School.

Direct talk. “Our pedagogies are designed to ensure learning through comprehension. Critical thinking skills are developed by encouraging children to solve Japanese puzzles such as Nonogram, Shikaku, Sudoku and Kenken. There is also an emphasis on strategy games in addition to chess. The objective is developing the cognitive skills of students so that exercising the mind becomes a habit,” explains Banerjee.

Future plans. Pleased with the learning outcomes of the school’s students and satisfied with Levelfield’s teaching-learning blueprint, Banerjee is exploring other geographies to replicate the Levelfield experience and to introduce — starting with Mumbai and Kolkata — the trust’s metro-centred hub-and-spoke model. “I’m looking for forward-thinking corporates and real estate developers to partner with us to roll out the Levelfield model nationally. It’s an investment in nation building,” says Banerjee.

Fair winds!

Nadia Lewis (Mumbai)