Shaping Minds Locally and Globally
Welcome back to an-all new Head’s Up. This week, we speak to Shahnaz Al-Sadat bt Abdul Mohsein, the Chairperson of LeapEd who shares with us her journey as a social entrepreneur and her aspirations with LeapEd.
Till our next issue, stay safe and stay healthy!
Q&A with Shahnaz Al-Sadat bt Abdul Mohsein
How did you get a start in the education industry?
I started out as the Executive Director of Strategic Human Capital in Khazanah where I had the opportunity to give “birth” to the company in 2010. After that I became an Executive Trustee in Yayasan AMIR, LeapEd’s strategic partner in implementing the Private-Public Partnership of Trust Schools Programme. My mandate during this period was to expand the Trust Schools nationally. At that time, LeapEd was my service provider.
It was when I was studying for my MBA that I deepened my passion for the nation’s talent development agenda as I believe it is our future. My thesis at that time was “Brain Drain Will be the Cause of Economic Downfall of Malaysia”. During my studies, I found that people were leaving the country for the sake of their children’s education. I was quite curious about this phenomenon and was keen to discover some solutions for this challenge.
At that point, I received some wise advice that I should visit classrooms to gain insights on how to transform our nation’s future. This drove me to visit many schools and universities in Malaysia. Firstly, I found that while our talents have great potential, our learning environments were not optimized to nurture and unleash our children’s potential to meet a future that requires curiosity, confidence, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and co-existence. Secondly, I also discovered that while Malaysia’s education philosophy and policies are ground-breaking, inspiring and relevant, there was a serious policy-implementation gap that needed to be addressed urgently.
With a firm belief that investments in education pays the best interest for the nation, I joined LeapEd in 2016 as its Managing Director to help the country, government, ministry and communities implement what all of us were dreaming of for the future generation of Malaysia. As the Managing Director, our mandate is to strategise and replicate the Trust School’s success throughout Malaysia and beyond. LeapEd is the replication engine for a large repository of intellectual property comprising education innovations that have been tried, tested and delivered. Last year, I became a significant shareholder of LeapEd and also its Chairperson.
As a social entrepreneur, I am excited to continue the efforts to replicate our initiatives to improve the quality of education for each child in Malaysia, regionally and globally to prepare them to lead and shape the future. That is LeapEd’s mission and I am happy to be part of that.
Can you share more about LeapEd?
LeapEd is an award-winning social enterprise and is Malaysia’s first homegrown Education Service Provider.
We undertake education transformation programmes and projects that support the system, school leaders, teachers, students, parents, and the wider community. Our education transformation activities are closely aligned to the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013 – 2025 (MEB) and the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
We work closely with our strategic partners – Yayasan AMIR and the Ministry of Education Malaysia in a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) and focus on whole-school transformation and student-centered learning. We help every individual learner realize their true potential.
Since our establishment in 2010, we have designed and implemented various education transformation models derived from best practices around the world. Our programmes include the District Transformation Programme-AMAN (DTP-AMAN), Islamic School Enhancement Programme (ISEP), Ground-up School Transformation (GUSTO) programme, Program Sekolah Transformasi (PreSTasi) as well as the nation’s pioneering Trust Schools Programme (TSP).
Since our inception, these programmes have benefited over 166,000 students, 6,753 teachers and 164 schools across 13 states nationwide.
What purpose do you hope to achieve with LeapEd?
Our purpose is to embed sustainable education practices in schools to empower students with 21st century competencies so they can go on to fulfill their true potential.
What are some other challenges related to gender within your industry? How do you think we can we tackle those issues? Why is it important to do so?
Challenges differ from person to person based on their vantage point.
I have observed that my female colleagues generally have higher benchmarks for themselves and others while evaluating a job fit, particularly if it’s for a high-level Senior Management post. What I’ve seen is that, if you offer a high-level job to a group of people, more often than not, the women in the group would need some persuasion to step-up for the role when they are already displaying high-level competencies. This is great as it keeps standards high, but it also demonstrates that women have so many self-filters that as you move into higher levels of management, the pool of good female candidates would shrink. In higher risk ventures such as entrepreneurship or in industries with new high-growth areas, we would see even less female talents.
To encourage more female leadership in education sectors and others, we need to create a supportive environment where we can eliminate these self-filters and fish-out women who have competencies to match roles. We can also build ecosystems that allow more women with potential to actively obtain mentorship and interact with successful leaders to encourage learning, visibility and support. On my part, I would like to encourage all women to seek out these solutions for their benefit and the community’s benefit.
Studies have shown that diversity – be it gender, race, or age fosters creativity and innovation in any organisation.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected LeapEd?
Like every other organization similar to ours, LeapEd’s main challenge during this time is to gain access to capital to fund our purpose, and recruiting the right people with the right passion, values and mindsets to keep the organisation true to purpose. As an engine for transformation, we also have to continuously keep our solutions ahead of the game.
Like everybody else, we were caught by surprise in March 2020 when the country went into lockdown and schools had to shift online. Fortunately, we had already insulated ourselves against adversities as we had been prepared ahead.
Even before the pandemic, we were already digitalising our services. The COVID-19 crisis became a catalyst for us to accelerate all efforts to move all our delivery mechanisms to virtual.
One of the key things we observed is that teachers in our Trust Schools who have undergone our transformation programme performed better as they have been prepared during “peace time”. Our teachers have already mastered the skills for assessment for learning (can assess how much a child has understood and learnt) and differentiation (can deliver lessons according to a child’s learning style). Sure, they required further support for their skills to be effectively applied in a virtual environment but having the fundamentals is a great advantage. This reduced learning losses during “war time”.
What do you think the government can do to address learning losses caused by the pandemic?
With the learning losses that children are experiencing from the forced shift from classroom learning to digital learning, it is critical for Malaysia not to drop the ball on education.
Given that the Government have limited resources currently due to other priorities, they should seek solutions that are tried and tested within our local context rather than spend more energy trying to develop their own interventions during this time.
Since our collective future is at stake, the Government could seek to work with existing parties such as foundations, social enterprises, and NGOs who already have tried and tested solutions rather than setting up a new foundation or developing untested models of their own.
I would also suggest that the Government continues to innovate its funding dispersal for public schools’ system in this current crisis where funds can be given directly to foundations, social enterprises and NGOs who are implementing the solutions instead of channeling funds through implementing Ministries. This will enable the solutions to be implemented with the urgent speed that is required.
Having said that I believe we should not just be depending on the Government for national progress. We could instead adopt a community empowerment model to have all stakeholders come together to strategise, plan, implement and monitor enhancements to public goods and services including education. This requires a strong collaborative framework for all social actors, economic players, education institutions, political machinery and youth engines to come together. I believe we have strong fundamentals to do this today but perhaps, we require some catalytic investors to support the development.
What are some of the lessons you have learnt as part of LeapEd and how has failure shaped your journey as an entrepreneur?
I have learnt that just because your intentions are good and that you want to do good deeds, it does not mean the path to success would be easy and straight-forward. In fact, my mother always reminded me that if you want to do good, you must expect your path to be difficult. So, perseverance and resilience are my two good buddies and they keep me going.
How can Malaysians show their support in general for LeapEd’s mission?
During this time when Malaysia is facing multiple challenges, LeapEd is empathising with the nation and would like to offer focus on two fronts.
Firstly, we would like to support school leaders and teachers with our tried and tested methodologies that will help them with the recovery of learning losses caused by the pandemic. Some of our current challenges are shrinking corporate social responsibility and philanthropic funds for education, halted transformation activities by Ministry of Education. We hope that corporations and the public will join us in our mission to advance education and help us deliver long-term impact as our children and future workforce is at stake.
Secondly, as our lives increasingly move to the digital realm, we would like to help students navigate the digital world as it increasingly becomes more embedded into our lives and our economy. We have created a virtual programme called CyberWira for 13-18 year old students. The programme equips youths with the necessary digital intelligence to navigate our increasingly digital world. Besides educating the children on how to protect themselves from cyber-risks, it also helps prepare them for their tertiary education as well as future workplace.
The CyberWira course has 8 modules covering Digital Footprint and Reputation, Digital Etiquette, Digital Security, Digital Literacy, Digital Communication, Digital Commerce, Digital Health and Wellbeing, and Digital Rights and Responsibility. Each of the students will also receive a certificate of achievement for the course. We now have more than 1000 students completing the course as well as 54 teachers from the Trust Schools. There are various ways to support us, and you can find it on our website at www.leapedservices.com.
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