This blog was written by Sreehari Ravindranath, Director – Research and Impact, Dream a Dream, India; Bhagwati Prasad Mandoli, Staff Officer, Samagra Shiksha, Uttarakhand, and State Nodal Officer for the Anandam (Happiness) Curriculum; Ghulam Omar Qargha, Fellow, Global Economy and Development, Center for Universal Education at Brookings; Rachel Dyl, Project Manager and Research Analyst, Global Economy and Development, Center for Universal Education at Brookings.
Education systems worldwide are grappling with similar challenges. As societies confront increasing complexity, technological disruption, uncertainty and widening inequalities, policymakers are rethinking what schools should prioritise and what capabilities young people need to thrive in the future. Education systems are increasingly seeking to cultivate capabilities such as critical thinking, creativity, agency, adaptability and social and emotional wellbeing alongside academic achievement. However, while aspirations are increasingly shared globally, translating them into meaningful classroom practices remains far more difficult.
India offers a particularly useful lens through which to examine these challenges. Through the Strengthening Pedagogical Approaches for Relevant Knowledge and Skills (SPARKS) initiative, we explored how the ambitions of India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 are interpreted and enacted across different parts of the education system. Conversations with teachers, teacher educators, policymakers and system leaders across multiple states pointed toward a broader lesson that extends beyond India’s borders. Reforms often struggle, not because the vision is unclear or teachers resist change, but because the conditions necessary to support change remain insufficient.
India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 provides a particularly revealing case. Widely regarded as one of the country’s most ambitious education reforms in recent decades, it calls for a shift toward competency-based learning, interdisciplinary thinking, flexibility, experiential learning, multilingual education and holistic development of children. These aspirations are not unique to India alone. Similar goals appear in reform agendas across the world as countries seek to prepare their young people for increasingly uncertain futures. However, India’s experience highlights an important question facing education systems globally: if there is growing agreement about where education should move, why does meaningful change remain so difficult to realise inside classrooms?
There are also examples in India that illustrate what becomes possible when reforms are accompanied by enabling conditions. Uttarakhand’s Anandam Pathyacharya, a state-wide wellbeing curriculum introduced in 2019 and later closely aligned with many of the aspirations reflected in NEP 2020, offers one such example. Implemented across thousands of government schools, Anandam Pathyacharya sought to create a dedicated space for reflection, mindfulness, relationships, social and emotional wellbeing, and holistic development within the everyday life of schools. Their experience demonstrates that meaningful educational change is not driven by curriculum design alone. Rather, it is strengthened when teachers are engaged as partners in the reform process, supported through sustained professional learning, and enabled by leadership commitment across different levels of the system. The lessons emerging from Anandam Pathyacharya suggest that reforms are most likely to flourish when systems invest not only in what should change but also in the conditions that make change possible.
Emerging evidence from the SPARKS initiative, based on conversations with teachers, teacher educators, policymakers and system actors across Uttarakhand, Telangana, Jharkhand and Goa, suggests that the challenge often lies beyond questions of policy design or implementation quality. While many teachers expressed strong alignment with NEP 2020’s vision of holistic, experiential and student-centred learning, they also described navigating conditions that make these aspirations difficult to sustain in practice.
Teachers reported spending substantial time on administrative responsibilities, including reporting requirements, surveys, election duties, documentation demands, and other administrative tasks, often reducing the time available for lesson planning and classroom engagement. Others described professional development programmes that introduced innovative pedagogical approaches but remained disconnected from the realities of multilingual classrooms, first-generation learners, resource constraints and large student populations. Across states, teachers also highlighted the emotional labour involved in supporting children facing poverty, trauma, exclusion and family challenges. Many view this relational work as central to learning, yet largely invisible within formal systems of accountability and recognition.
These experiences reveal an important reality about reforms. Classrooms are not static sites where policies simply arrive and unfold as they are intended. They are dynamic environments shaped by relationships, institutional culture, competing priorities and the everyday realities of schooling. Teachers are expected to improve foundational literacy and numeracy, implement competency-based and experiential learning, support students’ social and emotional development, engage families and communities, and prepare young people for an uncertain future. Simultaneously, they continue to operate within systems that often prioritise administrative compliance, examination performance and curriculum coverage. As one policy actor reflected during the study, India has become increasingly successful at designing ambitious educational reforms, yet often struggles to create the conditions necessary for those ambitions to be realised in everyday classroom practice.
This distinction is important because educational reform has traditionally focused considerable attention on questions of policy design and implementation. In responding to evolving needs and aspirations, education systems have invested significantly in curriculum reform, assessment structures, teacher development programmes and new frameworks to support learning. These efforts have contributed to important progress in many contexts. At the same time, experience from India and elsewhere suggests that alongside strong policies and interventions, equal attention may need to be given to the conditions that enable teachers and schools to translate these ambitions into everyday practice. However, evidence from India suggests that policy ambition alone is rarely sufficient.
However, evidence from India suggests that policy ambition alone is rarely sufficient.
In India, many of the expectations embedded within the NEP 2020 are being layered onto institutional arrangements that were designed for a different era of schooling. For decades, educational success has been defined largely through curriculum coverage, examination performance, procedural compliance and the efficient administration of a large and complex education system. Teachers have been socialised into structures that reward completion, standardisation and measurable outcomes. The NEP 2020 now asks the same system to additionally nurture creativity, agency, critical thinking, collaboration, social-emotional development and holistic learning. While these ambitions are widely welcomed, they often sit alongside older structures that continue to shape incentives, accountability mechanisms, teacher preparation and daily classroom realities.
This resulting tension is not unique to India. Across many education systems, reforms seek to promote learner-centred and competency-based approaches, while existing structures continue to reward very different behaviours. India’s experience shows that educational change is not simply a technical challenge of implementation. Aligning aspirations, incentives, cultures and conditions is also a challenge.
Under such circumstances, what emerges is often not resistance to reform but adaptation to it. Teachers continuously interpret, negotiate and translate reform ambitions into forms that can be sustained within the realities they navigate. Across the states engaged in the SPARKS initiative, teachers frequently expressed strong commitment to the broader goals of holistic development and learner-centred education. Many described their role as extending well beyond content delivery to include nurturing confidence, belonging, emotional wellbeing and the overall development of children and young people.
This finding echoes the evidence emerging from other contexts. For example, the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) suggests that teachers’ aspirations toward student-centred and holistic learning often exceed the structures and support systems available to help them enact those aspirations. In other words, the challenge is frequently not one of teacher motivation but of system alignment.
Teachers frequently navigate the tension between their beliefs about what matters for young people and the systems that ultimately reward them for their work. Policies may encourage student-centred learning, while assessment systems continue to prioritise narrow measures of academic performance. Professional development may advocate for innovative pedagogies, while offering limited opportunities for sustained reflection, experimentation and practice. Schools may be encouraged to cultivate creativity and agency while continuing to operate in cultures shaped by compliance, standardisation and procedural expectations.
Over time, these tensions require teachers to engage in constant negotiation, balancing what they believe is educationally meaningful with what the system demands, recognises and incentivises. Therefore, the challenge may not primarily be one of implementation failure but of system misalignment.
Across sectors, there is increasing recognition that sustainable change is shaped not only by the interventions themselves but also by the enabling conditions that allow those interventions to flourish. Education is no exception to this trend. Policies do not operate in isolation; they operate within systems shaped by relationships, trust, capacity, incentives, institutional cultures and the everyday realities of practice. However, reform efforts frequently assume that changing structures and introducing new frameworks will automatically change human behaviour, while paying comparatively less attention to the conditions necessary for individuals and institutions to enact those changes meaningfully.
This calls for a broader reconsideration of how reforms are understood. Rather than asking only what policies are intended to achieve, education systems may need to ask a more fundamental question: what conditions enable ambitious policy visions to become a lived reality in classrooms?
Answering this question requires engaging more deeply with classroom realities rather than assuming linear pathways from policy design to practice. It requires strengthening support structures around teachers through sustained, context-responsive opportunities for learning and collaboration, rather than relying primarily on episodic interventions. It requires recognising teachers as active interpreters of reform, rather than passive recipients of policy. It may also require reconsidering accountability systems so that they reflect broader educational aspirations, rather than reinforcing narrow definitions of success that can unintentionally constrain the changes reforms seek to encourage.
India’s experience with the NEP 2020 reminds us that the future of education is ultimately not shaped by policy documents, strategic frameworks or reform announcements alone. It is shaped in classrooms through everyday interactions, relationships and decisions that determine how young people experience the learning process. Reforms succeed not simply because policies are ambitious, but because systems create the conditions that allow ambition to become practice. Until education systems pay equal attention to the environments within which change unfolds, the distance between what reforms imagine and what classrooms experience may continue to persist, regardless of how compelling the vision is.
