Schools need to measure soft skills - Michaela Horvathova (Beyond Education)
Michaela Horvathova - Co-founder & Chief Education Officer Beyond Education
The company empowers students 10-21 years old with the 21st century competencies, or so called "soft skills” through research-based programs and 1st scientifically validated assessment. She is an international education policy expert having worked for international organisations like the OECD, IB and UNICEF. She has extensive global experience in curriculum design and reform for 21st century skills & competencies, learning outcomes, evaluation & assessment. She is based in Paris, France.
The full transcript of the podcast can be found below for those who prefer reading rather than listening. The podcast is hosted by Frank Albert Coates.
Episode summary
Michaela from Beyond Education discusses the importance of social emotional skills in education.
Beyond Education aims to empower students by equipping educators with tools to transform education and schools with ways to assess soft-skills.
The education system faces challenges in implementing necessary changes and translating policies into practice.
Beyond Education this year conducted a large-scale assessment in Brazil to 100K students, yielding positive feedback and insights for schools.
The company is currently in the stage of scaling up and improving their go-to-market strategy.
Here are a few resources from Beyond Education to further understand their work:
Transcript of interview
FA: Do you want to give the quick elevator pitch about your company?
MH: As everybody knows in today's world where technology's advancing exponentially and taking over many human tasks, Beyond education's mission is to empower students with what makes me and you unique; our social emotional skills that are so essential for jobs and life in general.
FA: Give me the longer story; what made you dive into EdTech and create this company? I know you have long history within this field of 21st century skills and soft skills.
MH: Yeah. I think this journey started many years ago when I was actually doing my studies at Harvard and I was very interested in future of education and innovation in education. And that's when I started to work with one of my professors on basically identifying and trying to understand what are the current trends in society and how education really needs to change and evolve and adapt in order to better prepare students for the future.
And so I started to do a lot of research. And we developed a framework that is called Four Dimensional Educational Framework that later on served as a basis for the project that I worked on at the OECD Education 2030 which aimed to help member countries to redesign their education systems and really change their national curricula.
And so when I was working there, I could see that there is a lot of sort of agreement on the high level among the policy makers and researchers that everybody sort of agrees that the education systems need to change. However, the change is very slow. And so that's when I left and I worked more on the implementation of these reforms. I worked with different countries on their education reforms, like Brazil, South Africa, Netherlands, Czech Republic. And one of the things I could see was that, what is really difficult for schools and principals and teachers, is even if they want to change, they don't really have tools that can help them transform the education.
And so that's where the idea of Beyond education came about. It was around three years ago. And, I think the desire to try to change things bottom up instead of top down, even though both are necessary, but I really believe that equipping educators with the specific tools, and being able to scale it up through technology, really makes sense.
So that was the birth of Beyond education.
FA: My follow up question will be, related to what you mentioned that the education system is slow. What about the top down? You know, why isn't there a PISA for soft skills and more things driving this on a broader scale, top down.
MH: It's being developed as we speak. So there is PISA for global competency and there is also PISA for creativity and critical thinking that is being developed. I think there is one competency that is being developed every three years because whatever OECD pushes out obviously requires a very thorough background research.
So there are efforts and obviously at the international level from the OECD and also at the national level in terms of the countries, right? There are a lot of countries that are currently doing their education reforms for 21st century. So there is a lot happening on the ground or on the high level of the systemic level.
However, what is the problem and where is the issues, is the translation of these documents and objectives and goals into practice. Because if you would look at a lot of the national standards or documents, they look very good and they're actually aligned with what needs to happen. Where is the problem?
It is that actually the reality in the classrooms looks quite different still. And so, there is a big delay between what the system and the policy and international education is trying to do and how fast the schools and the ground actually responds or can respond. And so there is a huge delay.
So I believe that both top down and bottom up are necessary in order to accomplish this really massive transformation that we need in education.
FA: So I guess you can say that what's happening top down is helping what you're trying to do bottom up. How do you see that and how do you integrate with these longer term initiatives?
MH: I think because I'm very well aware of what's happening top down, that was the idea and the objective of starting this bottom up initiative. How I see it and what is the challenge is that there is a big discrepancy still between what ministries of education, researchers, policy makers, understand that it's needed and important and what people on the ground understand that is needed.
And this is where the difficulty comes in, because anytime you try to do the change bottom up, you realize that the level of understanding of urgency of change in education is very different. And oftentimes it's not there. And so what is challenging for us is to, while we are trying to transform the education, we also need to basically educate the users and raise awareness about the importance of actually why is this so needed?
Because unfortunately, still in many countries, many schools, many principals, teachers, parents don't necessarily see this urgency and this need change.
FA: And one thing I wanted to hear from you about is your very recent, huge tests in Brazil; 120,000 students. How did it go and what have you learned if you have some of the findings?
MH: I wouldn't call it a test. It was a massive, large scale implementation of the assessment. And basically we reached 122,000 students across 26 out of 27 states in Brazil. So basically covered almost the whole Brazil. And it was implemented across 726 schools.
So it was really a massive scale up for us because last year we were in thousands and now we went over a hundred thousand students. And there are obviously many learnings. I think that when we are on the ground, we see that implementation and execution is crucial. So not just having a strong instrument, which I believe we have because it's scientifically validated and it can really measure what it's supposed to measure, but also actually implementing it and executing it on the ground, it's extremely difficult and that's what makes part of the success.
I think that we learned that we can scale up even though it's not easy and smooth. I think that we realized that we can deliver even on this large scale, even though it was very sort of overwhelming at the start. And then in terms of the feedback and the testimonials that we got from the teachers and the principals and also the consultants that were helping to implement it was actually very positive. That it brought a lot of insights into things that they're trying to do, but they had no idea whether actually the programs or pedagogical practices that they're implementing in the schools actually help develop these skills and that through our assessment and the reports and the data that schools got and teachers got, and students got, it brought them much more insights and clarity into what works and what doesn't. And so then ultimately it helps them better plan and better prepare the future programs and, and interventions.
FA: Fantastic. Eager to see more on the outcomes of this huge implementation. And over to more the company and the team. Could you say something about first what stage you're at in terms of fundraising, growth, things like that?
MH: Currently we closed the seed. So at the beginning when we were starting two and a half years ago we got a pre-seed and now we just closed the seed investment. We also finished Harvard alumni accelerator program. That really helped us with preparation for this scale up that we just did.
I think we are in between product market fit and go to market. So we see that our product is needed, that it creates value that users are willing to pay for it. And now we are really in a scale up mode and the next stage or something that we are currently working on, is iterating and improving our go-to market strategy.
FA: And over to more the investor question. What will make you succeed and what's your secret sauce?
MH: So I think above all it's our commitment and belief in the mission of what we are doing. I think that as, as you know, and as all of the entrepreneurs know, it's not an easy ride. There are a lot of ups and downs, but I, I think I never doubted the mission and the vision that we have and how needed this is. And that I think helps us be also resilient and stay on the course despite of the different challenges.
Also, I think we have a very strong team that is very complimentary. So we have the core skillset that we need and that is also highly autonomous and ready to push when they need to push. So this is a huge advantage.
We also have actually it is considered to be advantage and disadvantage at the same time, early mover advantage that we are really coming up with something that is innovative, that is ahead of the trend. And as far as we know, we don't really have any real competitor in the markets we are in. And so on one side, we understand this and we want to move very quickly and scale up. And on the other side, it takes time because as I was mentioning earlier, we really need to raise awareness and educate our customers and users to sometimes, this is the part of the advantage and disadvantage of the early mover.
And then lastly, I think that we are very well surrounded. We have a strong network of advisors and mentors that really believe also in our mission and are helping us on the way and supporting us and providing strategic advice when it's needed. So I believe that we have different parts of the sauce that can help us succeed.
FA: Over to the markets; you mentioned that you are quite an early mover in this space. So like who would you consider as your competitors if any and why?
MH: There are a lot of companies that are developing soft skills through programs, which is something that we actually started with and we still have, but we sort of put it on hold and as we understood that what is really needed or what is maybe more of an entry point to schools is assessment.
So, some of the competitors that we had at the beginning are the ones, and there are actually many that do develop soft skills through programs. But as far as we know in terms of the assessment, of course there are the big players like K Plan, ETS, all of those, but they don't really have soft skills assessment.
There is one player that is a foundation, it's called Ayrton Senna Foundation, after a famous Formula 1 driver that is investing a lot in the social emotional learning. And that has developed an assessment of social emotional skills, that also is research based. What is the feedback that we got from different clients is that apparently it takes two hours to administer, it's paper-based, so it's very difficult to implement and actually collect and analyze the data and the results.
So, ours just to compare takes 20, 30 minutes max. It's all online and students receive their personalized report immediately. And we give the school reports or comparison reports where we actually can benchmark different schools within the region or outside of the region or outside of the state, or even internationally within a week.
So I think that maybe on the research, they are the competitor, but in terms of the implementation and agility, and actually the whole operation side of it, as far as we know, we currently don't have a competitor in the Latin American market and European market, which are our two main markets.
FA: The follow up question related to that; how important is it to have both the assessment side and I would say the content side? Could you sort of split it out? Could you do the one without the other?
MH: We are doing one without another. I think that's an excellent question. We constantly ask ourselves this question, right? Because we first started with programs and I think that the feedback we were getting from the schools, they were saying like, yeah, it's great, we really want to do it, but we don't have time or money or both to actually do it, right?
Because it's still unfortunately a nice to have. Because as long as you keep measuring math and science and physics, this is what everybody cares about. This is what teachers and principals and parents and students care about because this is what they're being evaluated on and tested on. And so it was very hard, at least that was our experience to push programs in. And so that's when we understood that there is really a big market and big gap and opportunity for us to actually assess the impact of this program, because a lot of schools are trying to do something in it, but they have no idea whether it works and what is the impact of programs on developing these skills.
And so that's why our sort of theory of change is that first we need to, if we really treasure it, we need to measure it. We need to bring focus and awareness to it and then create a need by showing the gaps and then we can propose the programs. So this is our strategy, that first we want to scale up massively the assessment and then convert some percentage of the students that take assessment into our programs.
Which is something that we are in process of building sort of a personalized learning path where based on the assessment results, they will get exactly a personalized path proposed as to what are the different things that they need to develop.
FA: And when you talk about personalized, I'm thinking AI and, and Large Language Models and whatnot. Are you using any of that technology or have you sort of looked at that for your purposes?
MH: We are not using that right now because this is something that we would need to develop. So this would be part of our next fundraising. Basically including this in the budget and the funds and the resources, human and financial resources to be able to develop that. Because currently we have the assessment and we have the programs, but they're not connected at such a level that we can actually propose the personalized learning path.
So this is something that we would need to, and obviously want to develop in our roadmap.
FA: That makes sense. And you have mentioned a few challenges this year as you were implementing the program in Brazil. But if you look back since the start of the company, what's been your biggest challenge and how did you solve it?
MH: Well, I think it's the funds. It probably, it's not surprising. I think many entrepreneurs struggle with it. So the solution is just spending a lot of time on fundraising together with my co-founder. That's one. And the second one is tech. I'm personally not a tech expert. And so, knowing exactly what needs to be developed and what is our tech roadmap and what is it that we need in order to scale up.
It's sometimes challenging. And so obviously we have a team working on it. But as, as you know, it always takes longer to develop something, costs more than predicted. So I think that this has been our big challenge, the tech and some of the issues that we continue having with with the tech.
FA: And speaking first about the fundraising, what's your one takeaway from, you know, that fundraising that you've been doing already that you would share with other founders?
MH: I think that it takes long time and especially now, given the current context and the timing, it's probably more difficult than ever. But, finding investors or VCs that are very much aligned with the mission and believe in the mission and understand the mission and of what you're trying to do, I think it's extremely important because, they won't be just financial investors, but they can actually help with different strategic choices and decisions and can stay more for the long run. So I think that this is one of the important lessons I learned.
FA: And looking across the support that you've been able to find and resources that might have helped you along the way, are there sort of a couple of things you have in mind that were really, really helpful when you needed support along your journey?
MH: I think the Harvard Accelerator that I was mentioning it was really a great experience because basically we went through all of the different parts of the business and it was really like a reflection and stepping back and looking at, okay, what is our value proposition? What is our pricing? What is our go-to market? What is our tech strategy? Basically dissecting culture, HR, so dissecting every single part of the business that normally we don't have time to do because we are in a reactive mode and we are just sort of in a do-do mode. And being able to step back and look at it and share it with, and discuss it with other founders, but also have access to experts in pricing, in sales, in go to market and having their advice, I think was was super useful.
It was really like a full review of our business and it helped us I think also prepare for this big scale up that we had. And then talking to other entrepreneurs, sometimes just having this sort of common feeling that we are not alone or I'm not alone in this. And people have similar issues and challenges.
And then having access to mentors. I think that has been extremely valuable. We have been very lucky to be able to surround our ourselves with some people very generous with their time that also have incredibly experience, that can help us in some of the points when we were stuck.
So I think it's a combination of all of the things that I just mentioned.
FA: And looking forward the next 6, 12 months, what is keeping you up at night?
MH: Yeah, so I feel like the company's really in a turning point. That we are in the process of massive scale up. Last year we had 3000 users. This year we have more than a hundred thousand users. And next year we aim to go to 300,000 users. And I think the biggest question or challenge is how can we quickly adapt our tech to be able to do this?
And also our operations to be able to implement this large scale with excellence and with no major challenges. So that's my main question.
FA: And if you had a magic wand and you can just, you know, wave it at what you wanted, what would you wish for?
MH: That more and more people would understand that education really needs to change and evolve. And that we wouldn't have to do so much of education and awareness raising among the users. And we could just scale up to, I was talking about a hundred thousand, but to millions of users because I truly believe that what we are doing is aiming to help ultimately students be better prepared for the future.
FA: Excellent. I'll tell that to my fairy who's flying around here. And is there anything else that you want to share with other EdTech founders? Any specific advice based on your experience?
MH: Having a co-founder really helps. With both sharing challenges and sharing successes, it's already hard as it is, so I think it would be very hard if I would be doing it really alone. So I think that that's one of the advice, maybe if somebody's thinking whether to do it alone or with the co-founder.
I think that sharing it, again, the ups and downs with someone is really good. And also having a sparring partner about thinking through and reflecting about some important decisions. But also choosing this co-founder carefully because sometimes it can go in different ways. And then I was already mentioning that having investors that are aligned and really believe in the mission, I think is the key.
FA: Anything else that you want to share?
MH: Yeah, I think just in general the entrepreneurial journey and building a startup I think for me personally has been the hardest professional experience, but at the same time, the most rewarding one. I believe it's sort of like a true school of life for me, and it helps me to grow professionally and personally. So, I would highly recommend it to anyone, even though it's hard it's really worth it.
