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The Future of business. Future of business.

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Peugeot business is more global and more decentralised, making sure that enterprises that are a lot more responsible.

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Smart cities. More collaboration. Consumer driven productivity.

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Environmental and social responsibility. Global human centred.

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Purposeful individualised. Automation. Big Data.

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Climate Change. Space Exploration. Renewable Energy.

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Information security. Exciting and digital. Hello and welcome to the Future of Business Podcast.

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I'm your host, Alison McArthur.

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And in this episode we'll be talking with Tarun Varma Initiatives Manager at the Lego Foundation, specialising in early childhood education.

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He focuses on businesses and opportunities which can help children realise their full potential.

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We also caught up speaking to Laura and Pooja from the MBA program here at Oxford Said Business School,

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who are building a Start-Up to help support vulnerable parents, support their child's growth.

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So welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on.

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Thank you for having me. So I was wondering, could you just start by telling us a little bit about what early childhood development means,

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making sure that children learn well and in the age below six,

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which is typically what is defined as early childhood or eight in some cases, that they're well-cared for happy, healthy, nutritious.

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And in this time of amazing brain development, where the brain is literally making the maximum neural connections it ever will in its life,

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that the child is ready to learn, absorb what's going on in the world.

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So I guess early childhood development has really until now been in the purview of of the government is maybe seen as the Government's role,

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but obviously you're more focussed on it from a business aspect.

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So I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how you got into the role,

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what the Lego Foundation does and how business can play a part in early childhood development?

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Sure. In terms of the way I look at it, you know, I have a business hat on most of the time because that was what my first career was.

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And I think there's a lot of room for business innovating the Lego Foundation per say.

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It works in many different settings and tries to make sure there's a balance between innovation investment.

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But I step back a little bit,

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tell you actually quickly about how I got into doing this and why I think business has a big role to play in this area because I work.

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Yes, that'll be great. Lovely. So, you know.

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Econ undergrad, and I had a brilliant opportunity to go work for a large telecom company managing large scale projects.

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And what I realised was when I looked at 400 plus people across India and the UK, there was a certain difference between how people transacted.

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You know, people were curious about what they did, wanted mastery, wanted to solve problems.

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I wanted to have an impact on the world.

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And that impression as a as a, as my first job stayed with me and it only grew when I went back to India and was an entrepreneur.

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Building a technology business for education.

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But this was higher education at that time. I met consistently young people or older people who were who fell into these buckets of

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super curious wonder to have mastery and control and develop or have an impact on the world.

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And then people who fell in bucket number two who were just transacting jobs for money and were cared about way less.

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And when I started reading about the state of the world, I thought we needed a lot more of these bucket one people.

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And I became curious about how they were crafted or built and what seemed to be similar or anecdotally,

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at least across these Buchanan people, was they had powerful life or education experiences.

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And what was common across them was they had a different kind of education.

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Mm hmm.

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And I was a few years into my study, and I started really looking at the people through this lens and realised that education played a big role.

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And from the deans of directors of the institutions that I was working with, we realised that it was primary education that made a big difference.

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So I actually became a primary school teacher. Alice and I taught primary school.

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I did the Teach for India Fellowship, which is a little bit like Teach for America in the U.S. or Teach first in the UK.

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And I was in charge of 42 children between the age of five and 11 for about two and a half years.

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And that's when I realised that early childhood was super important.

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What happened with children before they came to school, I walked into the doors was super important and the idea of research in early childhood,

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the idea of how parents viewed society and the influence of the children became very critical.

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And I came to Oxford. I did a double masters, a missing child development or understand that.

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And then, of course, I did an MBA because, you know, I believe business can truly be a force for good.

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Mm hmm. And the lack of foundation that expands that boundary between being a corporate foundation that has a large business entity,

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that wants to be a responsible player to inspire and develop the leaders of tomorrow, which are children.

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But look at looks at the world in terms of having high quality learning across

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the world and the way that it plays out in different countries across the world.

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Like how how is this education being brought to children?

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Is this fire cloth? Classroom activities at home?

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Teachers. Parents. Biotech? You mean high quality, early learning?

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Yes, I think there are different models. The foundation supports.

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Lots of implementers in very different countries in terms of looking at what are the high quality models and how they can be scaled.

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But I think going back a little bit to to why there's an opportunity in business,

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I think what we share across the many countries that they are is that.

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As a collective. There are millions of potential potential customers in the world.

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Most of them either sit in high growth markets, which we probably call the developing world,

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or high value markets where parents want great learning for the children.

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Pre-school, which is below the age of six or eight,

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is usually very lightly regulated and parents are willing to pay a lot in terms of time or

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money to ensure that the children have incredible access to paid learning experiences.

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And when they have a few. Few opportunities to expose children, to experiences they realise as they want to do much more.

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So millions of customers, high growth, high value markets, low regulation, willingness to pay.

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And you know what is inchoate? Demand. It makes it a phenomenal business.

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Blue ocean opportunity.

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And examples of that abound, whether it's Nigeria, where you have one of the fastest growing countries in the world, or you have the UK,

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where the government introduced a 15 hours per week free early care for families who couldn't afford it that quickly grew to 30 hours a week.

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You're seeing examples all over the world where there is room and time for parents to experiment with how the children are taught and educated.

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So you're seeing well, as you know, we'll always be speaking to Laura White's shortly who who?

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You know, and she's looking at setting up a start-up at the moment.

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So are you seeing this is sort of an area that's getting more popular in recent years.

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I think in my view, what business does really well are what start ups are.

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What business is set up to do really well is attract capital towards problems, try things out and scale it up.

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So innovating close to the issue is, is something that's the the heartbeat of business.

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So I do think given the massive opportunity, given the fact that there is room for innovation and consumers,

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people like you and I, people who are young parents or people who are trying to solve issues for children,

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want to use tools that the use day to day towards being able to make lives either more efficient for their progeny in terms of organising things

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or have a better system of delivery where they can have a seamless interaction with the various different experiences that child is having.

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We then spoke to Laura and Puja about how technology can play a pivotal role in supporting the parents of young

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children and how their Start-Up is looking to combat some key issues in the area of early childhood development.

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So today on the podcast, we are delighted to have Laura and future here, two of our MBAs here.

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SB So welcome. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you.

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Yeah. So they are here to talk about their social enterprise and I guess we can start with like your vision.

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So you've said that your vision is a world where every parent has the support

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and knowledge they need to give their children an equal chance for success,

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you know? Can you just give, like, an overview of, like, how you became like,

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aware that that was like an issue around early childhood development and how you got into this?

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Happy to. So this is Laura and I was an early years teacher before coming to the MBA program.

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So I used to teach children as young as one and a half with autism,

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as well as typically developing preschoolers and pre-kindergarten years for D.C. public schools in the States.

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And every year I had the same problem in that low income children were arriving in my classroom,

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often significantly behind the skills of their wealthier peers.

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And this really bothered me. And on top of that, it was part of my job as a teacher to try and close that gap.

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So I experimented with how to do that a lot in my own teaching.

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But also a critical component was providing highly individualised relationship based coaching to parents to help them help their child grow.

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And that's what really resulted in enabling all of the children in my class to

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be able to leave at the level that they needed to to succeed in the next class.

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So that's what brought me into the MBA. I wanted to explore how to do that at scale, and my teacher skills weren't enough to do that.

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I was fortunate to meet Pooja, who is looking at a similar problem, but just from a slightly different angle for me.

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Yeah. So this is Pooja, my background. I was working in child welfare and foster care in the United States.

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Kind of working from the federal level on policy level changes all the way down to at the at the county and

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state level how foster care is actually administered to make outcomes better for children and families.

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And anyone who's familiar with the caring system in the US, sorry,

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in the UK or the foster care system in the US knows that it completely most of the time doesn't work.

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And so the kind of not we were trying to crack was how might we support families, vulnerable families in particular,

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better to be able to foster their children's development, to really break that cycle of poverty and intergenerational vulnerability.

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And we realised that we really had to be working preventatively and I've kind of the much higher up stream than what we

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were doing when children had already been abused or neglected or were at risk of being so in the foster care system.

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So I was really excited about the angle of helping parents and helping families support their children.

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So why do you think the current system isn't working?

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Is it that there isn't enough money for services or people aren't aware of it

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or they don't have the opportunity to kind of take up what's available like?

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That's a great question. And actually we're very fortunate in the MBA program at Saeed to have participated in the MAP the system contest,

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which challenges students and people from other business schools to really map out an ecosystem to understand the root cause of the problem.

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So Puja and I did that to explore early childhood services in Oxfordshire and we actually found that long story short, in an environment of austerity,

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different early childhood institutions at the local level were really struggling to serve the most vulnerable families,

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the people that are hurt us to reach often those are folks in rural communities or have a few more barriers that might keep them from going to,

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say, a children's centre stay in playgroup. What sort of challenges do they face?

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Yeah, mental health is a huge thing and that really came out in the prototype that we were doing.

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But people often know what they should do by this point.

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There's a lot of information out there about what you can do to support your child.

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Reading to them. Singing to them.

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But there is a behavioural barrier to actually doing that and that comes from feeling like your own needs aren't met.

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People are judging you and not seeing where you are. Mm hmm.

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Yeah. So it's just really difficult. There are structural barriers, so things like education, level of parents,

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or just physical proximity to services that are really difficult to overcome.

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But I think the much bigger challenge that we've been finding,

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that it's found both in the literature and is found through our kind of anecdotal evidence from our research,

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was that there are these psychological and cognitive barriers to putting in practice a lot of these things.

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But in response to kind of the the question of is it sort of resources, is it cognitive, is it just people know and they're not doing it?

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The answer is yes. Kind of all of the above. So there are there are significant resource constraints.

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There's also the fact that early childhood, while it has exceptionally high ROI,

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you don't see that early until a child is entering employment or entering school.

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And that could be, at the very least five years to like 20.

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And so it's really difficult when you're in a government situation that has limited budgets and election cycles

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of four years to invest significant money in something that won't pay off at least for five years if not longer.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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And, you know, I imagine, you know, not getting the early childhood development that a child needs probably has long term percussions.

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It's not necessarily like, oh, you know, they get to school and they're a little bit behind, so they have to work a bit hard to catch up.

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You know what the sort of consequences of a child being behind at this stage and not getting the support that they need.

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Yeah, it can ultimately lead to lifetime inequalities and that's what actually got me interested in early childhood education as a teacher,

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that they're the most enjoyable people at that age.

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But but we found in our research here that a significant, significant portion of the attainment gap after leaving primary school was already present.

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When a child enters primary schooling in the UK, it persists.

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And we know from research as well that most brain development happens between the ages of zero and three.

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And so that's a really critical time to be able to prepare everyone for school and for life.

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Mm hmm. There's a particular stat that 50% of gaps in cognitive assessments at the age of 11 are were already present at age two.

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Wow. And so that's even before our child is entering pre-school.

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Yeah. So really early intervention is where it needs to happen.

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But again,

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that ROI kind of timescale is so long that it tends to be kind of the thing that gets cut first if you have to look for things to around budgeting.

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And I want to point out, too, like we're talking a lot about children and the challenges they face,

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but I think it's a really unfair position to put parents in, to not support people out there at that stage of their child's development.

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Like, you know, when you're having children who are young, you're often not as economically positioned as well as you might be,

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like further down the line as you're advancing in your career. It's really unfair to not support people at this point.

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Yeah. Yeah. And what are the ways that you're seeking to address this program with a problem with your social enterprise?

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Yeah. So we're trying to meet parents where they are on their terms and help them accomplish their goals for their child.

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And we're trying to do that in a medium that's known to them.

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We've been using WhatsApp and messaging to speak with parents about their goals and their pain points.

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So what are they really struggling with with their child?

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What's important to them in their family and how can we help them with that and then

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use that as a platform to also share things that they can do that meet their goals,

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that advance their child's development? Mm hmm.

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And when we looked at the literature overall around kind of when we looked at gaps in school readiness.

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So by the time low income children enter primary school, they're starting about 11 months behind their higher income counterparts in the UK.

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And so when we looked at the breakdown of what is responsible for those gaps,

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parenting is the biggest explaining factor, and it's also the area where it's the hardest to intervene in.

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And so that's the reason we chose to focus specifically on parents and parenting.

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And then we looked through we did a lot of user research with parents and with experts in the field

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around what were the barriers to putting those parenting behaviours that we know work into practice.

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And that's where we came up with some of these cognitive barriers we mentioned,

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and that's how we came up with this model of kind of working on parenting goals with parents in a way that meets them, where they're at,

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does it empathetically and in an empowering way so that they're able to be the parents they want to be to their children,

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because every parent wants to be the best parent they can be for their child. Yeah.

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Like an analogous kind of thing to think about what we're doing right is a lot of people might have a goal to.

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Wait or get in shape. Right. But it's hard to actually put our exercise behaviour or eating behaviour into practice.

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We know what we want to do. It's hard to actually do it and then we feel bad when we don't have success.

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So we're thinking about parenting a similar way.

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People have goals that are valuable and we're just trying to make having those achieving those goals a little bit easier.

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And it's not contingent on, you know, getting the child to nursery or getting them to do that,

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you know, something that you can a parent can incorporate, you know, 3 hours a day if they're at home.

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And yes, absolutely. Everything is based on like a set of constraints that we came up with doing our user research.

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So it's like minimum viable actions that you can do every day and that little wins, right?

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You can feel successful as you go. Even if you're just remembering that I should have done that, that's a step in the right direction.

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So and what are the nature of these interactions with the parents?

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Could you kind of, you know, say from a parent's perspective, like, how do they engage with this?

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It's a lot like WhatsApp messaging with your friend. That's what we've been aiming for.

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So and we should say too, this is an early stage project.

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So this is on prototyping. But our prototyping that you've done so far that's been successful has involved building a relationship.

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So doing conversations and activities with parents through WhatsApp messaging

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that allow them to reflect on what they're grateful for about their child,

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what's really funny about their child and their day.

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And then that kind of gets us to a place where they feel comfortable sharing what's really challenging for them.

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And then we move into setting a goal related to that using a behavioural science technique called WOOP and then we move into a goal.

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Me? Great question. Great question. It stands for Wish Outcome, Obstacle Plan.

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Okay, great. And the way that works is you think of a wish like what you want for your child.

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For example, one that I hear a lot is I want my child to be able to calm themselves when they're upset.

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Outcome would be, well, what would that mean for your family, huh?

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Like we'd all get along so much better, we'd be able to get to things on time, that kind of stuff.

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Obstacle. What's keeping that from actually happening? Yeah, maybe your your child kind of flies off the handle really quickly.

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And then plan is when you see that starting to happen, or if you see that starting to happen, then do this and building that this into your habits.

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See? And then would would the platforms link to other kind of services available or make them aware of what's going on in that area, for example?

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That's definitely our aspiration. Yeah, there's a lot about that from her work before.

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Yeah. So my previous work was effectively making government services more accessible because they tend to not be.

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And so we are imagining that this could and it's already kind of become necessary.

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For example, when we're working with a more vulnerable parent, it becomes evident that that's that this isn't something that we can read,

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like it's not a daily behaviour that we could just take care of over text.

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Yeah. And there needs to be some further intervention either with the doctor or speech therapist or something like that.

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And but the understanding is that actually a lot of parents are coming to us at the point

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where they're not confident or they actively have the desire to not have to use that service.

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And so our mission becomes how might we use this process to build their confidence

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so that when so that when we make kind of a warm suggestion later that,

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hey, we think that it would be really helpful if you reached out to a doctor or you reached out to a speech therapist to do this,

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they'll be more amenable to it. And so we're thinking about actually this as being also a way of making those services

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more accessible and more friendly and priming people to access them properly.

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So so yeah, I think that is an explicit part of what we're doing. It wasn't maybe when we started, but now it is.

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And she makes a good point too. Like it's a core part of our mission.

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We don't think that these services can be replaced via text, and there's a temptation to do that in times of austerity.

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We're trying to make those in-person services even more successful and even better by closing that loop.

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And how does the technology work? So you use a chat bot, is that right?

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So is it again, this is a prototype early stage effort, but that's the vision.

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Yeah, we'll have to see. One thing I really like about working with Pooja is she's an expert designer.

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So we've been trying to do whatever is best for achieving this goal of serving vulnerable parents well as we advance and learn more.

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But right now, we do envision as a chat bot, and in the short term, the chat bot is me.

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Yeah. So I will talk to you. Thank you, Alison.

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I think I think that's the reason why I like so much of this is when we first started,

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the question was actually, what does this even look like if we were doing it over text?

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Right, because that hasn't been done before. And so the question was, Laura's already done this in with humans and in class.

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So what if we just I gave her the biggest kind of leeway possible and said, do this over text and then we'll try and codify what you do.

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And so that's kind of like what we've been doing so far is we've been following Laura's

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lead effectively on the parents lead to actually think about what the chat bot

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would do in terms of mimicking what that journey looks like when a human is actually

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there on the back end and to our prior point about integrating with human services.

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What parts of these things can be automated and what parts will always need to be done by a person?

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Yeah. So there are a series of assumptions or questions like that that need to be answered before we think about, okay,

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well let's code it into a chat bot or create the data infrastructure on the back end to make the machine learning possible or whatever.

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We've been really trying to be pretty deliberate about validating those assumptions or getting answers to those questions in a systematic way,

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so that with each iteration, it gets closer to the real thing.

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Mm hmm. Yeah, well, it sounds like a really fascinating social enterprise.

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Great idea. Like, you've really clearly both done your homework, so I'm really looking forward to seeing how it goes over the next few months.

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Hopefully that we can get you back on the forecast in the future. You can talk about that really fun.

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We would love to do that. I'm sure there will be a whole new set of craziness that's happening by then.

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Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, both of you, for coming on. I really enjoyed it.

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I'm sure our listeners did as well. Thank you. Our pleasure.

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Thank you for listening. Thanks, as always for listening to the Future of Business podcast.

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We hope you've enjoyed the season so far. Please consider rating us or sending your feedback to us directly at SBS podcast at SBS Stocks dot ac UK.

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Until next time. Goodbye.