Palatial idealism and scrappy ingenuity: Embracing Jugaad in education

Sam Seaborn is no one’s favourite West Wing character. But he does (thanks to Aaron Sorkin) give a great speech about education:

“Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes.
“Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce; they should be making six-figure salaries.
“Schools should be incredibly expensive for the government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defence.”

Rob Lowe as Sam Seaborn in *The West Wing* (NBC) | via Getty Images

The problem is, as everyone keeps reminding me in debates around the election, it is 2024, not 1997. I am (sadly) not Josh Lyman and there is no money.

In England in 2024, our schools are not palaces; they are tired and falling down. Competition for the best teachers is fierce but they are certainly not making six-figure salaries. In fact, competition for all teachers is fierce because they are fast becoming an endangered species. Apparently, there are only 351 maths teachers left in the wild. NIOT’s breeding programme will take a few years to feed into the system.

Having used reserves to cover unfunded teacher pay rises last year, schools’ budgets are incredibly tight this year. Dare to dream of increased spending and Rachel Reeves will crush that dream faster than Gillian Keegan can say “fucking good job”.

We are living in a world of ‘pervasive scarcity’

And we will be for a while yet. Two books provide insights into how we might respond.

Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja recommend the ‘jugaad’ approach to innovation. ‘Jugaad’ is a Hindi word “which loosely translates as ‘the gutsy art of overcoming harsh constraints by improvising an effective solution using limited resources.’”

Meanwhile, Paulo Savaget, associate professor at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford, suggests ‘workarounds’,

“A workaround is an effective, versatile, imperfection-loving, problem-solving approach that thrives when stakes are high, resources are scarce, and there’s no time for the usual drawn-out decision-making process. At its core, a workaround is a method that ignores or even challenges conventions on how, and by whom, a problem is meant to be solved.”

Savaget’s book is subtitled, “Strategies from the World’s Scrappiest Organizations for Tackling Complex Problems”, and the stories of ‘scrappy’ ingenuity are inspiring. One of his workarounds is ‘piggybacking’; circumventing barriers by leveraging “what is already present in an ecosystem.”

The tiny organisation ColaLife, for example, realised that many remote regions of sub-Saharan Africa struggle to get essential medicine. But you can nearly always get a Coca-Cola. So, they made a deal with Coca-Cola to ‘piggyback’ on their distribution channels to transport life-saving diarrhoea medicine into rural communities.

Jugaad Innovation is a similarly stirring read, a testament to the “modern-day alchemists who transmute adversity into opportunity”.

The inventions and solutions profiled in the book are fascinating but it is how jugaad innovators work and the mindsets they adopt that are most helpful in working with scarce resources in schools.

To be clear, I would absolutely prefer—like Sam Seaborn—that education was properly and fairly invested in. I am not sure I want our school leaders to have to be ‘scrappy’. But we are where we are and, actually, what lies beneath jugaad and ‘workarounds’ is a deeply human way of working—grounded in a desire to serve everyone in our communities, especially those on the margins.

There is a recognition that by listening closely to the people we seek to serve, opportunities for significant change can emerge. As Savaget writes,

“At its core, a workaround is a method that ignores or even challenges conventions on how, and by whom, a problem is meant to be solved.”

The story of how Jane Chen and Rahul Panicker, co-founders of Embrace, created a wearable infant warmer that costs less than 5% of incubators in the West is a good example of this.

They started by trying to create a low-cost version of a traditional incubator. But by working with the Indian women they were seeking to serve and learning they preferred to wear their babies on their fronts, they iterated their designs and created a final product that is both cheaper and more aligned with how people already live their lives.

So, what might this look like in schools?

ColaLife and Embrace’s founders illustrate three features of a jugaad approach: they innovate faster, cheaper and better. Over the last few years, we at The Reach Foundation have been working with schools and trusts doing similarly; mastering the art of Jugaad.

Innovating faster

Jugaad innovators “collaborate intimately with customers and use their constant feedback to zero in on the most relevant product features.”

For example, leaders from United Learning’s Portsmouth cluster were seeking to strengthen relationships with parents. They struggled to connect through traditional means of engagement, like ‘coffee mornings’, so responded quickly and set-up ‘sofa selfies’, where they took a sofa into the community to listen to parents and other community members in an informal setting.

As part of a suite of low-cost changes to how relationships are built, the school has massively reduced the number of parental complaints and attendance is the highest it has ever been.

Innovating cheaper

In an echo of one of Savaget’s ‘workarounds’, jugaad innovators make excellent use of existing resources. “Rather than reinventing the wheel or splurging on expensive R&D projects, they develop new solutions by building upon existing infrastructure and assets, as well as by recombining existing solutions.”

At Reach Academy in Feltham, for instance, the team were conscious of a lack of opportunities to learn about how to navigate complex safeguarding challenges. Working with cross-sector colleagues from across Hounslow, they created the Community Action Partnership Panel (CAPP) - an opportunity to work through anonymised cases together. Working entirely with people already in the system, CAPP provides very low-cost professional development whilst also strengthening relationships for those involved, thereby enabling more challenging discussions during real cases.

Community Action Partnership Panel—information booklet (2020)

Innovating better

Finally, jugaad innovators “attempt to meet customers’ high aspirations by developing solutions that are not only affordable, but that also deliver superior value. In sum, they strive to deliver more (value) for less (cost).”

For example, at King’s Oak Academy in Bristol, updating the communications framework to support a particular group of parents has led to much better, more relational communications with all parents and strengthened the ability to provide deeper support to children and families across the school.

Meetings with parents and children take place in a room that’s been remodelled to look and feel like ‘your nan’s front room’. This can help to put parents and children at ease, re-framing the dynamic of conversations between families and the school.

This, until then…

There are, of course, numerous other examples. From taking over empty shops in their community to provide creative spaces for students; to setting up volunteer taxi services in transport deserts so children can access opportunities; to simply making school events more relational and therefore strengthening the collective capacity of families—many schools are using ‘workarounds’ and mastering the art of Jugaad to better support their children.

Even the Labour Party is embracing workarounds: their plan to open 3,000 nurseries in spare classrooms in schools is a good example of piggybacking.

Yes, “gigantic, monumental changes” are needed to create a fair education system. Better funding would certainly help. But until then, being gutsy and scrappy is a good place to start.