What running 100+ schools taught me about culture

The Swiss secret to high-performing boarding schools

Building a school culture that outlasts generations is a decision made every single day. Institut Le Rosey has been making it for 146 years, and the alumni it produces have taken that culture into some of the most consequential rooms in the world. In this episode of the EdVance Podcast, Christophe Gudin, Director General of Institut Le Rosey, is clear about what is happening to education and who is letting it happen. What begins as a conversation about phones in schools quickly becomes a harder question about ownership: who decides what children learn, in what order, and through whose lens, and why that decision is drifting quietly toward EdTech companies that have never taught a child. He leads a school where no single country ever accounts for more than 10% of the student body, teachers live on campus with their families, and the entire school relocates to the mountains every winter. Every one of those decisions keeps education in the hands of the people closest to children. Christophe knows what happens to schools that hand that responsibility to someone else. Download, subscribe, and share the EdVance Podcast for conversations with the world's most influential education leaders.

Why India's education system is both admired and misunderstood

India has over 1.4 billion people, a quarter of a billion children in school, a record number of teachers, and a system that, by its own admission, has not cracked what actually happens inside the classroom once the children sit down. The people who understand that gap most clearly are the ones who have spent their careers building inside it. Shreyasi Singh, Founding Managing Partner of Jetri, built one of India's most talked-about education companies, sold it in six years, and now advises the philanthropists deciding what Indian education should look like next. She believes the problems are fixable. But first, India has to stop looking away. In her own words, India should be far more unsettled by this than it currently is. India has produced some of the world's greatest minds. It has also left hundreds of millions of children behind. Shreyasi Singh has spent her career trying to understand how both things are true at the same time.

What running 100+ schools taught me about culture

He was once told his entire class ranked in the bottom 10th percentile of their age group. He calls it one of the strangest things a school ever did to a child. He now runs 100+ schools. And that experience sits behind every decision he has made about what education should and should not do to a young person. In this episode of the #EdVancePodcast, Ng Yi Xian, Group CEO of EtonHouse International Education Group, gets direct about what the sector consistently gets wrong on culture, AI and affordable education. The discussion unpacks why financial buyers keep failing in education when operators succeed, why most ed tech has spent years building solutions for problems schools do not actually have, and why the schools winning in Asia right now are the ones that chose curiosity over efficiency when it was still an unpopular position to take. Download, subscribe and share the EdVance Podcast for conversations with the world's most influential education leaders.

What the IB gets right that most schools get wrong

Efficiency is often the enemy of real education. In an age of instant answers and AI shortcuts, we are tempted to prioritise the "output" over the "process." But intellectual growth requires friction; if we let robots do the heavy lifting in our classrooms, we aren’t innovating - we are simply making our students, and our systems, weaker. In this episode, Olli-Pekka Heinonen, Director General of the International Baccalaureate (IB), challenges the "top-down" approach to school reform. The discussion unpacks why classroom change cannot be imposed from above, why culture matters more than charisma, and why the most successful leaders in 2026 are those brave enough to "swim against the tide." This is a sharp, blunt conversation on what AI can do, what it must never be allowed to do, and why the future of education depends on building systems that are actually worthy of the teachers within them. Download, subscribe, and share the EdVance Podcast for conversations with the world's most influential education leaders.

Why your best students switch off

What if the design of your school is the very thing holding it back? Most schools are not running a bad design. They are running an inherited one, built for factories and mass production, not for learners. And most leaders have never once stopped to question it. In this episode of the EdVance Podcast, Jeff Wetzler, Co-founder of Transcend and Head of Transcend Labs, joins host Vikas Pota to challenge the model that has been quietly running classrooms around the world for over a century. Jeff shares the six shifts every school must make to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world, explains what learner-centred leaders consistently do that others do not, and makes the case that until school design moves from the background to the foreground, performance will always have a ceiling. He also shares the one question every principal should ask their staff this week, and why the honest answer will be uncomfortable for most leaders. And somewhere in this conversation, a veteran educator makes an admission that is difficult to ignore. After decades in the field, they had never once truly sat down with a child and listened. What they finally heard changed how they lead. What are your students telling you that you are not hearing? Download and subscribe to the EdVance Podcast for conversations with education leaders from around the world.