Home / What we have not solved
What we have not solved.
Every school has things it has not solved. These are ours.
Everything else on this site describes what is working. This page describes what we are still getting wrong. All of it is drawn from our own published record — written by the facilitators who ran the work, before anyone asked us for it. We would rather tell you ourselves than have you find out.
Prototypes stall before they become things
The Grade 7 waterless toilet exists as a working demonstration model. A stationary installation remains at feasibility stage. Purpose Projects reliably produce good prototypes and unreliably produce implementations — and the gap between those two is where most real engineering lives.
We teach fabrication better than social observation
In one of our own facilitator’s words: we teach them equations, we teach them coding, we teach them fabrication, but we rarely teach them how to observe society carefully.
Not every learner feels heard
Our anonymous survey found that a majority of learners feel recognised at school. The only defensible target is 100%, and we do not know who the others are.
Heat has become a curriculum constraint
The Grade 5 Noida unit was designed around field visits. Extreme heat made stepping outdoors impossible and they were cancelled. For a pedagogy that depends on leaving the building, a lengthening unsafe season is a structural problem, and we will not pretend the season is not getting worse.
Our most distinctive work has no assessment home
Self-directed projects are assessed by the learner against process rather than product. We are satisfied that is correct — but it means our most distinctive work is invisible to every system that will judge these learners next, and we have not resolved what to do about that.
We are missing two pieces of evidence we should have
We hold parent testimony on wellbeing but not on Personal or Purpose Projects. Three or four parents describing what they watched happen at home over twelve weeks would be the strongest evidence we could offer, precisely because parents have no reason to flatter the programme. We also have not reproduced learner journals publicly. Both are on us.
We would rather be judged on this page than on any other.
If you are comparing schools, this is a good question to ask each of them.