The Hindu Business Line : `A school needs to evaluate its service quality'

`The school needed to reinvent itself. The challenge was to leverage its tradition and heritage and not see it as a liability.' Lawrence School alumnus Ramesh Venkateswaran gives up a corporate career to return as its headmaster and give the school a brave new direction.

The Lawrence School and its students.

Remember the evocative Raymonds ad on TV? It's a wedding reception and the groom, seeing his old school headmaster standing by quietly in a suit with his white, bristling moustache, has a flash back to the days when he and his friends saw off the headmaster in his old car on his last day at the school. It's a nostalgic public school scene, amplified by the background score, and the sight of his old master, who taught legions of students, is the trigger for remembrances of the good times at school.

The setting could well be similar at the well-known public school, The Lawrence School, Lovedale, in the Nilgiris, near the popular tourist resort of Ooty. Only, the headmaster in this case is not one who has grown in the school system, teaching scores of students who remember him with great fondness when they pass out of school.

For Ramesh Venkateswaran, the present headmaster of The Lawrence School, it's been some homecoming. An alumnus of the school himself - as were his children — Venkateswaran, a graduate of IIT, Mumbai and a gold medallist-MBA from IIM, Bangalore returned to the school last year after a long corporate career to take over as HM and give the school a brave, new direction.

Ramesh Venkateswaran, Headmaster, The Lawrence School

So, what's a true blue corporate honcho doing heading a public school with a long history that counts among its distinguished alumni Anjolie Ela Menon, Arundathi Roy, Vikram Kirloskar and Anand Mahindra? Venkateswaran, who earlier had stints in TVS Suzuki and Metal Box — he is also a director on the Board of Patni Computers — was comfortably ensconced in Bangalore, teaching at IIM as well as running a counselling organisation for people under emotional stress.

When the Board of Governors of Lawrence wanted to try a new and bold approach to the school's administration it made him an offer of the headmaster's position. He was persuaded by many well-wishers of the school to take it on which he did in April last year on a five-year contract. As he says, "Lawrence needed to reinvent itself. The challenge was to leverage its tradition and heritage and not see it as a liability."

Self-evaluation

One of the first things he did was to get the school to do a self-evaluation. As he explains, like a corporate has stakeholders, a school too has three stakeholders: students, parents and teachers. And, while a corporate would also make an assessment of its service quality a school too needs to evaluate its service quality.

Venkateswaran introduced a dispassionate assessment of the school's 80 teachers. "How does one assess service quality in a school? Not just by board exam results; it goes beyond marks," he says.

That was unfamiliar ground for the teachers and any change in the status quo could cause fear amongst the group. "I had to dispel that quickly by talking to them in groups - that assessment was not for punitive action but for improvement." The process, he emphasises, is consultative and meant to empower the teachers to work on their shortcomings themselves. At one level, teachers are assessed by students; secondly by a third party, a senior school administrator from outside, while the third prong of this exercise involves an independent skills assessment of students.

"We analysed the data to see if the differences in performance had to do with the students or teachers. Here my corporate experience helped in identifying the root cause," says Venkateswaran.

Ushering changes

There were other areas too that he needed to address.

"There was an image of the school that children were indisciplined. I believe that a manager's job is one of selling and I've been a salesman for 35 years! I had to spend time with senior children selling them ideas on why they've to behave in a certain way. While empowering them, they also need to know that the `how to do' is not as important as `why to do'. I think now I have built some credibility for being fair."

Venkateswaran says that he also had to change the pace of work and speed things up. The school, he says, is wired now, with fibre optic cables and the idea is to encourage students to undertake projects working with new technologies.

There was a phase, he recalls, when the school's image and its residential school culture was taking a beating. But, now it's moving in the right direction with the right levels of commitment. "I'm wary of snapshots, but in two-three years the trend will be more apparent," he adds.

Steeped in history

The Lawrence School is tucked away in the Nilgiris, at about 7,200 feet above sea level in the small village of Lovedale, about six kilometres from the popular tourist town of Ooty. Sprawled across 750 acres in sylvan surroundings, it was founded on September 6, 1858 by Major General Sir Henry Lawrence, who wanted to provide a sound education, in the healthy climate of the Nilgiris, for the children of the British members of the Indian Army.

Contrary to public perception, the school is not a private school, but very much a government school. In May 1949, the school was taken over by the Indian Government and run as a public school, open to all, with 40 per cent of the seats reserved for the children of Defence personnel and Central Government services.

The school comes under the HRD Ministry headed by Mr Arjun Singh with a board of governors comprising serving and retired bureaucrats, Army officers and old students. The school's alumni list reads like a who's who of people in the higher echelons of journalism, bureaucracy, the armed forces and the corporate world. Chennai's first woman police commissioner, Letika Saran, an IPS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, is also an alumnus of Lawrence School.

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