"She's doing well. 88% this term." The teacher says it. The parent smiles and nods.
Then comes the question teachers are hearing more often these days: "But is she ready?"
Ready for what?
For college, certainly. For a career that may look very different from the one her parents imagined. For a world where technology can write, calculate, search and increasingly create. And, perhaps most importantly, for the situations where there is no textbook answer to fall back on.
Ask a parent to define ready and she may struggle to put it into words. Listen a little longer, though, and the concerns get clearer. Can my child take charge of something without being told what to do? Can she use technology to create, not just consume? If she faces a problem with no obvious solution, will she know how to begin?
These are hard questions for schools too — not because schools don't care, but because our education system has always been better at measuring what a child knows than what she can do with it. That distinction matters more each year.
Leadership is not just the child at the front of the room
Ask a school what it does to build leadership and you'll usually hear about debates, elocution, student councils, the head boy and head girl. All of it has value. None of it tells you whether a student can lead when things get uncertain.
Imagine a group project with no roles assigned. Someone has to decide who does what, set a deadline, settle an argument, take responsibility if it fails. That is leadership too.
Or the student who proposes the idea her group thinks is too risky — has to defend it, absorb the criticism, change parts of it, and make it work anyway. That's a different skill from speaking confidently on a stage.
It is ownership. Decision-making. Accountability. None of it comes from one workshop a year. It comes from being handed real decisions, repeatedly, and owning what happens next.
Growing up with technology is not the same as understanding it
A child today can navigate a smartphone before she can explain how it works. Familiarity was never readiness.
The better question: can she build something with it? Solve a problem with it? Troubleshoot when it breaks, instead of handing it to an adult? That gap matters more each year technology changes faster than curricula can keep up.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 — based on a survey of over 1,000 employers across 55 economies — found analytical thinking remains the single most sought-after skill, with seven in ten employers naming it essential. Technological literacy and creative thinking follow close behind.
The fix isn't another coding period or a robotics lab nobody uses past induction week. It's what happens when the project breaks. A teacher who asks "why do you think it failed?" instead of fixing it builds more of this skill in five minutes than a term of passive demos.
Money, ideas, and the ordinary problems adults deal with
A student can top mathematics and still not know how interest actually compounds on a loan. She can define "entrepreneurship" in an exam and never once have identified a real problem worth solving.
Ask a Class 12 student what a loan might actually cost her over five years — the answer often isn't there. Ask her to name one real problem in her own school canteen and pitch a fix for it — she may never have been asked to try.
A student who understands money before she earns it, who can turn a rough idea into something real, who can explain it and adjust when the first version fails — she's building a kind of practical readiness no mark sheet shows. Call it that, if "life skills" sounds like a notice board term. It's the same thing.
There's a quieter question underneath all of this, about what happens to a child's idea when it's a little unusual. Most classrooms reward the expected answer — there's a right answer in mathematics, a model answer in language. That's appropriate for those subjects. But the same instinct, left unchecked, quietly trains children to stop offering the odd, half-formed idea well before Class 10. A school serious about innovative thinking has to protect that instinct on purpose — let a "wrong" first attempt sit long enough to be improved, instead of correcting it the moment it appears.
Parents have stopped being impressed by "she attended a workshop." They've learned to discount it, the same way they've learned to discount an inflated participation certificate.
What convinces a parent is a portfolio — a real one, built across the year, showing something that failed, got reworked, and eventually worked. Growth from June to February. Not a one-day event that photographs well for the newsletter.
Picture a PTM built on that evidence instead. Not "she got 88%, keep it up." Something closer to: "Here's the app she built this term — it didn't work in September, it does now. Here's the pitch she led. Here's where she's actually grown since June." That's only possible if the evidence was collected all year, not assembled the week before.
None of this replaces marks. A child still needs strong maths, strong language, strong science. But a report card was only ever built to answer half of what a parent is really asking at that table. The other half — can she lead, can she build, can she think on her feet, can she manage money and manage a setback — needs its own proof. Schools that start collecting it now won't be scrambling for an answer at the next PTM. They'll already have one.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Sushruth, chief business officer, Ulipsu.