EdTech: EY’s Catherine Friday On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On Education

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. In this particular installment, we are talking to leaders of Education Technology companies, who share how their tech is helping to improve our educational system. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Catherine Friday.

Catherine Friday is EY’s Global Education Leader where she is responsible for bringing together teams from around the world to support engagements in the departments and ministries of education and higher education, vocational and K-12 providers. She has over 25 years of professional services client and leadership experience working to deliver the best outcomes for citizens across education, health, human services, defense, transport, infrastructure, and central agencies.

Catherine has post-graduate qualifications from Monash University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the Cranlana Programme.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

My dad was in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), so I grew up on and around air force bases in Australia and also Malaysia. That childhood introduced me at a very young age to ideas of service, community, and the important work of governments in keeping citizens safe. The many moves we had also taught me that people everywhere live their lives differently — and, consequently, that things are often “different” rather than “right or wrong”.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

I’ve been lucky to have many interesting experiences in many places around the world. The best ones always involve unexpected experiences with great colleagues: whether getting stuck in a car in a blizzard in upstate New York and finding our way to a little bar for help (and the BEST merlot I’ve ever had); or 4WD-ing over sand dunes in the UAE; or spending days in a donga on a mining site in Western Australia, these experiences have all been memorable because I’ve come away from them with a much greater connection to the incredible people who are my colleagues.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There are a great many people who have been instrumental in helping me navigate to where I am, with a number of strong and brilliant women at the front of that line. One of the most careers defining people was when I first became a partner and relocated to an office where I didn’t know any of the other partners, didn’t know the team, and didn’t have any clients. The person who was meant to be the Office Managing Partner left the firm shortly after I arrived, and the whole office was leaderless and fractured. I felt very vulnerable. About the time I was considering options outside the firm, a new Office Managing Partner joined the firm, and very quickly established her mark as a leader of the team. She took a keen interest in getting to know and support me. What could have been a moment when I left the firm and took a different career path became a moment when I felt seen and supported, and so stayed and doubled down on loyalty. That new leader was very clear with me, as well, that I was also a leader, and expected to behave like one, and her expectation that I step up as a member of her leadership team gave me tremendous self-belief.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My favorite quote is “Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.” I come back to it often, because it is a constant reminder that in order to live a “bigger” life, I need to be prepared to do things I’ve never done before, and that will always mean becoming a bit (or a lot!) uncomfortable for a period of time. My husband grew up on a farm, and he talks about the different types of 50 years’ experience local farmers have: is that farming the same way for 50 years (i.e., the same year, 50 times over)? Or is it applying new and better methods, every year for 50 years? At the end of each of my years, I like to think I’ve done things that I hadn’t done in the years prior and done things that were new (and hopefully better), not just repeating a year I’ve already had. That will always mean pushing to the edge of my comfort zone.

You are a successful business leader. Which three-character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Integrity, Curiosity, Diligence.

For me, integrity is about always doing what I say I will do, no matter what. It means showing up, honoring commitments, and becoming worthy of trust. I hope this is true of all my relationships, both professional and personal. I think Curiosity is so important, as there is always more to discover, learn and become.

I have also found that the very smartest people I’ve ever worked with, those that truly are “the smartest person in the room”, are also the most likely to be humbly curious about everything and everyone, and constantly seek to better understand the nature of things.

That growth mindset is one I admire, and to the extent that I am able to practice it at all, it has helped in my career progression, as I generally try to understand as much as I can of people and situations, and challenge my own assumptions about things. Diligence is hard work and follow through in my book, and I have been blessed with a big motor for work: I enjoy my work and am able to get through relatively high levels of work at a good pace, and with a lot of care for what I do and who I do it for. That has certainly been an asset in my career.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our educational systems. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

The biggest problem we are looking to solve is providing equitable access to high quality teaching and learning, for all the world’s learners. Education is a “gift to tomorrow,” by equipping people today with the skills and knowledge they need, to tackle the world’s biggest problems and realize their own potential.

How do you think technology can address this?

Technology has the potential to put high quality teaching and learning in the hands of every person on the planet. That has never been true before in human history, and through technology we have the potential to realize UN SDG 4: “to Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education:

I have been passionate about education my entire life. All the way through school, I aspired to be a teacher, and to inspire and touch lives in the way some of my own great teachers did. When we’d go on family holidays, I’d always collect up brochures and pamphlets, and think about how I’d use that information to develop class plans when I was a teacher. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t go into teaching straight out of Uni, but went into professional services instead. I always had at the back of my head “I’ll just do this other thing, and then I’ll go and qualify to teach.” In the meantime, I’ve been able to find a way back to Education, but as a service provider, bringing the full breadth of EY’s talent and experience to supporting education outcomes in a different way to how I had originally envisaged. With that said, I do still hope I get the chance to teach at some point in my life: I think there is no greater vocation.

How do you think your technology might change the world?

I think that’s up to us: it has tremendous power for good and democratizing access to important services like health and education. I think the ethics of how we use technology also need to be debated and challenged, so that (as an example) the unintended consequences of human biases aren’t built into AI.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Yes, as above, if we simply codify biases and assumptions into the datasets that should be serving improved citizen experiences, then we massively exacerbate the gap between advantaged/disadvantaged populations.

How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?

I see education becoming increasingly personalized for students, based on factors such as: goals and intents of education; life stage of getting education; preferences for hybrid/flexible/in person learning; need to manage other commitments and obligations. All of this can be enabled by technology now, and will become increasingly sophisticated as universities invest more in both tech, and teaching teachers how to optimize tech.

We know from our latest report that there is an appetite for this from students and teachers. We found that students want their online learning experience improving, putting “quality of online learning” at the bottom of all surveyed aspects of university life. What’s missing from the digital learning experience is engagement. Although students rate the availability, quality of production and accessibility of digital learning materials reasonably well, they give low ratings to its ability to engage, enable collaboration or check understanding. In our survey, students asserted that if funds were available for technology-related investments, they would prefer this to be invested in training teachers to deliver digital learning more effectively (45%) and in better digital learning materials (41%), rather than in upgrading the technology.

Given what we’ve found in our report and the potential for technology to improve the educational experience, now it is time for universities to design systems with their students at the center in order to make this work.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?

The main ideas are to be clear about the problem to be solved, be clear about the humans that you’re solving it for and what experience they want (and why) and be clear about how those humans will be engaged as part of the solution design. One example of where we’ve done this, that is very close to my heart, is in the world’s most populous country, India, where a Digital Public Good (DPG) called DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) is pushing the boundaries of education. India has one the world’s largest education systems with more than 260 million students, 9.6 million teachers and 1.5 million schools, spread across urban and rural regions. You can imagine the complexities of providing consistent and inclusive education standards across such a vast nation with huge extremes in wealth and access.

DIKSHA is a digital platform that helps students learn and teachers teach. It supports 36 different Indian languages and can be easily customized to the needs of each of India’s 28 states and 8 union territories. A local body in a local state can digitally access content from physical textbooks in the education system via unique QR codes, making pretty much every textbook available to every pupil and teacher.

This inspiring program — the world’s largest digital public infrastructure in education — has really taken off. More than 60 boards of education across 35 states are using in excess of 300,000 pieces of content taken from 600 million-plus textbooks.

DIKSHA is also having a tremendous impact on the professional development of teachers, with numerous online programs that give them the skills to teach more effectively — including using tech-based solutions in classrooms. This has plugged a big gap in training at a very modest cost.

In just 3 years, 2.5 million teachers have received Elementary training and a further 3.5 million have undergone Secondary training from the 5000 courses available on the platform.

And because everything is digital, those running DIKSHA can monitor how well it works and use the insights to make continuous improvements to content, as well as assessing children’s learning outcomes and teachers’ effectiveness.

Over the next few years, DIKSHA hopes to use AI to overcome the language barriers that prevent many Indian pupils from accessing content (it’s estimated that there are around 1700 different languages spoken across the country).

The development of DIKSHA has been helped by the World Bank, as part of a $500 million USD support package to the Government of India. According to Shabnam Sinha, Lead Education Specialist at the World Bank in India, “…if you look at the economic returns of this instrument, it is incalculable, because I think perhaps it’s one of the smartest advanced interventions of the Government of India.”

India’s highly successful venture into DPGs in education is now being shared in other parts of the world, especially in Africa — once again highlighting the collaborative nature of DPGs. Find out more about the inspirational DIKSHA story in our recent podcast.

What we’ve seen in India’s education system is being replicated worldwide across a wide range of other public DPG initiatives across health, social care, employment, transport, and infrastructure. My EY colleagues estimate the annual DPG market will grow to $100 billion USD by 2030.

Seeing education finally enter the digital age in this way is immensely satisfying and gives me great hope that we can use DPGs to fulfil the UN SDGs and build a world where every citizen has the chance to fulfil their potential — which is surely what education is all about.

In the realm of EdTech, there’s often data collection involved. How do you ensure the ethical handling of user data, especially when it concerns students?

This is such an important question, and Identity and Access Management, as part of broader Data Governance considerations, has to be one of the fundamental design principles whenever data is collected. Whilst there is great good that comes from data being used to predict and support citizen experience, that benefit can be quickly eroded when data is mishandled or misused. Data and Trust need to go hand in hand.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Whatever you’re passionate about achieving, there is so much good that can be done from where you are, right now: everywhere is the right place to start, and every effort is valued and valuable.

Is there a person in the world with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why?

I’d be greedy and choose two: Barack and Michelle Obama. They have offered their lives and voices to creating and sustaining deeply important narratives, and I admire them both enormously. Of course, if I were to actually have breakfast with them, chances are I’d be profoundly tongue-tied, and I would just quietly eat my eggs and toast and waste the opportunity!

How can our readers further follow your work online? Our latest thinking is here: Why human-centered design is critical for universities | EY — Global and I am here: (2) Catherine Friday | LinkedIn

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.