When Prerna Kaushik first walked into a Teach For India classroom as a volunteer, she saw a school very different from the one she had known. The building was a house – small, dimly lit and not well maintained. It was Prerna’s first time in a place like this, and she was taking it all in, a little unsure of what to expect, her thoughts were interrupted by a confident little voice “Hi didi, you look very nice today. What cream do you apply?”
The encounter reinforced her belief in the transformative power of education and what good education can enable in a child, regardless of the resources they grow up with. Today, she is the founder of Anant Education Trust, which runs Anant Valley Public School, Anant Academy and Anant Learning Lab, working to build an education ecosystem that reimagines education for all children.
An Early Belief in Education
When asked when her interest in education began, Prerna traces it back to one of her earliest memories in Grade 3. She remembers writing “Education is the only solution” in every writing task in her English exam, convinced even as a child that education could change lives.
That belief was deeply rooted in the story of her grandfather, whom she lost when she was just six. He had grown up in a small village in Haryana, served in the army and was the sole breadwinner of a large extended family. Yet, despite limited resources, he believed deeply in the power of quality education and made it a priority to send his children to a school beyond his means. That decision changed the trajectory of their family. Education became the bridge that helped them move up the socioeconomic ladder.
By the time she was eight, Prerna had made a decision of her own: one day, she would start a school and use the power of quality education to change the trajectories of many more children.
Yet, in the world she grew up in, education was something to value, not necessarily a profession to pursue. As an academically strong student, she was expected to choose one of the conventional professions that came with academic achievement.
It was only in college, when she started volunteering for different organisations, that she began to see firsthand the belief she had carried since childhood: that quality education could fundamentally change what was possible for a child.
From The Classroom To TISS
Prerna volunteered at an orphanage in Old Delhi through Make A Difference and worked in a Teach For India classroom in Usmanpur in North-East Delhi.
The experience became particularly significant. “That was when I realised how profoundly a teacher can transform a child’s life,” she says.
Wanting to understand education more deeply, she decided to commit to a two-year fellowship with Teach For India. From 2016 to 2018, she taught students in Grades 8, 9 and 10 in a budget private school in East Delhi and later in a government school.
The fellowship exposed her to the many nuances of education and left her with larger questions: Why could excellence not exist in every classroom? How could children be supported beyond school so that they could reach higher education? And how could she contribute meaningfully to education without having formally studied it?
That realization led her to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, where she pursued a two-year Master’s in Education from 2018 to 2020. The programme helped her understand the complexities of education more deeply, including the social, psychological and systemic factors that shape how children learn and grow.
Finding Tikri Kalan
Shortly before COVID, in 2020, Prerna returned to her hometown, Bahadurgarh. A few kilometres from where she lived is Tikri Kalan, a peri-urban community with a large footwear industrial park and Asia’s largest PVC scrap market. The area is home to thousands of migrant families from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and other states, who come here in search of livelihood opportunities.
It was here that she met Anuj.
Prerna had first met him around 2005, when he was just starting school. When she met him again, he was 18 and working in a factory, just like his father.
The encounter left her grappling with a question that would shape her work for years to come: “If children spend 14 years in school and still end up where the previous generation did, then what is schooling really changing?”
But Anuj’s story was not an isolated one. More than 13,000 children were enrolled in schools across Tikri Kalan. She found that around 70% dropped out before Grade 12, with most eventually entering factories or the unorganised sector despite spending years in school.
For Prerna, the question was no longer simply whether children had access to school. It was whether schooling was actually leading to something.
Rethinking Where to Begin
Prerna initially wanted to work with older students in Grades 9 to 12, drawing on her Teach For India experience in career readiness, awareness and skills.
But as she began working in the community, she quickly realised that the challenge was much deeper than she had anticipated.
“My students were ready to think about careers. Here, I found students in Grades 11 and 12 who were still struggling with the basics of reading and writing,” she says.
The realisation made her rethink where the intervention needed to begin. If children were reaching Grades 11 and 12 without foundational literacy skills, preparing them for college and careers was addressing the problem too late.
She also realised that before any intervention could succeed, she first needed to build credibility and trust within the community.
After a year of visiting the community, interacting with students and understanding their realities firsthand, Prerna decided to change direction. In 2021, she began piloting a pre-primary programme, shifting her focus towards building strong foundations much earlier in a child’s educational journey.
Building Anant Education Trust
What began as an attempt to address the gaps she was seeing in the community gradually grew into a larger ambition: to build an entire education ecosystem within the community, one that could support a child at different stages of their educational journey.
Prerna launched the pilot of Anant Valley Public School in 2021 and formally registered Anant Education Trust in 2022. Today, the Trust brings together three interconnected initiatives, each addressing a different part of that journey.
Anant Valley Public School is a kindergarten to Grade 8 school built around the belief that children need more than access to a classroom to thrive. The school combines strong foundational learning with project-based learning, exploration, exposure and social-emotional development, creating a learning environment that helps children build academic capabilities, confidence, curiosity and the skills to navigate the world beyond school.
Anant Academy is an after-school programme for high school students, focusing on communication skills, digital literacy and self-directed learning to help them navigate the transition to higher education and careers.
Anant Learning Lab is the Trust’s research and innovation arm. It documents practices from the field and develops curricula that can strengthen learning, including curricula for literacy and project-based learning.
Together, the three initiatives are designed to create a continuum of support, from building foundational skills in the early years to helping young people develop the capabilities, exposure and pathways they need to pursue higher education and careers.
The Challenges of Starting from Scratch
While speaking to The Logical Indian, Prerna Kaushik described three major challenges during the early years.
At 25, Prerna started AET as a solo founder with no team, essentially running a one-person organisation. She had to navigate fundraising, communications, people management and organisational development, without prior experience in the technicalities of building an organisation. For years, there was little financial stability, and she often put in her own savings to keep the work going. Even today, the core team remains small, with three people, and building the organisation’s capacity continues to be an important focus.
The second challenge was building in a community where no organisation had an established presence, Anant Education Trust became the first organisation to put down roots in Tikri Kalan, but Prerna had always envisioned building it as a collective effort, bringing together partners, people and organisations with different strengths. With no existing organisational ecosystem to build on, however, it took 1.5 years to secure the first partnership for the school.
The third challenge was building trust within the community and finding the balance between her vision for education and what parents expected. The work had to remain child-centric while also earning parents’ confidence in what the organisation was trying to build.
Over time, that trust has grown into a much larger collective. Today, AET works with more than 20 partner organisations, including Teach For India, Feeding India, Creatnet Education, The Akanksha Foundation, Tan90 and many more. Each brings different expertise, from teacher professional development and nutrition to social-emotional learning, creating a collective ecosystem of support around children in a community that had largely been invisible just a few years ago.
Measuring Change One Child at A Time
For Prerna Kaushik, impact is both about numbers and individual journeys.
She recalls the story of Kajal, who joined Anant Valley Public School in 2024. She was much older than the grade she was expected to be in and had significant gaps in her learning.
With extra support, special literacy lessons and project-based learning sessions, she quickly caught up. Within a year, she had reached the grade level she was expected to be in.
This year, Kajal and two classmates moved to Avasara Academy in Pune on full scholarships till grade 12. They were among only 10 girls selected from Delhi, and the first girls from this community and their villages to receive an opportunity like this. For Prerna, their selection was about more than individual achievement. It gave the community a glimpse of what could be possible for its children, creating a sense of hope and possibility that a different future could be within reach.
The work has grown alongside the vision. Anant Valley Public School has grown from 15 children to 230 this year. Anant Academy has already reached more than 200 children through workshops and is now piloting its one-year programme with a cohort of 20 girls. Meanwhile, the Learning Lab has developed two curricula, in literacy and project-based learning, especially designed for first generation learners.
Overall, Prerna Kaushik says the organisation has directly impacted around 500 children.
A Lighthouse Model for First-Generation Learners
For Prerna, the goal is not simply to grow AET or reach more children. It is to learn what works, document it and make those learnings useful beyond the community where they were developed.
Tikri Kalan is part of a much larger phenomenon unfolding across India. As families migrate towards cities and industrial centres in search of livelihood opportunities, many children grow up in communities where rural and urban realities overlap, and where access to a school does not always translate into access to opportunity.
Prerna wants AET to become a “lighthouse model” for educators working with first-generation learners and children from under-resourced communities, demonstrating what an education ecosystem designed around their realities can look like.
“We want to build a K-12 ecosystem that demonstrates what education can look like when it is designed around the realities of first-generation learners,” she says. “And we want to document what we learn along the way, so that educators and organisations in other communities can adapt and build on it.”
“Names Will Always Matter More Than Numbers”
Prerna Kaushik’s approach to impact is rooted in depth.
For her, working with children over the long term and changing their life outcomes matters more than simply increasing the number of beneficiaries.
“For us, names will always matter more than numbers,” she says.
She believes social organisations need to define what meaningful impact looks like for them, rather than allowing the number of beneficiaries alone to become the measure of success. For her, reaching more children matters, but not at the cost of losing sight of the individual child behind the number.
Her final advice is equally straightforward: ask for help.
“Working in the social sector is a tough journey. No matter how strong or capable you are, you cannot do it alone. You should not have to do it alone. ”
She adds, “There are people who will help, but you have to ask. So reach out, ask for help and let people be part of the journey.”
The Logical Indian Perspective
Prerna’s journey is built around one question: what should schooling make possible for a child?
Her experience in Tikri Kalan showed her that access to school alone does not necessarily change a child’s trajectory. Her response has been to build an education ecosystem that begins with strong foundations and extends to skills, higher education and career pathways.
From 15 children to 230 at Anant Valley Public School, from having no partner organisations to working with more than 20, Anant Education Trust has grown into an entire ecosystem of support within the community, shaped by what Prerna has learnt along the way.
But Prerna’s larger ambition goes beyond scale: to learn what works, document it and build a lighthouse model that other educators can adapt for first-generation learners across communities.
Because ultimately, for Prerna, education is not measured simply by how many children enter a classroom, but by whether that classroom helps them imagine and build a different future.
Can access to education truly create change if it does not lead to meaningful opportunities? What do you think?
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