This week I have written two (slightly) long featured stories that I think you would find interesting. One is the NEET leak story, which dominated the media airwaves and streams. I have consolidated the important updates to this developing story, so you stay on top of everything that’s happening. The other is a feature about the Class 12 CBSE exam results - not as controversial as the first one, but I took a stab at the limited data that CBSE has released in its press note to see what the underlying data tells us. As with every week, I have included a summary of the latest happenings across the Indian education space, and for those of you looking for career moves - I have included more job opportunities. Hope you enjoy!
I’d love to hear what you think. Push back, agree, or share what I missed. Drop me a note at me@sandeepmallareddy.com. And if this is worth a spot in your inbox every week, go ahead and subscribe
Featured Stories
1. NEET, cracked from inside
It started with a Rajasthan tip-off, and the trail now runs inside the National Testing Agency itself. NTA cancelled the May 3 NEET-UG exam, taken by roughly 22.79 lakh students, within nine days of Rajasthan Special Operations Group mapping a 45-person multi-state network of paper solvers, impersonators and coaching counsellors across Maharashtra, Kerala, Haryana, Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand. Sikar career counsellor Rakesh Kumar, named as the original mastermind, allegedly bought the question bank from a Kerala examinee for ₹5 lakh and resold it to aspirants for ₹30,000 as the date approached. The handwritten "guess paper" SOG recovered matched 120 of 150 biology and chemistry questions in the real test.
From there, CBI walked the chain upwards. The agency arrested Pune chemistry professor PV Kulkarni as the alleged kingpin, then Manisha Mandhare, an NTA-appointed subject expert at Modern College, Pune who sat on the paper-setting panel itself and is accused of handing final question sets to handpicked students who took "special coaching" at her residence. An unnamed NTA official is now under scrutiny for allegedly feeding the papers and answer keys to the ring from April 27. Among those caught up: the Biwal family of Sikar, where five cousins with thin academic records cleared NEET in a single year in 2025. Three are now missing. Vikas Biwal, who averaged 30% on college tests but scored 86% in NEET, has been arrested along with his father Dinesh and uncle Mangilal.
The fallout has been quick. NTA chief Abhishek Singh called the situation "embarrassing". Karnataka’s medical education minister demanded a court-monitored probe and Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, arguing the scandal was "orchestrated to enable the sale of MBBS seats". The Centre has ordered a retest for June 21 with admit cards on June 14, refunded fees, opened a one-week city-choice window, added 15 minutes to OMR time, and confirmed NEET-UG moves to a computer-based test from 2027 under what Pradhan calls a "Fight Against Pariksha Mafia". This is inline with what IIT-JEE does - which so far avoided a comparable nationwide leak, or has never been caught running one.
NEET has buckled before. The Supreme Court cancelled AIPMT 2015 nationally after a Bluetooth-and-SIM solver gang spanned roughly 10 states; NEET 2016 and 2021 saw localised invigilator and solver-gang cases; and in 2024 a centre superintendent at Oasis Public School, Hazaribagh, left the strongroom door open, CBI traced the leak to safe houses in Patna and identified roughly 155 direct beneficiaries, and the Supreme Court refused to scrap that exam, ruling there was no "systemic breach". 2026 looks worse, not better. An NTA insider on the paper-setting panel, a layered counsellor ring across six states, and a family of five cousins clearing NEET together in 2025 do not appear in one season. They look like infrastructure. Which makes it harder to believe earlier years were clean, and easier to believe they were just never caught. Educator Maheshwer Peri ran the numbers on last year’s NEET and found 7.48% of Sikar candidates scored above 650 against a national rate of 1.29%, with one centre alone, Tagore P.G. College, clocking 12.36%, nearly ten times the national norm. That is the same Sikar at the centre of the 2026 ring. The response is the harder thing to explain. In 2024, 155 contaminated scripts out of 24 lakh did not meet the Supreme Court’s bar for a "systemic breach", and the state went after the beneficiaries instead of the exam. In 2026, the ring has been named, the arrests are happening, and the exam is being scrapped anyway for 22 lakh students. Policy Grounds places the whole picture in a 12-year frame of NTA failure: an aspirant economy of 3 to 4 crore young people, the Parliamentary Standing Committee in December 2025 calling NTA itself "a very small outfit with no intellectual base", and a leak market that already prices a NEET seat at ₹30 to 50 lakh. Why the asymmetry, and which past years is the state now willing to walk back into?
2. CBSE Class 12 (2026) , the result beneath the result
CBSE’s Class 12 pass percentage landed at 85.20%, down 3.19 points year on year and the lowest since 2022, with 94,028 students above 90% and Trivandrum, Chennai and Bengaluru topping the regions while Prayagraj and Patna sat at the bottom. The drop came in the first year of full-scale On-Screen Marking, or OSM.
OSM in plain language: instead of teachers grading paper answer books, every sheet is scanned into a PDF and routed to evaluators on a portal, where they mark it digitally against a centralised scheme. The paper never leaves the exam centre, and totalling and uploading are handled by the system rather than by hand.
CBSE ran 98.66 lakh answer books through this pipeline in 2026, the board’s biggest digital evaluation exercise yet. Education Secretary Sanjay Kumar said around 13,000 answer sheets had to be pulled out and checked manually after light-ink writing failed the scan.
The Education Ministry has gone on the defensive. It cut the answer-sheet access fee to ₹100 and the per-question re-checking fee to ₹25, made both refundable if marks change, and is opening student review windows from May 19 to 22 and May 26 to 29 after admitting evaluation errors are possible. It pointed to ICAI, Delhi University and Cambridge curricula as OSM users to argue the system itself is sound. The complaints had been building since April, when a Delhi DAV teacher flagged portal slowdowns and login failures inside the evaluation pipeline.
The OSM row has crowded out the more interesting half of the result. I pulled the geographic and gender splits out of the data: Kendriya Vidyalayas and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas cleared 95%+ pass rates, Delhi government schools beat private schools by 5.7 points, girls outpaced boys by 7 points nationally and 10 points in UP and Bihar, and Bihar’s female enrollment in the exam sat at just 37%, a gender gap inside a gender gap. Hindi-belt and northeastern states underperformed sharply against the south, and children with special needs cleared 90.16% against the 85.2% national average. The headline isn’t the marking system. It is which schools and which states are actually moving.
Weekly Roundup
Funding & Acquisitions
Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives
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Bodhan AI, a centre incubated at IIT Madras, will train one million teachers on classroom AI by 2027, with the first public cohort launching on Teachers’ Day in September. The programme covers lesson planning, worksheet generation, multilingual content and evaluation, and is positioned for central, state and government-supported schools. It lands alongside the new AI and computational thinking curriculum CBSE rolled out for Classes 3 to 8 in April under IIT Madras professor Karthik Raman.
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IIT Patna’s COIL-D centre is building machine translation systems from Hindi into 17 Indian languages under BHASHINI, the IT ministry’s flagship multilingual AI programme. Partners include the India Meteorological Department and the Madras High Court for use cases like regional climate alerts and legal document translation. The project is led by Asif Ekbal with IIT Delhi, IIT Guwahati, IIIT Delhi and others.
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Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann flagged off 72 government school teachers for a two-week training at the University of Turku in Finland, framing it as a working programme on conceptual learning, critical thinking and assessment reform. Telangana CM Revanth Reddy made a similar pledge days earlier at the state’s Education Week launch, saying 500 of the state’s best-performing teachers will be sent abroad annually from next year.
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Samsung opened applications for the fifth edition of Solve for Tomorrow with a top prize pool of ₹2 crore in incubation grants at IIT Delhi, open to students aged 14 to 22 across four themes including AI Living for India and Health and Education. The window runs through July 3, with 100 design-thinking workshops planned during the application phase.
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The Ministry of Education has opened nominations for the 2026 UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for ICT in Education, themed "Reimagining creativity and critical thinking with artificial intelligence". Two laureates will receive $25,000 each. National Commission applications are due to the Ministry by May 29.
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Rice University is scouting a deeper India presence including a possible physical campus and joint research tie-ups under NEP 2020, citing existing collaborations with IIT Kanpur and IISc. The interest extends the foreign-campus push that brought Bristol, Liverpool, York and Southampton onshore, as US visa uncertainty pushes universities to come to India instead of waiting for Indian students to come to them.
Policy & Government
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CBSE made three languages mandatory for Classes 9 and 10 from July 1, with at least two having to be Indian, extending the Class 6 rule the board announced in March. The third language will be school-assessed rather than board-examined, foreign languages are allowed only if two Indian languages are already chosen, and Class 6 R3 textbooks in 19 scheduled languages will arrive before July 1. Principals have already flagged teacher shortages and timetable upheaval mid-session.
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Army Public Schools in Punjab made Sanskrit a compulsory subject and Punjabi optional, drawing complaints from parents and Punjabi cultural groups that the move breaches the state’s 2008 law mandating Punjabi up to Class 10. An anonymous Army officer cited the need for standardised English, Hindi and Sanskrit across cantonments. The Supreme Court the same week held that a child’s freedom to choose the medium of primary education falls under Article 19(1)(a), in a case that began as a petition to add Rajasthani as a medium of instruction in Rajasthan schools.
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Karnataka withdrew the BJP-era February 2022 order that allowed schools to ban hijabs in classrooms, letting students wear religious and customary symbols including hijab, sacred thread, rudraksha, shivadhara and sharavastra along with uniforms. The Congress government cited equality, dignity and the right to education, and the move followed a May 1 KCET incident in which students were asked to remove hijabs and sacred threads at exam centres.
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The Ministry of Education is rolling out a pilot to bring out-of-school children aged 14 to 18 back through NIOS and State Open Schools in 10 districts across nine states including Odisha, Maharashtra, Bihar, UP, Gujarat and Karnataka. PLFS estimates put the target group at over two crore. Only 62 of every 100 Class 1 entrants reach Class 12, adding to the NITI Aayog finding that 4 in 10 children drop out before higher secondary flagged last week.
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The Union Ministry has asked the 21 IIMs to unify admissions, build a common IIT-style counselling system and refund full admission fees minus ₹1,000 when a student switches institutes. Around half a dozen entrance tests, including IPMAT (Indore and Rohtak), JIPMAT (Bodhgaya and Jammu) and separate Bangalore and Kozhikode tests, are in the firing line. The directive came at the IIM coordination forum chaired by Dharmendra Pradhan at IIM Ahmedabad.
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The Central Consumer Protection Authority fined Motion Education ₹10 lakh and Career Line Coaching ₹5 lakh for using NEET and IIT-JEE topper photos without disclosing which programmes those students had actually taken. CCPA has now issued over 60 notices and imposed penalties exceeding ₹1.39 crore on 31 coaching institutes for misleading ads.
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Telangana CM Revanth Reddy said the state will gradually raise education spending from 8.22% of the budget to 15% over coming years, on a recommendation from the State Education Commission chair Akunuri Murali. Alongside, the government sanctioned ₹1,011 crore for 11 integrated school complexes and 501 new classrooms across Hyderabad, Medchal-Malkajgiri, Rangareddy and Sangareddy, with 70% of funding from an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank loan. The push comes weeks after the state put its school-intermediate merger plan on hold.
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Telangana made an anti-drug affidavit mandatory for Intermediate first-year admissions, to be submitted by both student and parent during the admission window now running till May 31. The Telangana Gazetted Junior Lecturers Association has called the notarised affidavit a burden on rural and EWS families and wants a simple written undertaking instead. The state also transferred T-SAT from the IT department to the Education Department to consolidate satellite-based learning.
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UP CM Yogi Adityanath announced recruitment of 20,000 new teachers and instructors, days after raising honorarium for 24,717 part-time anudeshaks from ₹9,000 to ₹17,000 and adding ₹5 lakh cashless health cover. He claimed the state dropout rate has fallen from 18% to 3% under Operation Kayakalp and School Chalo Abhiyan.
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Bihar made the NCERT 10% school bag policy mandatory for all private and aided schools, with weighing scales required on campus and routine bag checks every three months in Classes 1 to 5. Education Minister Mithlesh Tiwari said violators will face action. Tiwari is separately under fire for reported remarks that "it is not necessary to provide higher education to girls" and that daughters are better off at home.
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The Bar Council of India quadrupled its legal education spend to ₹180.25 crore in 2024-25, up from ₹46 crore the previous year, the biggest item on its expenditure list by a wide margin. The Council collects roughly ₹130 crore from inspection fees and ₹37 crore from the All India Bar Examination, and law-college regularisation fees nearly tripled to ₹9.08 crore.
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Karnataka set up a six-member Cabinet sub-committee under Home Minister G Parameshwara to act on the Thorat Commission’s State Education Policy report, which spans eight volumes on curriculum, deemed and unitary universities, financial implications and human resources. Output is expected before the next academic year.
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The Supreme Court hearing TET review petitions told teachers and states not to be "self-centred" about job security, defending the September 2025 judgment that requires in-service teachers of Classes 1 to 8 to clear the Teachers’ Eligibility Test within two years or be retired. Tamil Nadu has argued the order affects about four lakh teachers in the state alone, and roughly 25 lakh teachers nationally are caught in scope. The court has reserved judgment.
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Prime Minister Modi asked schools, government and private offices to shift to virtual classes and work-from-home to conserve fuel as Brent crude crossed $105 a barrel after Iran-linked disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. Maharashtra’s higher education department followed up with a circular asking universities and colleges to push car-pooling, online meetings and cut electricity use.
Financial Reports & Market Trends
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IDP’s Emerging Futures 8 survey of nearly 8,000 international students puts Australia at 28% first-choice preference unchanged, UK up a point to 22%, USA down three points to 19% and now in third place, and Canada up a point to 14%. The UK saw the steepest jump in students declining to study abroad altogether since the previous wave, with India contributing 78 of the 344 decliners surveyed, the single largest source market. Cost of tuition (51%) and cost of living (36%) lead the reasons students are walking away, and New Zealand was rated highest on clarity of visa communications at 7.3 out of 10, against the US at 6.3.
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Teachmint grew operating revenue 4.3x to ₹74.2 crore in FY25 and cut losses 57% to ₹46.6 cr, driven by its Teachmint X digital board and the EduAI teaching assistant now used across 20 million learners in 50 countries. Employee benefit expenses dropped 55% to ₹48 crore, and total expenses fell 7%. The Bengaluru firm last raised a $78 million Series B in 2021 at a ~$500 million valuation.
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Amity-backed UNIVO Education said it has delivered 7x revenue growth in three years on a "high-scale, low-burn" model, serving 200,000-plus learners across 135 countries through exclusive online-degree partnerships with UGC-accredited universities. CFO Lalit Pruthi told FinancialExpress the firm raised $76.6 million in 2022, is now largely self-funded, and was ranked 4th in TIME’s 2025 EdTech Rising Stars. The pitch lands as global edtech VC funding has collapsed from $16.7 billion in 2021 to under $3 billion in 2025.
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Scaler is targeting 20-25% annual growth in its online business on the back of AI-led upskilling demand from non-technical professionals, with online now contributing 60-65% of revenue. CEO Amar Srivastava said the firm’s new online PG programme in Business and AI is drawing enrolments from Microsoft, Swiggy and Reliance group executives, and audited outcomes show 2.5x to 3x compensation jumps and 89% completion. The vertical has been profitable over the last few quarters.
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A new 1 Finance Global Economic Outlook 2026 report flags how mid-range private schooling in Mumbai now costs roughly ₹17.3 lakh from Nursery to Class 12 against an average urban couple income of ₹5.44 lakh a year in Maharashtra. Affordable schools cost ₹7.9 lakh over the same arc and elite institutions up to ₹61.2 lakh, with annual fee hikes of 10-12% running well ahead of headline education inflation of 3-6%. The numbers extend MeitY’s ₹17.3 lakh BTech versus ₹4.74 lakh fresher salary gap into school-fee territory.
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A growing homeschooling network across Delhi, Noida and Gurugram now has 500-plus families opting out of formal schools, with the largest cluster (about 150 families) in the 3-7 age group and another 57 in the 8-13 band, many of whom stepped away after the pandemic. Anchored by Swashikshan, NIOS, Cambridge and IGCSE pathways, the parents leaning in are largely mothers who have restructured careers to do it.
Opinions
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Can a generation of Indian universities funded by billionaires actually take on the Ivy League, or are they just expensive bets on the same broken system? The Economist surveys Ahmedabad, Ashoka, Jindal, Shiv Nadar and the new private elite charging upwards of ₹10 lakh a year, and finds the bigger constraint is not money or talent but the cost of an inconvenient finding. A must-read on the trade-off between research ambition and political risk in Indian higher education.
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India is quietly cutting credit-bearing English communication courses across engineering colleges, from four-credit subjects to one- or two-credit modules tucked into the margins. A Velammal Engineering College faculty member argues in The Hindu that this is a retreat dressed up as reform, with first-generation learners from regional-medium backgrounds paying the cost. Read it for an uncomfortable take on what gets lost when language stops being treated as infrastructure.
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Why does AI in Indian classrooms keep failing, and what does it take to actually shift learning outcomes for the rural child? Sampark Foundation’s Vineet Nayar, ex-HCL CEO, sits down with The Indian Express to lay out why "a tablet without pedagogy is just hardware" and how Sampark TV is reading data from 86,000 government classrooms while keeping devices out of children’s hands. Read it for a sharp counterpoint to the prevailing AI-in-education orthodoxy from someone running it at scale.
Job Openings
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upGrad is the higher-education and skilling platform that recently agreed to acquire Unacademy in an all-stock deal. They’re hiring a Business Head in Bengaluru, full-time, looking for 8-15 years across consumer internet, marketplaces, growth or digital business. Apply through LinkedIn or DM Muskan Khandelwal.
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Unacademy is the test-prep platform now being absorbed into upGrad. They’re hiring a Category Head – K12 in Bengaluru (on-site), full-time, for someone with 6-9 years in category management or P&L roles and demonstrated success scaling B2C/EdTech businesses. They will only consider candidates from the EdTech industry.
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K12 Techno Services runs school operations and academic services across a large K-12 network in India. They’re hiring a Zonal Business Head for a group of schools in Bengaluru, looking for an MBA from a top-tier institution with experience managing multi-school operations and K-12 sales and academic processes. Apply via LinkedIn.
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The Akanksha Foundation runs a network of schools and the Project RISE enrichment programme across Maharashtra. They’re hiring a Senior Director – HR, People & Culture in Mumbai or Pune, full-time, with 12-15 years of progressive HR leadership including 3-5 years as a Head of HR, ideally in education or non-profits. Send a 1-2 page resume, a work sample and three references to akanksha.headhr@crossovercatalyst.com.
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J-PAL South Asia, the policy research lab housed at the Institute for Financial Management and Research, is hiring an Associate Director, Policy and Communications in New Delhi for someone with 10+ years across government, development, academic or research organisations. Apply through the J-PAL/IPA common application by selecting the "Associate Director – Policy" position and uploading a cover letter and CV.
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DAI Research is running a Punjab-government randomised controlled trial backed by J-PAL, with principal investigators at Azim Premji University, the Max Planck Institute and Northeastern University. They’re hiring a Research Associate in Punjab to lead field data collection across students, teachers and schools. Early-career candidates welcome; details and applications via the link in the post.
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The Convergence Foundation, incubating a new venture called Aikyam Foundation focused on mental health in India, is hiring a Program Director and a Program Lead based in India for the founding team. The brief is for people who can build from first principles across strategy, public systems and institution-building. Application links for both roles are in the post.
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Codju Technologies sells AI, coding, robotics and future-skills programmes into schools. They’re hiring Area Managers, Assistant Regional Managers, Regional Managers and Senior Regional Managers in Bangalore and Hyderabad, looking for backgrounds in EdTech, academic publishing or institutional sales with regional growth track record. Send a CV to rohit@codju.com or palak@codju.com with the subject "Application for [Position] – [City]".
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BriBooks is a children’s writing and creativity platform operating across India, Singapore, UAE, Hong Kong, UK and the USA. They’re hiring a Brand Marketing & Communication lead in Gurugram (in-office), working directly with founders on storytelling across LinkedIn, Instagram, schools and parent communities. Send a resume and a short note on fit to hcm@bribooks.com.
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Cuddles Foundation runs nutrition support for children undergoing cancer treatment in Indian hospitals. They’re hiring a Fundraising Manager – CSR in Mumbai (on-site), full-time, to build CSR partnerships and scale impact-led growth. Send a CV to carmeline@cuddlesfoundation.com.
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Godrej Foundation runs philanthropic and DEI programmes anchored in the Godrej group. They’re hiring a Fellowship Coordinator in Mumbai (Godrej One, Vikhroli East) on a 12-month full-time consultancy at ₹50,000 per month, for someone with 1-2 years in programme coordination, English communication skills and an undergraduate degree. Last date to apply is May 20; the start date is June 1. Send a CV to rajeev.kushwah@godrejfoundation.com.
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The LEGO Foundation, administered through the Social Science Research Council, has opened the LEGO Foundation Fellowship for early- to mid-career researchers working on children in crisis or conflict, neurodivergent children’s inclusion, or learning in AI-enabled environments. Up to 10 three-year fellowships of US$300,000 each are on offer, with the portal opening June 1 and the deadline July 31, 2026. Applicants need a PhD earned within the last 10 years and must be employed by a university or research institute at the start of the fellowship.
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