Nootan Sharma
Nootan Sharma is a Principal Correspondent at ThePrint who reports on how India’s exam and recruitment systems shape youth aspirations and access to government jobs, with a particular focus on small-town candidates and coaching hubs. Her work sits at the intersection of education, bureaucracy and social justice, drawing on ground reporting across coaching centres, campuses and aspirant towns. She covers the UPSC coaching industry, competitive entrance exams and government recruitment processes as systems that can enable or block opportunity, rather than as isolated news events. She has reported for national outlets including Hindustan Times, BBC Hindi and The Lallantop, and has been with ThePrint since 2021.
Competitive exams and the trust gap in recruitment
Sharma’s reporting on government recruitment often starts from the experiences of aspirants whose futures hinge on written tests and merit lists. In a recent piece on Jharkhand’s government job process, she documents how repeated cancellations, leaks and delays have eroded trust in the examination system that is supposed to be the gateway to public employment.
Across her coverage of medical entrance tests, she reports on paper leaks, disputed grace marks, unusually high numbers of perfect scores and shifting cut-offs that cumulatively undermine confidence in the fairness of exams like NEET. Her stories on national entrance exams such as the JEE track how policy announcements and score outcomes translate into anxiety, strategic choices and stalled plans for students aiming at institutions like IITs and AIIMS.
Rather than treating each controversy as a one-day story, she links exam irregularities, opaque grievance processes and delayed appointments into a broader narrative about a recruitment pipeline that many young people no longer trust.
Coaching centres, small-town youth and the UPSC economy
Sharma spends extensive time in coaching towns and private institutes to show how the business of exam preparation shapes daily life for students and their families. In her reporting on Patna’s coaching landscape and the cult around teachers such as Khan Sir, she details how celebrity tutors, packed classrooms and aggressive marketing feed an industry that promises government jobs as a route out of precarity.
She covers schemes like Haryana’s Super 100 programme to examine how state-backed coaching interacts with private players and influences who gets a real shot at elite medical and engineering colleges.
Her stories on debates over taxation of coaching services and regulatory proposals track how policy decisions affect fee structures, business models and the accessibility of test preparation for students from smaller towns. Throughout this strand of her work, the coaching sector is treated not just as an education service but as an economic and emotional ecosystem that sustains, and sometimes exploits, aspirant youth.
Higher education, professional courses and student battles with institutions
Beyond entrance tests, Sharma follows students into higher education institutions and professional courses, focusing on the promises made to them and what happens when those promises are broken. In her coverage of IIM Sambalpur’s proposed Delhi campus, she reports how students who paid high fees for a specific location and brand experience have taken their fight to court after the plan did not materialise as expected.
A ground report on a Gurugram-based ‘MBA course’ that stretches from Dharavi to Mundra Port shows how the language of business education is used to repackage workplace training, raising questions about who truly benefits and how value is measured.
Her stories on vulnerabilities in systems like the CBSE’s online portals highlight how individual students can expose technological and procedural gaps, forcing large institutions to confront security and accountability issues. Across these pieces, she consistently centres student voices while mapping the institutional decisions, legal battles and governance structures that determine whether formal education delivers on its stated goals.
Ground reporting on bureaucracy, gender and student life
Sharma’s portfolio is built around ground reporting, with travel across regions to document how policies and bureaucratic decisions play out in the lives of students, women and other marginalised groups. Her background across television, digital and print outlets informs a style that combines long-form narrative with clear explanation of rules, procedures and institutional hierarchies. She frequently frames exam and education stories within broader questions of gender and social justice, tracing how access to coaching, safe housing and supportive family structures affects who can persist in competitive academic tracks. Across beats, the through-line is a close attention to how young people navigate systems designed by others, and how those systems either reinforce or challenge existing inequalities.
4 more education journalists.
Ajit Niranjan
Ajit Niranjan links climate science, policy and hard numbers to how extreme weather and environmental damage disrupt daily life, public services and industry. He is European environment correspondent at the Guardian. His beat includes violent heat, pollution, wildfires, air quality, EU green policy, corporate responsibility, energy transition, clean home heating, public health and long-term risks to landscapes and ecosystems. He examines how lobbying, supply chains and regulation shape environmental harm, from data centres and fish farms to fossil fuel industries. His reporting covers schools, hospitals, transport, homes and infrastructure as climate stress points. He previously reported on climate for DW News. He combines data, scientific research, eyewitness accounts and on-the-ground reporting. He also produces explainers, dossiers, factsheets and Q&As that translate complex technical debates into clear, precise language.
Albert Tait
Albert Tait is Education Editor at The Telegraph, leading coverage of schools and universities as institutions whose decisions have direct consequences for staff and students. He focuses on how regulators, senior leaders and governing bodies respond when safety, standards or integrity are under scrutiny, and how those responses affect classrooms and lecture halls. His work links school inspections and teacher safety to regulatory frameworks and conditions on the ground, and he reports on incidents such as knife attacks and “Code Red” alerts with attention to immediate impact and emergency protocols. He produces multi-part investigations into university governance, including extensive reporting on Cambridge’s handling of Jason Arday’s appointment and resignation. He also covers curriculum debates such as changes in how scientists view evolution and inheritance. He began at The Telegraph as a news reporter and previously covered community news at a local paper.
Beth Kennedy
Beth Kennedy is editor at The PIE News and stands out for reporting on how UK policy, institutional strategy and new delivery models reshape international education. Her beat covers UK study visa rules, international student flows, Home Office and UCAS data, alternative study pathways, language schools, and mergers and acquisitions across the sector. She reports on the practical effects of visa changes, scholarship schemes, online and transnational education, school closures, job losses and sector consolidation. Her work is direct and data-led, with clear explanations of complex systems and a focus on what policy and market shifts mean for universities, language schools and private training organisations. She has over a decade in specialist media, including years reporting for primary healthcare professionals before joining The PIE in 2024.
Callum Clark
Callum Clark is a multimedia journalist at STV News who covers education through the lens of university finances, restructuring and their impact on students, staff and local services. He focuses on stories where cost‑saving plans, job losses and service closures reshape community life, such as Dundee University’s nursery and botanic garden closures, and sets those decisions within wider restructuring efforts. His reporting is direct and fact driven, built on official documents, statements and precise figures that show both the scale of savings targets and monthly losses, and the number of posts at risk. Clark’s background in local news and public service coverage, including mental health service reforms and redundancy schemes, shapes a methodical style that tracks formal processes while keeping the lived experience of workers, families and service users in view.