Private schools and the government: a symbiotic relationship?
Fiona Vaz
A few years ago, when I was working at an NGO that partnered with governments to run municipal schools, one of the oft-repeated requests from parents was to change the name of the government school to make it sound more ‘private’. Parents wanted the foundation’s name to be officially added to the school’s name, as they believed it would convey that their children received quality education in that school. As staff members, in a public private partnership (PPP) model, we also knew that some of our ‘brightest’ students, who were enrolled in the kindergarten, were only spending time in our classrooms until they secured admission in coveted private schools nearby. We had heard of students being ashamed to walk on the roads in their municipal school uniforms as they would be looked down on by their peers who attended private schools.
For the past few decades there has been a narrative that private schools provide quality education while government schools provide dismal or sub-par education. Private schools are perceived to be a better choice as compared to government-run schools by almost everyone. But this belief couldn’t be further from the truth. Data over the years has pointed to the fact that students from private schools perform only slightly better than those from government schools. Government schools are also often better equipped, in terms of physical infrastructure, especially when compared to affordable private schools (APS) that cater to the lower sections of society and directly compete with government schools for students. The quality of teachers in government schools also tends to be better as they attract talent that hopes to be compensated according to bureaucratic standards, while APS attract talent that might not be up to the mark. Although APS directly compete with state-run schools or ‘municipal’ schools as they are commonly known in cities like Mumbai, it would be erroneous to believe that they are only for the poor. Government schools are for everyone, including the more affluent sections of society. However, the idea that affluent parents would enroll their children in government schools is unthinkable today. This economic division contributes to the erosion of political support for education as a right, imparted freely to all, in government schools.
If government schools are critical for children to access their right to free and compulsory education, then it might help to interrogate the relationship between governments and private schools. In this article, we will look at the evolution of the private school as it is today and how the government might have contributed to the environment that enables the proliferation of private schools at every budget level. We will also look at the relationships that governments maintain with private schools and how that might affect our ideas around education at large.
Education as a right
Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), one of the first conventions of its kind, passed in 1948, states that education is a fundamental right and that it must be freely available to all, at least until elementary stages. India is a signatory to the UDHR, which means that it believes that children should have access to free and quality education at the primary school level. The Right to Education Act, passed by the Government of India, in 2009, made free and compulsory education to all children until the age of 14, a right. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which in its previous avatar was the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), had various articles, similarly advocating a rights-based approach to education. However, if education is a right, as accepted and endorsed by the government, then we must examine the reasons why private schools provide education as a commodity at a price to students. It would be helpful to see the role of the state in enabling the rise of private schools at practically every budget and to interrogate how private schools came to enjoy the distinction of being an obvious and only choice, for parents and communities, in many social circles.
Private schools and the government
Narrative of quality education
In the 1990s, at the time that India’s economy was liberalized, the conditions encouraged the establishment of a number of private schools to meet the demands of the middle and lower-income classes for private education. Private schools have always existed in India and some were supported by the government as government-aided schools. Such schools received the support of the government often through funds for teacher salaries, while they continued to be run by private or religious entities. Around the 1970s-80s, the middle class in India had already begun their flight from government schools to private schools. Government schools did have issues such as high teacher absenteeism and poor infrastructure, thus strengthening the public perception of them being of low quality. This perception fuelled the demand for private schools in the 90s, even among the lower income classes, as they imitated the choices of the middle class.
Dr Shalini Bhorkar, currently teaches at St Mary’s University, UK and is an expert on privatization of education in India and other developing countries. For her doctoral research, Dr Bhorkar focused on private tutoring and its role in advancing educational inequity in India. Dr Bhorkar found, through her research, that owing to the high demand for private schools in the 90s, several providers of private schools (including state education department and other government employees, and private tuition and coaching class providers) came into existence. “These people, who had some insider knowledge about schooling and/or school education felt incentivized to start private schools, sometimes because of the prestige of becoming school principals.” As such, many other players entered the space of private school education and APS began to grow and so also the exodus from government schools. Dr Bhorkar says that the government did not do anything specific to support the proliferation of private schools, but it contributed to reducing the pressure to improve public schools, which furthered parents’ beliefs that private schools are better than public ones.
“The government school needs children to function. Often, when private players lead to decrease in the number of children attending government schools, it further results in a subsequent reduction in the government’s motivation to improve the schools. This resulted in a vicious cycle, whereas the number of students enrolling in government schools continued to decline, the perception about its quality continued to deteriorate too, which meant that many students migrated to private schools and further negatively affected the enrollment levels of children in government schools in many regions,” says Dr Bhorkar.
Regulations and control of private schools
The Right to Education Act (RTE) passed by the Government of India in 2009 tried to regulate private schools in different ways. The RTE tried to control, among others, three key aspects in private schools namely their founding, the quality of teachers therein, and inclusion of students from economically weaker sections of society (EWS). Within these three areas especially, one could see considerable engagement between the State and private schools.
According to the RTE, schools had to be registered, if they were already in existence and also if they were being newly set up. The requirements for registration, among others, were that the school had to have infrastructure such as a playground, separate toilets for students according to their gender, a kitchen, barrier-free access to and adequate classrooms. The act mandated that the schools are run as not-for-profits in order to check the amount they might charge as fees from parents. However, it is no surprise that schools require money for the upkeep of their infrastructure, to pay teacher and staff salaries as well as fulfill other costs that are incurred. It is not possible to meet these expenses without charging high fees and when the fees charged are low, the quality of the schooling experience suffers. Here, we can see that students are treated as customers, in that what you pay for is what you get and not as bearers of rights.
In addition, and sadly, the quality and accountability mechanisms that were introduced by the RTE, now are being weakened with the inevitable implementation of the National Education Policy (2020) across states. The NEP, as it has come to be known, suggests that private schools need not have the requisite infrastructure, accessible classrooms or playgrounds especially in urban areas where land is scarce and costly. It also suggests that the Directorate of School Education, which previously regulated private schools, will no longer regulate them, but private schools will be required to self-disclose basic regulatory information. They will also be accountable to an independent state-wide body called the State School Standards Authority (SSSA) for ‘minimal’ and ‘basic’ parameters of quality and safety. Students, who are paying for an education, have to now make do with ‘basic’ and ‘minimal’ quality and safety under the new policy of the government. The government, through the NEP continues to loosen its control over private schools by undoing the provisions of the RTE and abdicating its position as a guardian of children’s rights.
The Government of India also has a strict control on the quality of teachers through the RTE. The RTE mandates that teachers in private schools have to be adequately qualified. However, adequate qualification in some cases could mean the most minimal and in other cases could also mean falsification of educational qualification to supplicate government authorities. As per Transparency International, an organization reporting on global corruption, India is one of the highest-ranking countries for the prevalence of transgressional practices in the public sector[1] and schools could be bribing state educational officers to provide them recognition on the basis of teacher qualification.
Another area that private schools were in continuous engagement with the government was over the 25 percent RTE quota for students belonging to EWS. The RTE mandated that private schools reserve 25 percent of their total seats in the first year of schooling for students who belonged to the EWS of society. Since its adoption by different states, schools, especially those that are self-funded, have conflicted or flouted the norms for filling the seats with students from EWS of society. Private schools have pointed out that they are reimbursed late by the government for these seats and face challenges integrating students in the school. The pushback from private schools on this matter continues until today with them asking for various exemptions in the courts of law.
Private schools as aiding government efforts: some concluding reflections
As mentioned earlier, private schools have been in existence in India even prior to India’s independence. Mostly existing as charitable organizations, these schools often run by religious missionaries, social thinkers, and reformers, played a significant role in developing the future citizenry of a young nation. Today, private schools play a role in supporting the government in expanding education to the large number of students in the country. Some private schools partner with government school departments to share best practices and teacher training. Sanyukta Bafna of The Acres Foundation points to her team’s enthusiasm to work with state governments to take their innovative curriculum to a large number of students. Others also mandate their students to work with neighbourhood government schools or APS as part of their social outreach programmes. Proponents share that private schools are able to create competition and thus force development of state-run schools. However, this has not been the case. If anything, private schools and those who support the commodification of education have weakened the political will to improve state-run facilities. In addition, private schools have led to a stratification based on economic class, gender, and caste as data suggests that most private schools are attended by those who are better off, male, and belong to upper castes[2]. By refusing governmental policies for inclusion such as the 25 percent reservation of EWS, private schools strengthen their position as institutions only for a homogenous group of people – mainly the middle class and elite.
Rishi Sunak, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was similarly educated in an elite private school and was perceived as out of touch by the public precisely because of the lack of diverse views in his formative years. Sunak’s policies seemed to benefit only the rich while burdening the poor and the working class, which hastened his removal. His private schooling and continuing education, seemed to narrow his vision of welfare and we need to think if it does the same here. Are private schools, inadvertently, eroding the government system that they were meant to support?
As I mention that private schools and governments could have a symbiotic relationship where one’s growth affects the other, Dr Bhorkar is quick to correct me. Private schools and the Government of India have a very complex relationship and cannot be defined in a straightforward manner, and it would be misleading to call this relationship “symbiotic”, she says.
As I continue to reflect on these issues, I would ask, how can we make the relationship between the state and private schools more symbiotic and mutually fulfilling?
The author is the co-founder and director of InteGRAL, a gender focused research and consulting firm. She can be reached at fiona@integral-asia.org.
[1]Express News Service. (2024, January 31). Corruption Index: India ranks 93 among 180 nations. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-corruption-index-cpi-2023-corruption-perceptions-index-public-sector-corruption-9135717/
[2]Bagde, S. Epple, D. Taylor, L., (2022). The emergence of private high schools in India: The impact of public-private competition on public school students. Journal of Public Economics, Vol (215),2022,104749, ISSN 0047-2727, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2022.104749
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