Affordable Private Schools: everyone's a winner

Three days until departure. Lots of life juggling going on what with trying to write a dissertation, moving home from university, packing for ten months abroad and saying all my goodbyes. There is so much to think about when going to somewhere like India: flights, visa, insurance, bank account, phone account, medical kit, vaccinations, mosquito net, plug adapters... The to do (and to get) list is endless, and ticking things off takes time. 12,000 words on moral particularism and human rights has also been a somewhat hefty addition to my workload. Currently, my days are spent in the library; evenings packing, unpacking and repacking bags at home; nights out with friends or eating with the family. Sometime I get some sleep in too.  And I’m trying to learn Hindi. I can do 12 letters of the alphabet so far.

To remind myself of why all this craziness will be worth it, I have been reading ‘A Beautiful Tree’ by Professor James Tooley, which is an account of his research into Affordable Private Schools that has inspired much of the work IDEX sets out to undergo in Hyderabad.

Tooley’s book recounts ten years of his own research into Affordable Private Schools (APS): schools privately owned, set up by local entrepreneurs, located in the poorest areas of low-economy nations, and created to educate children from very poor families.  These schools are not well documented in the Western world and indeed Tooley himself stumbled upon them by accident whilst carrying out a separate research project. His story begins in the slums Hyderabad where he came across the surprising discovery that even in the poorest areas, many very poor families were choosing to pay for their children to be educated at one of tiny independently owned schools dotted on every street corner of the slums, rather than at the government schools where teaching, uniform and daily lunch is all free. 

The findings meant two things: the teaching in the APS was of a significantly higher standard to that in government schools, and the parents of children, even in the poorest areas, value education so much that they are willing to pay for this difference. 

Tooley argues that these schools are the way forward for the poor. They cost around US$10 per child per year, which is just about affordable for the average cycle rickshaw driver. Some children – orphans, or those from the very poorest families – attend for free, subsidised by the fees of others. The school owners make a small profit, the teachers are paid small, but sufficient, wages and the kids receive a good quality of education. These schools are businesses constructed for social means, the school owners genuinely wanting to provide a good service. This is social enterprise at its finest.

Each of the IDEX fellows will be assigned one of these schools to work with. Mine is called Alliance International. This is all I’ll know about it before I arrive since none of these schools, being very small (often just rooms in the houses of the owners), have websites.  Our job is to work with school owners to help bring new ideas and innovations to improve the running of their schools from experiences of our own education and market based strategies we will be learning in our intro weeks. These schools still have very few resources so we have to be innovative with what there is to work with. We will be looking at everything from school dinner plans to discipline strategies to sports clubs. I’m hoping to start a CV clinic to help children think about their future life plans beyond school.

The APS system has not been without criticism. Kevin Watkins, in a paper responding to Tooley, argues that development agencies should be concerned with improving free education for the poor and not improving the APS leading to a further subdivision of class in poor countries. I am aware that this might be a legitimate claim, however, I have a feeling Watkins may have somewhat missed understanding why it is that the APS have been such a success. Development requires that everyone involved in any project have a motivation to put in the effort to reach goals. In societies where corruption and bribery are still widespread, it is easy for things to fall through the loop and for some people to take advantage. In the APS, owners are motivated to keep their standards high as this is the only way to ensure fee paying children will attend; teachers in these schools will thus be motivated to teach well, not wanting to risk dismissal by the owners; families of poor children will be motivated to send their children to these schools because they will be aware of the significant difference in educational quality their children will be receiving. Everyone has a stake in maintaining the success of the business. And everyone is held accountable.

I shall be very interested to see for myself at Alliance International whether Tooley’s happy picture of bottom-up small-scale development is as he claims. I very much hope it is.


For more on Affordable Private Schools please look at the website for Gray Matters Capital which is the organisation sponsoring the IDEX fellows in India http://www.graymatterscap.com/affordable-private-school-initiative