This document discusses the role of affordable private schools for educating poor students in India. It notes that private schools play a large role in increasing enrollment beyond what governments achieve alone. Parents choose private schools due to perceived better quality and opportunities compared to government schools. Challenges include teacher absenteeism, lack of infrastructure in government schools, and lack of English instruction. Innovative solutions proposed include increasing the number of English-medium affordable private schools, reducing teacher absenteeism, improving basic infrastructure, ensuring schools are run as community services not businesses, developing relevant curriculum and technologies, and generating information to support the sector through studies, workshops and symposiums.

1. An Essay on Affordable Private Schools
What do you believe is the role of affordable private schools for the poor in India?
“Private” schools are schools that are independently operated and do not receive government aid. Private
schools for the poor exist and they are most likely to have the largest effect on enrollment. The macro-level
analysis of various independent factors such as government spending on education, political opinion,
economic data, and cultural variables determines their relationship to private schools in the developing
world.
Private schooling in India is demand-driven. Parents choose private education because they believe they
provide better education and future opportunities for their children than the government schools. Political
factors play a serious role in private education choice. Private schools are currently educating a large
percentage of the world’s poor. Governments are not on track towards achieving the Goal: Education for All.
When private schools are included, more students are enrolled in school than governments. Affordable
private schools are included in education enrollment goals and benchmarks are being met. Because of
government failure to educate students in very poor areas, private schools that charge low-fees are
educating students that would otherwise attend government schools—or not be in school at all.
Schools develop in this scenario as government does not meet a mandate to education, which it declares a
fundamental right. Whether the failure is actual or perceived, private organizations are educating the
masses where there is government failure. The low-fee private school sector is fulfilling parents’ demands in
cases where government schooling does not. Political scientists, policy-makers, and government officials
need to recognize the influence and salience of the private sector when discussing global education.
Private education is helping educate the world’s poor in a substantial way. Primary reason that families
choose private schools is perceived superior quality to government schools. Largest reasons for choosing
private schools are, in order, poor or nonexistent government-school infrastructure, lack of English medium
education, and insufficiency or absenteeism of government-school teachers.
Government schools geographically located too far from many families to attend school, and children who
attend private school tend to have higher attendance and greater measured achievement. Political aspect of
affordable private schools has often been overlooked. Existing studies either discount affordable private
schools completely, citing education as a normative universal “public good”, or discount the role of
government, saying that private schools arise because the “government system is perceived to be
inadequate”, that they exist because of the poor and declining quality of government education, or
inadequate infrastructural capacity of government to handle educational needs alone. Affordable private
sector can “reclaim education” for the poor, especially in cases in which governments fail to provide
education. When a collective-action problem leads to failure of the government sector, and government is
not responsive to citizens’ needs, citizens are more likely to privatize what has been previously viewed as a
collective function. Trust in government, the relationship between teacher job protection, union strength,
and teacher absenteeism and the language of instruction are all salient concerns. Government policies,
including spending and curriculum help explain the size of the private sector.
There is a role of key players in government and private education. The principal actors, which are outlined
as follows, are government actors (public officials), teachers, parents, and school operators/entrepreneurs.
With such heavy job protection, teachers are often absent from class. Some teachers are absent because of
the close relationship between teachers’ unions and the government sector—they are carrying out
administrative, political, or election-related work, and other teachers are absent because of the lack of
accountability surrounding teacher absence.
Parental preferences also play a role in private enrollment. Parents also recognize teacher absence, and cite
government-school teacher absenteeism as one reason for choosing private schools. Government officials
also hinder or encourage the provision of private schools by motives of personal financial gain. Corruption
taints private school regulation. Government teachers oppose private education for both ideological and
practical reasons. Teachers have a stated commitment to universal and compulsory government education,
and many do not feel that poor families ought to pay money for private school. Practically, low-fee private
schools are competitors for government schools, and teachers have a rational incentive to limit their supply
in order to protect the pre-eminence of government school.
Individuals and groups create and operate affordable private schools. For these schools to exist there has to
be significant incentive for independent school operators to work in the sector. School curriculum and
language of instruction can also impact parents’ preference. Many families choose private schools because
they are English-medium. English provides a competitive advantage: though the country has official

2. languages at the state level, English is one of the two official languages for state business. Governments use
language as a political tool. Finally, cultural factors have a significant impact on parental choice. Low-fee
private schools do have some direct connection to parental choice through factors associated with religion.
If given a chance what are the kinds of innovative solutions (products & services) that you will
introduce to these schools and how would you make these interventions sustainable in these
schools?
Innovative Solutions - Outline
1. Introduction of English-medium affordable Private Schools.
2. Reduction in teacher absence (as defined by non-teaching activity) in private schools thereby
increases enrollment. Parents cite teacher absence as a main reason for choosing private schools.
3. Many parents choose private schools for their children because the vast majority of private schools.
4. Private school infrastructure, presence of basic amenities—such as desks or blackboards, should
have working toilet facilities.
5. Schools are to be run as a community service and not a business, and commercialization should not
take place in the school in any shape. Profit-making and school establishment is hard to establish.
6. “Edupreneurship”, i.e. large number of school founders coming from entrepreneurial, rather than
educational, backgrounds.
7. In order to drive the APS sector along the double paths of growth and impact, we need to think big
and out of the box. One of the core challenges for the APS sector is the availability of credible
information, which could enable better decision-making all around and healthier competition
amongst schools. In order to advance the sector in a meaningful way, we need to use the
information (and make independent efforts) to bring in investments and engage with the
government and policy in order to drive changes overall.
8. Affordable private school owners have built these schools up from scratch, they know their
constraints and they know their market well. They handle high attrition of teachers, ill-equipped
teachers, demanding parents and competition from other APS with their own brand of strategies
and strong networking among competing APS. Lesson plans created for APS teachers form part of
the support system that service providers offer the school as well as a strategic solution to many of
the APS constraints.
9. Designing curriculum tools and technology relevant to the specific learning needs of students is
another step towards successful engagement with affordable private schools. Working on the
adoption of these tools and technologies to ensure that desired learning outcomes are met is then
the real challenge.
Strategy:
The challenges are around accessing a disaggregated market, the existence of other alternatives and the
lack of opportunities to pilot. These challenges need to be combated with innovative strategies.
1. Generating Information: Given the fact that the market is not really well-established – facts and
figures are just starting to become openly available, and the market size is just getting established -
an important step in attracting an entrepreneur into the sector is showing her how big the market
is. This means sector level studies on size, measuring current performance and disseminating this
widely. Ways to do this could include conferences and sector reports.
2. Service Provider Development: Entrepreneurs need not only opportunities and capital to access the
market, but specific information on how to succeed in this segment. The challenge currently is that
there is limited common experience that entrepreneurs can draw upon; there is no frame of
references or ‘best practice guide’ on how to work in the sector (or even share information on what
challenges are and how to overcome them). This can be achieved through workshops, conferences
and targeted capacity building efforts.
3. Organizing symposiums is taking steps towards building up that reference point to understand
challenges. The Symposium should plan to bring together players with interesting ideas for the APS

3. sector and have experts, both educationists and business-people give feedback to allow better
development of products and services.
4. School Development: It is seen how school mindset issues could be a challenge in bringing
entrepreneurs into the sector. As important as service provider development, therefore, is school
development. It sounds unreal, but there is no other way than to bring schools together, and bring
them together frequently to speak about specific issues. Establishing success stories and enabling
communication between schools are very important.
5. The event should be conceptualized solely to help schools get more informed on specific issues that
affect them, and plans to, over many conferences raise issues that cut across schools – potential
future conference topics could include Teacher Quality, Attrition and Teacher training as a solution.
6. Pilot Opportunities: Entrepreneurs need opportunities to pilot and test out their products or
services. This is especially important because APS present some peculiar challenges – beyond the
resource-constrained environment and limited teacher attainment, which are common to
government schools, these schools are also enterprises in that they are an income source for the
school owner. Given that, and because these schools run on very thin margins, decisions around
new initiatives are made in a constrained environment. That means anyone wanting to ‘sell’
something to an APS has to work pretty hard! In this context, having a pilot opportunity is valuable
– not only because providers get an opportunity to test, but also because schools get to see
something often at a significantly lower price.