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id21 invites development workers, activists and researchers to contribute their points of view on development issues. James Tooley, a professor of education at the University of Newcastle, comments on how poor school children can benefit more from independent schools than government ones for a fraction of the cost.

Private education is good for poor people in Africa and Asia

The accepted wisdom says that, to achieve universal basic education, massive amounts of aid need to be invested in public education systems: the Commission for Africa recommends an additional US $7 to $8 billion per year. In part this money is to be used to help countries follow Kenya's example of introducing free primary education, widely credited with bringing well over a million extra children to school.

Our research at the University of Newcastle suggests that the accepted wisdom is failing to take into account the important role that private schooling is playing in educating poor people. It runs the risk of both overestimating the magnitude of the problem and of channelling aid in the wrong direction.

The research was carried out in selected low-income areas of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and India. It found an extraordinarily large number of children already in private schools. In Ga District, Ghana, 64 percent of school children attend private unaided schools and in Lagos State we estimate that 75 percent of school children are in private schools - with a larger proportion in unregistered private schools (33 percent of the total) than in government schools (25 percent).

Because such large proportions of poor children are in private unrecognised schools, off the state's radar and not on official statistics, this means that the proportion of children not attending school has been over-estimated. In Lagos State, for instance, the existence of private unregistered schools would reduce the percentage of out of school children from 50 percent to 26 percent. In other words: the difficulty of reaching 'education for all' may have been overestimated.

Moreover, our research in the slums of Kibera, Nairobi, suggests that the introduction of free primary education in January 2003 did not increase overall enrolment in schools because there were already private schools serving the slum populations. We found a total of 76 private schools in the slums with around 12,000 students enrolled. These schools had suffered a massive fall in enrolment since free primary education was introduced; and at least 25 private schools had closed altogether. The number of children lost from private education appeared far greater than the additional enrolment in the state schools bordering Kibera. At best - allowing for some exaggeration by the school owners of the numbers of children who had left - we could infer that the additional enrolment was a result of children transferring from private to public schools.

Children transferring from 'mushrooming' private to government schools may not seem such a bad thing, given the assumption that private schools can be of low quality. We explored the attainment of students in private and public schools serving poor communities and found that private schools in general had a large achievement advantage. For instance, in Lagos State, the mean maths score advantage over government schools was about 15 and 19 percentage points more respectively in private registered and unregistered schools, while in English it was 23 and 30 percentage points more.

In other words private schools are outperforming government schools. Moreover, they spend less on teachers - a cost which is likely to make up most of school's recurrent expenditure - than do government schools. In general, the average monthly teacher salary in a government school ranges between three to four times higher than in an unrecognised private school.

If aid is channelled only into state education systems, then it may be concentrated on the low-achieving and expensive option. The way forward, instead, may be to encourage the private sector that has shown itself able and willing to serve the poor. Funds could be channelled through a revolving loan fund, for instance, to help private schools improve their infrastructure, or through voucher schemes to help the poorest access the higher quality private education that is already available.

Contributor
James Tooley
E G West Centre
School of Education
University of Newcastle
NE1 7RU
UK
Tel +44 (0)191 222 6374
Email james.tooley@ncl.ac.uk

September 2005

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