The brewing crisis in the Affordable Private Schools of India
Over the years, owing to market demands a whole new segment of education providers have entered the market. They are referred to as “affordable”, “low-cost” or “budget” private schools. These schools are setup by a local entrepreneur or a family usually in a low-income neighbourhood or community to offer education services to children in those communities. In 1996, around 10% of students received private education, while in 2016–17, according to the Unified District Information System for Education (U-DISE), 43.18% of students from grades 1–12 attended private schools. India has nearly 400,000 unaided private schools, with more than 79 Million students enrolled and nearly 80% of them enrolled in Affordable Private Schools (APS).
The APS schools are popular because they are affordably priced (under INR 20,000 per annum tuition fees), are located inside communities they serve which is convenient for many parents who can’t afford incidental costs of transport, most of them offer English as a medium of instruction which is aspirational and respond to local needs / demands of parents and offer innovations in their programmes and pedagogy. Over the years, they have become a lifeline for many communities where government school systems have failed. The APS schools sustain themselves entirely on the school fees paid by parents which helps them pay teacher/support staff salaries and manage administrative costs to run a reasonable quality school.
Dream a Dream works with 25 such APS schools in Bangalore partnering with them to deliver high-quality life skills programmes to over 5000 children every year. The entrepreneurs / families that run these schools are deeply invested in children’s learning and have been selfless in their service. Nearly 30% of the students’ families can’t even afford the meagre fees and attend free of charge due to the generosity of these school owners. These schools are literally sustained on a hand-to-mouth basis. However, they are inspirational in their service to the children in their communities.
The current COVID-19 pandemic has hit the APS hard. Due to the lockdown, they have had to shut their schools without clarity on when their schools will re-open. This has severely impacted their ability to collect school fees and continue to pay salaries of teachers and support staff. Many of them are operating out of rented premises and are struggling to pay their monthly rent during this crisis.
As we come out of the crisis and schools re-open, there is a strong possibility of 1) Increased dropouts from schools because parents have moved back to their villages or are unable to pay school fees due to loss of income and livelihoods 2) Students who do come back to school are going to struggle to pay the school fees until the time their parents are back to earning an income.
This will severely hamper the school’s ability to retain teachers and support staff and be able to pay them regular salaries. The salaries in these APS schools are already low and it’s not feasible to make further salary cuts. Since the schools might not have savings, it’s unlikely they will have sufficient cash flow runways to manage for a few months. Hence, we are looking at a real possibility of some of the APS schools shutting down and thus closing the doors on the only available education option that many children in low-income neighbourhoods have access to.
To ensure this does not happen, here are some recommendations to support APS during and post this pandemic
1. Government providing cash benefit transfers to parents specifically for school fees of children for the current year.
2. Allocation of funds from the budgets of local corporator / MLA to APS in the ward.
3. Government providing budgetary allocations to support APS under a certain fee to one year to help overcome the crisis.
4. Interest fee loans from banks for APS to manage cash flows.
5. CSR allocations from companies to cover the school fees of all the students for one year or to cover salaries of teachers / support staff.
6. Local community fundraisers / support systems to ensure their local APS schools don’t close down.
It will be imperative to support Affordable Private Schools, so they don’t close down and hamper the education for approximately 43% of the country’s students who are studying in APS schools today.
We can’t have this pandemic create a ripple effect of other crisis scenarios that we are unprepared for, continuing to impact the lives and futures of our children.