South Africa: Private Schooling as an Elite Option Only?

Shah, James Lorimer (DA) The president of India’s Centre for Civil Society (CCS), Dr Parth Shah, attended a workshop on private schooling organised by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), one of FNF's South African partner organisations. FNF made use of this opportunity by inviting Dr Shah to a round table discussion on ‘Successful low-cost private schooling models from India – Possible applications for South Africa’ with Democratic Alliance (DA) parliamentary and provincial spokespersons on education. Both CDE’s report (Hidden Assets: South Africa's low-fee private schools) and Dr Shah’s presentation debunk the myth that private schools are the prerogative of affluent families and in fact show-case that low-cost private schools are the preferred route for many poor parents.

In a very tangible, vivid and inspiring fashion, Dr Shah kicked off the round table discussion with a presentation on low-cost private schools in India and best practices around the issue of getting better education for children from poor families. He spoke about the School Choice Campaign, the flagship initiative of CCS, which conducted two pilot projects: the Delhi Voucher Project and the School Voucher for Girls Project. The decisive departure from previous models is that the students and not the schools are being funded, so the money follows the students rather than the institutions and hence the motto “Fund Students, Not Schools”. The fact that the parents and the students get to choose where to use their voucher creates competition among the different schools. This makes the school more accountable to the students and their parents, and it creates an incentive for the schools to improve their performance. One of the interesting highlights presented was the unexpected popularity of the Delhi Voucher Project (India’s first school voucher project) which received 120,000 applications from interested parents for only 408 available vouchers.

Wilmot James MP, Shadow Minister of Higher Education and DA Federal Chairperson, and Shah To ensure a fair and transparent method of selecting the beneficiaries, School Choice had a public lottery conducted by the local Ward Councillors to pick students from each ward. Parents of students who were not chosen decided to submit a petition to their Ward Councillor demanding school vouchers from government. An evaluation of the project showed that the voucher students performed better on reading achievements and maths proficiency than those who had remained in government schools. In addition to that, a 53% increase in the involvement of parents in the students’ education could be observed. An unexpected but wholly welcome outcome was that parents’ expenditure on their child’s education did not decrease, but in fact it increased because the positive outcome gave them a “sense of hope” for a better future for their child¹. The net and very beneficial effect then was a crowding-in of investment instead of a crowding-out, as one usually gets when government takes over.

Another interesting highlight of Dr Shah’s presentation was the percentage of students attending fee-charging private schools in rural India which stands at 22% for children between the ages of 6 to 14. This was especially true in villages with high teacher absentee rates in government schools; furthermore, research indicated that it is poorer areas, with poor government schools, that are more likely to have private schools than richer areas. Such findings support the view that parents – despite their economic standing – are willing to contribute to a fee-charging private school as long as they see better educational results and know that the school is accountable to them. On the best practice aspect, Dr Shah spoke about corporate initiatives for low cost private schools (e.g. transferring the management of government schools to private companies, or public private partnerships), a school rating system (which looks into student achievement, parent engagement, financial systems and the learning environment) and the Indian School Finance Company (a non-banking finance company extending loans to low-cost private schools with the aim of identifying the most capable school operators, helping them to improve the academic quality of their programmes, to upgrade premises and facilities and so forth)².

Dr Shah's presentation was followed by an animated discussion on possible applications of some of the Indian solutions and best practice examples to the South African state education system, which is failing the majority of its learners dismally and chokes off any hope poor children might have to improve their lives through a decent education.

This event was another example of the FNF Africa’s successful initiative of providing platforms for South-South exchanges between FNF partners from developing countries and emerging economies.

Amira Elibiary, Project Officer FNF Johannesburg

Barbara Groeblinghoff, Project Director FNF Johannesburg

Katja Manuela Egger, Project Officer FNF Cape Town

¹It also bears remembering here that India does not have a state pension system and that for poorer people it’s their children who will have to look after them in old age.

²One needs to bear in mind here that all private schools in India have to be non-profit by law, which makes it very difficult, and in the case of low-cost private schools well nigh impossible for them to raise finance in the regular banking sector.

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