The National Picture on Private Tuition

By Renu Sharma

The trends of Indian education system are changing tremendously. And one of the most remarkable trends is the proliferation of private tuitions outside the regular school system.

This phenomenon is relatively new to India and today the practice has become quite prevalent and popular in both urban and rural India. The number varies by States and grade levels but children from middle class or poor households in both urban and rural India take tuitions more so at the higher levels of schooling. The Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) 2011 found that almost a quarter of all pupils in elementary schools in rural India rely on private tuition in addition to attending classes at school.

The problem is most acute in the Eastern states of Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal, where the survey found that more than 70 per cent of middle-school pupils in rural West Bengal were taking private tuition.

It is argued that this points to the poor quality of education in government schools, which forces children to go for private tuitions. But private tuitions do not guarantee acceleration in the learning levels. Most tuition teachers themselves are not equipped to teach children especially when it comes to English and vocational skills. Even then, tuitions become an important part of learning because of the lack of options, especially in the rural areas. Several surveys have found the performance of primary school children who did not go for tuition to be slightly poorer than those who did, but the difference in performance is not very large.

Talking about the above issues and also keeping in mind the advent of RTE, there can be multiple solutions to this problem of quality in and out of school.

1. One possible solution which might be the hardest to implement considering the nature of our school system, is to give regular training to government school teachers on how to teach specialized subjects like English and science.

2. Another important parallel initiative we plan to start is to support the teachers and tutors outside the school system who work in the education field. This would not only help in accelerating the learning levels but also give opportunities to people in the community who are seeking employment in the education sector.

Renu Sharma is associated with Pratham's English Programme