The handing over of aid money to governments to spend on state schools has often proved disastrous. Thousands of villages in the developing world now have ‘ghost schools’, where buildings are empty or half-built. The teacher is paid but doesn’t turn up. A local official is bribed to confirm that all is well.
In a recent paper for Civitas, ‘Aiding and Abetting’, Jonathan Foreman gives examples of bad practice. Officials in India admit that at least £70 million of the £388 million contributed by the Department for International Development to India’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (‘education for all’) programme was stolen or otherwise lost. The country’s comptroller and auditor general also found that £14 million of British taxpayers’ money for another education programme was embezzled by Indian officials in 2005-6 and never reached schools. Foreman adds: ‘Standards and teacher attendance in Indian government schools are often so wretched that large numbers of the poor scrimp to pay for private education.’
There is, however, better news about funding for low-cost private schools in developing countries. In Punjab, an education voucher system — under which aid money pays for pupils to attend low-cost independent schools — has proved a success, following a programme run by the Punjab Education Foundation. As a result of the voucher scheme, which is supported by DFID, more than 140,000 children are now enjoying the benefits of private education.
A report for the Reform think tank by Michael Barber says: ‘Since the data shows that these schools on the whole achieve better outcomes for less cost, the programme has significant implications for the future.
‘The three PEF programmes combined are educating more children than, for example, Denmark. The beneficiaries are not just the children on the PEF programmes; the whole of Punjab benefits because of the competition effect.’
Professor James Tooley of Newcastle University runs a business called Omega Schools Franchise Ltd which runs 40 low-cost private schools in Ghana along with another three in Sierra Leone. They are expanding into Liberia and South Sudan.
Omega is not a charity. It is a business. ‘There are certainly a lot of state ghost schools which do not really exist,’ he says. ‘But usually the reason that parents, including the very poorest parents, pay for private education is that state schools are available but they offer a very low standard.’ Tooley agrees that overseas aid funds would be better spent on education vouchers than state education and is pleased that there is growing recognition of this.
Andrew Mitchell, then International Development Secretary, visited private schools in Africa, as did Steve Hilton during his time at Downing Street. Both were impressed with what is being achieved. ‘If we are going to spend more on aid then this is where it should be going,’ say Tooley. ‘It helps make choice more effective, especially if targeted at the very poor.’
However, Tooley also sounds a warning. ‘The market is a fragile thing,’ he says. ‘Private schools do well as they are accountable to parents. That must not be undermined. While I would favour vouchers for the very poor, it is true there could be moral hazard. In one home the father is a drunk and they get a voucher, in another the father works hard and they have to pay the fees. There are difficulties. However, vouchers would help far more children get the chance of a good education.’
Tooley first became aware of private schools for the very poor when visiting the slums of Hyderabad in India more than ten years ago. He found schools full of
ambition and rigour charging annual fees as low as $10. He spoke to Mohammed Wajid, owner of a school in a converted family home. ‘His fees ranged from 60 rupees to 100 rupees per month ($1.33 to $2.22 at the exchange rates then), depending on the children’s grade, the lowest for kindergarten and rising as the children progressed through school,’ says Tooley in his book The Beautiful Tree. ‘These fees were affordable to parents who were largely day labourers and rickshaw pullers, market traders and mechanics — earning perhaps a dollar a day. Parents, I was told, valued education highly and would scrimp and save to ensure that their children got the best education they could afford.’
At the time Tooley found nothing but hostility for private schools from the development bureaucrats: they were undermining the state schools by ‘creaming off’ the best pupils, they were run by businessmen ‘exploiting the poor’, and so on.
Yet the ideological hostility to private schools is undermined by the evidence. Bihar in northern India has hopeless state schools: a study for Harvard University found that only 61 per cent of teachers turned up for work. Yet the state has thriving private schools. The Annual Status of Education Report studied a district of the capital Patna which showed that children in private schools had significantly better results for maths and reading than did those in government schools. In Kenya, figures from the Integrated Household Budget Survey suggest typical annual fees for private schools at $40, compared with annual spending per pupil of about $80 a year at the state schools.
To the very poor, $40 is a lot of money, of course. Sometimes 30 per cent of household income goes on school fees. However, an LSE study found much higher standards in the private schools. There was a ‘large effect of private schooling on test scores, equivalent to one full standard deviation’. The scores for the private school pupils would be 15 to 22 per cent higher depending on the district.
Last year a DFID paper confirmed that low-cost private schools offer a better standard of education than government schools. ‘If private schools are seen to be beneficial to low-income families, then this points to the possibility of policy initiatives such as vouchers that would enable the poorest to access private education.’
DFID is now funding education vouchers in Punjab and Sindh, and helping creating a better business environment for private schools in a number of other countries, including Nigeria. These schools are often subject to regulatory harassment by state officials, forcing them to stay small to avoid being noticed by the authorities and preventing investment to improve quality.
In some ways it is curious that the British government favours education vouchers for parents in Lagos or Hyderabad, but not for Liverpool or Hull. Nevertheless, the shift in policy is very welcome. The coalition government should not boast about spending more on aid, but on spending it more wisely. Nothing could be more effective than education vouchers.
From the Spectator’s Independent Schools supplement September 2013
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