New Delhi: India’s tuition culture often gets a bad rap, but for many low-income parents who are unable to help their children make up for Covid-induced learning losses, the neighbourhood “tuition aunty” or “maths sir” is a lifeline. So much so that even parents who shifted their children from private to government schools because of cost are willing to pay for personalised coaching.
One such parent is Mamta Devi, a 40-year-old domestic worker who lives in Delhi’s Zamrudpur. When the second wave of Covid swept the city last year, her husband lost his job and it became difficult to even feed their three children two square meals a day.
“Education became second priority then. I shifted the children to a government school because it was better than dropping out,” she said. Since then, the family’s circumstances have improved, but Devi has kept her children on in the government school. However, she is now supplementing their education with private tuitions.
“During the two years of the pandemic, I could not provide them much, but now that facilities are available, I want to make sure that they are able to catch up and read their grade-level textbooks,” she said.
Devi’s family is not the only one. According to the 2021 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), based on a survey across 25 states and three union territories by the NGO Pratham, about 40 per cent of school students were enrolled in tuition classes too. This was up from the 32.5 per cent reported in the 2020 edition of the survey and 28.6 per cent in 2018.
The report cited this as a “natural response” to prolonged closure of schools owing to the Covid pandemic from early 2020. Notably, between 2018 and 2021, there was a 12.5 percentage point increase in the proportion of tuition-taking in children whose parents are in the “low education category”. However, there was only a 7.2 percentage point rise in the share of children with parents in the “high education category”.
The overall increase in tuitions coincided with another pandemic trend — children shifting from private to government schools, where fees tend to be much lower.
According to Ministry of Education data, student enrollment in government schools increased from 130,931,634 in 2019-2020 to 143,240,480 in 2021-2022. This means an additional 1.23 crore students enrolled in government schools during this period. Enrollments in private unaided schools dropped by over 1.81 crore during the same period, showed the data. In Delhi alone, 4 lakh children reportedly shifted to government schools this year.
“This could be because of economic factors or because the household shifted to a rural area and the nearest available school was a government one,” said Harish Doraiswamy, a project director with Central Square Foundation (CSF), an education-focused nonprofit.
But there is a paradox — even as parents, especially those from lower income groups, sought to spend less on schools, they were willing to shell out for tuitions.
While it remains to be seen whether this trend will continue, experts, parents, and tutors point to unevenly distributed learning support in government schools and major learning loss owing to school shutdowns for which personalised attention is required.
Further, as the ASER report also mentions, local tuition classes generally have a flexible and negotiable fee structure, which makes a hybrid education model of government school and private coaching more feasible for parents in an uncertain economic climate.
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‘Teachers in school are unable to give attention’
Until the pandemic struck, 13-year-old Harish Tatkare studied at a private budget school in Mumbai’s Malad, but the Rs 1,000 monthly fee became too much for his parents when they lost their jobs.
They took the hard decision to take him out of school and to stop his tuition classes too, his mother Rajita Sakde, a domestic worker, told ThePrint.
When schools reopened, they enrolled Harish in a government school, and when money became less scarce, they resumed his tuition classes.
“He has been going for tuitions from a very young age. Since we cannot give him time due to our jobs and do not have knowledge of the subjects, he gets all his support there,” Sakde said.
She has no plans to move her son back to a private school. The government school is easier on the pocket, a midday meal is provided, and she believes his learning outcomes are improving because he is now in an NGO-run classroom.
According to CSF’s Doraiswamy, tuitions have always been a “fact of life” in India. But the clientele is expanding. Earlier, he said, more privileged students tended to take private classes to get an edge, now even parents from lower income groups are investing in them to compensate for the children’s learning losses owing to the Covid pandemic.
For instance, 16-year-old Drishti Kori and her two younger brothers — who are both in Class 3 — all study at a private school catering to low-income groups in Ahmedabad’s Kubernagar. Before the pandemic, Kori would help her brothers with their studies at home, but now the boys attend tuition classes in the neighbourhood.
“The reason we put them in tuition classes was because they have forgotten most of their grade-level concepts. Besides, I can communicate with the tuition teacher one-on-one and ask her to give customised lessons according to their learning needs. Sometimes with a lot of students in the class, teachers in schools are unable to give attention to them,” Kori explained.
Learning inequities got amplified during the pandemic since online learning was not always accessible or effective for many students, said professor Suresh Kumar of the government-run National Institute of Education Planning and Administration (NIEPA) in Delhi.
According to Kumar, despite several initiatives by the government to address the issue, a gap in learning has been felt and several stakeholders are rushing in to fill it.
“In order to help children with learning, the Education Ministry jumped into action and sought to reduce the curriculum burden on children. However, parents too have to provide from their side to aid learning, and they are doing so by providing expensive tutoring.”
Meanwhile, several NGOs continue to work on the ground to ensure that children are able to keep learning in schools. Aditya Mallaya who leads the Mumbai operations for the nonprofit Teach for India, said that outreach to parents was key to this effort.
“Our (teaching) fellows periodically visited the houses of their students to help them with doubts and to convince parents to not withdraw their child’s name,” said Mallaya.
‘Parents are offering twice the money’
While neighbourhood tutors have always found takers in India, government data suggests that before the pandemic, expenditure on private tutors was on the downswing.
According to the National Sample Survey (NSS) report on education released in 2020, around 20 per cent of students opted for private tuitions in 2017-18, a six percentage point drop from 2014, when the survey was last conducted. Further, the share of average household expenditure that went into private coaching dropped from 15 per cent to 12 per cent.
However, private tutors that ThePrint spoke to claimed that their enrollment numbers have jumped post-Covid and that parents are desperate to have their children make up for time lost during the pandemic.
Priya Dang, who runs private tuition classes from her home in South Delhi, claimed that she has seen a 30-40 per cent increase in students approaching her for classes. With 35 students from classes 1-12, her charges range from Rs 500 to 4,000, depending on the economic status of the parents.
“Parents who were previously against corporal punishment now come up to me and say do as you like, but just bring up his or her grades. Owing to the shift to online classes, students have lost their drive to self-start. In addition, their concentration span has significantly shortened,” Dang said.
According to her, some parents are willing to pay more for faster results too. “I have so many requests from parents asking me to take private lessons for their children for twice or thrice the charge.”
Dang claimed that government school students seemed to be in particularly dire straits. Of the two government school students she has, neither has a regular teacher at school, according to Dang. “There is no one to teach them lessons, but right before exams suddenly they are given large portions to read,” she claimed.
Ahmedabad-based tutor Arpana Jain had a similar story to tell. “The number of students coming to me has doubled. There has been a major learning loss and parents are desperate to bring their child back to the pre-pandemic levels of learning,” the 52-year-old said.
Jain added that middle-class parents are now ready to send their children to expensive tutors even if it comes at a big cost to them.
“Even well-read parents faced challenges with explaining concepts to their children during the pandemic. In addition to this, the lack of personal attention on children in classrooms has not done much for low-performing students,” she said. “Parents expect the tuition teachers to bring them up to speed.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
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