Can Collective Impact Principles Work for Budget Private Schools?

Imagine your dream school.

Whenever I do that, I think of vast sports grounds, top quality infrastructure, high quality teachers, and students who love coming to school because they are taught things in ways which are effective and joyful.

Schools in India are spread across a wide range both in terms of size and quality of education delivered. There are over 15 lakh schools in India which cater to over 26 crore students.

These get further divided into public schools, private aided schools (get some money from the government), and private unaided schools (get no money from the government). Private unaided schools make up around 31% of all schools in the country. Most of them are classified as budget private schools.

Schools which charge less than Rs 20,000 annual fee are considered Budget Private Schools (BPS). They usually have around 400–500 students. They are usually owned and operated by individuals or families who may or may not have any experience or background in education.

There are a lot of challenges that schools in India face and budget private schools come with their set of challenges. The reason they have grown exponentially is because of the impact they are having inspite of the challenges.

According to FSG, budget private schools are far more efficient in getting results than government schools. This is based on publicly available data around per pupil cost. This is further evidenced by the fact that government schools, which charge no fees, have seen their enrollment drop by 9% between 2011 and 2015.

Most of these students who have dropped out of the government schools have joined local budget private schools. This is owing to a few key advantages that BPS possess. They are usually closer to housing communities than certain government schools. There are operated by individuals or families who usually live or have lived in and around the community and hence have more goodwill and trust among the community members. Parents feel that they can hold these schools more accountable than government schools due to the proximity to the individuals running the school.

As mentioned before, budget private schools come with their set of challenges. Some of them are:

Infrastructure

BPS usually don’t have facilities like a playground, a functioning science and/or computer lab, a library or even a big enough classrooms. This reduces access to extra curricular activities for students. Some schools also don’t have enough functioning toilets and drinking water facilities.

Teacher competency

BPS have been known to hire teachers who don’t have the qualification that government mandates. These teachers don’t get sufficient or regular training which leads to ineffective teaching. Owner of the school is usually the principal/trustee and the teacher with the most experience is usually made supervisor without any other qualifications being required. Neither the principal, nor the teachers, nor the supervisors get any kind of training which would ensure that they remain effective.

Teacher Attrition

A lot of teachers in these schools quit because of personal reasons like wedding, pregnancy, or an offer of a slightly higher salary from a nearby school. This creates a huge problem of sustainability and stability for the school.

Administrative staff

Usually these schools have one or two people who handle all the administrative work for the school. Work for the admin can range from opening and closing the school to collecting and tracking fee, to maintaining registers for student and teacher attendance, to maintaining the school building to anything and everything that the principal demands. They are also not hired for this role and get no training whatsoever about their work. There is little to no use of technology for administrative matters in the school both because of a lack of budget and due to competency of the administrative staff.

Finances and Operations

Individuals who start these schools are not always people who have financial or operational expertise and hence most of the systems and structures that they set up for the school are usually just stop gap measures to solve problems. They do not get any support on how they can run their schools better. They also cater to a group of parents who themselves don’t have a constant flow of finance and hence are more likely to default on fee payment than an average parent. This creates cash flow and funding issues for the school.

Budget Private Schools: The Way Forward

Budget private schools were born out of necessity and are going to keep changing based on needs of the society. They do face a lot of challenges but their contribution to the education landscape is immense and growing. Budget Private Schools are a work in progress and with each version, they will become better.

A lot of different organisations have come up in order to support budget private schools solve some of their problems.

Loop Education Foundation is one of them. Their vision is to use principles of collective impact to create ecosystems of high performing schools. Collective impact is a social process aim at accomplishing collective rather than individual goals and it requires collective and coordinated action.

Some of the ways Loop Education Foundation has leveraged these are:

• Convincing schools in a common geographical area to share their physical resources be it classrooms, grounds, office space etc.
• Getting schools to share administrative staff so that fewer employees are required to do the work that previously took many people to accomplish.
• Training a mixed group of teachers and then leveraging them to share this training with teachers from all schools. Facilitating peer observation and feedback across schools.
• Solving community level challenges as a group of schools rather than independently in order to avoid duplication.
• Creating spaces for teachers of different schools to share best practices and learn from each other.
• Training school leaders and getting them to share best practices with each other so that they can better support their teachers and better manage their schools.

This is the first instance where an organisation is using principles of collective impact while working with budget private schools. There are many instances in the field of development where we have seen that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Now we are getting to see it play out for budget private schools as well.

Do you think that principles of collective impact can scale up to help us solve challenges around BPS across the country?

[About the author: This article was written by Apoorv Shah]