Private schools have little impact on quality of learning - research

Private schools have become synonymous with lower income countries as the quality of state education systems declines, but new research shows private education has surprisingly little effect – and in some cases no real impact – on learning.

Data from more than 560,000 children in Kenya, Uganda, India and Pakistan shows that on average, “at least half of the learning gains that privately-educated pupils make over their state-school peers reflects their more advantaged backgrounds, rather than the quality of their learning.”

The Research for Equitable Access and Learning (Real) Centre at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education calculated that the real difference many private schools make to pupils’ attainment is just a few percentage points – which may not exist in some instances.

The new findings are contained in the journal Comparative Education Review and were published on November 22.

Rising enrolment

The number of private schools across the global South has continued to rise steeply over the past 20 years as entrepreneurs take advantage of gaps in poorly-performing state education systems.

The share of primary school pupils in private institutions in low and middle-income countries rose from 9.9 percent in 2000 to 17.5 percent in 2017, according to the World Bank.

“The evidence from our research suggests that some of these schools are not really living up to their promise of providing a much-improved education,” said Dr Rob Gruijters from the Real Centre.

“While their impact on learning is definitely no greater than we report, it could be even smaller, because there are some factors we could not take into account, such as the peer effects which occur when more-advantaged children are clustered together in a private school. In some lower-income contexts there may even be no ‘true’ private school advantage at all. This obviously raises questions about their value to society,” he added.

Unlike elite private institutions in North America and the UK, many private schools in low income settings are poorly resourced and costs are deliberately kept low, the study found.

And while supporters of private schools point out that pupils typically emerge with better test scores than their State-educated peers, critics suggest that this is partly because privately-educated children tend to enjoy other advantages, such as more educational resources at home, or better parental support. The researchers warn that in many countries, private schools may be drawing support away from State education, without significantly increasing standards.

“For many low-income families, the reality may be a choice between seriously underperforming government schools and private alternatives that are not much better. The danger is that private education will further entrench inequality without improving overall quality, at the expense of the very poorest children,” noted Director of Real Centre Professor Pauline Rose.

The study compared the learning outcomes of primary school-age children from the same household who attended different types of school.

The study compared the average difference between these children’s attainment measures with the average difference between state- and privately-educated pupils overall. It also looked at whether the resulting patterns differed by wealth.

The researchers also found that the difference in achievement between privately and state-educated pupils fell by half or more, once the advantages of family background were taken into account.

There were 37,000 cases where researchers could compare children from the same household, one of whom was state-educated, and the other privately-educated.

They measured educational attainment using standardised literacy and numeracy test scores.

The impact of these background factors have been notoriously difficult to measure.