Low cost private schooling in India: Is it pro poor and equitable?

The social justice implications of privatisation in education governance frameworks: a relational account

“…For instance, though low-fee private schools in both Africa and India are promoted as solving problems of access to education for the poor, a growing body of empirical work has found that these schools do not include the very poor (cf. Härmä, 2011;Lewin, 2007) and when family incomes are limited, it is more likely to be the boy child who is chosen above the girl child (Rose, 2003). From here we could argue those promoting low-fee places in private schools not only exploit the aspirations of the poor, whilst the entrepreneur makes a profit from a social group least able to afford to pay, but that such practices reinforce gendered divisions of labour.…”

Getting a Child through Secondary School and to College in India

“…Completing secondary school and entering college are significant accomplishments in India and likely cannot be realized without the assistance of others who can help these young Indians through the process, especially given the extent to which stratifying factors such income, caste, religion, gender, and other factors create large inequalities in access to education (e.g., Azam and Blom 2009; Härmä 2009; Bhaskar and Gupta 2007; Clark 2000; Das Gupta 1987; Desai, Adams, and Dubey 2009; Härmä 2011; Kandpal and Baylis 2013; Lewin 2011). …”

“…Boys and girls have declining parallel trends in school attendance at each subsequent age, but, up until class 11, boys’ enrollment is consistently about 15% higher than girls’ (Lewin 2011), which reflects broader social and filial disadvantages that girls face (e.g., Bhaskar and Gupta 2007; Clark 2000; Das Gupta 1987). Economic differences figure in this selection at each stage (Azam and Blom 2009; Härmä 2009; Härmä 2011). Children, especially girls, in families with little educational attainment have few opportunities to advance in their schooling without the interpersonal support and guidance from sympathetic family and community members (Kelly, Bhabha, and Krishna 2015).…”

“…A pervasive zeal for education clearly exists in contemporary India yet government schools are perceived to offer poor quality of education, and many families desiring to send their children even to “low-fee private” schools cannot do so due to income and informal social barriers (Härmä 2009; Härmä 2011). Further, Indian higher education has been under considerable stress from this rising educational demand and inadequate supply for labor market skills required by early-career Indians (Agarwal 2008; Forbes 2014).…”

Achieving Teaching Quality in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…All secondary schools, in which the intervention is conducted, are protestant non-governmental schools in Anglophone Cameroon -covering all schools from the Presbyterian Church Cameroon (PCC) and the Cameroonian Baptist Convention (CBC) (Härmä, 2011; for a detailed discussion of the nongovernmental school sector in SSA: Lewin & Sayed, 2005;Scheunpflug, 2014;Srivastava & Walford, 2007). The non-governmental schools analysed in this study -termed as programme schools in the following -are formally subsidiarized.…”