Blame it on disruption of classroom teaching due to the pandemic or the inability to adapt to online education, more school children are opting for private tuition according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER).
The ASER 2021 report , released on Wednesday, reveals that 40% of the school children are now opting for private tuition classes compared to 30% in 2018. This proportion has increased across both sexes and all grades and school types. The incidence of tuition has increased across all States except Kerala, the report said.
Interestingly, those opting for private tuition are from the lesser privileged classes. There is an increase of 12.6 percentage points among the children of parents who fall in the low education category whereas it is 7.2 percentage points among children with parents in the ‘high’ education category.
The report also reveals that fewer children whose schools have reopened are taking tuition. Tuition classes were common among children whose schools were still closed at the time of the survey. The survey was conducted in 25 states and three union territories covering 75,234 children in the 5-16 year age group.
Government schools see higher enrolment
An interesting aspect of the study outcome was the increase in enrolment in government schools between 2018 and 2021. The report says 70.3% of children enrolled in government schools in 2021 compared to 65.8 % in 2020 and 64.3% in 2018.
The report also says that private schooling increased rapidly in India from 2006 to 2014 and from there it hovered around 30%. However, in the pandemic years, private enrolment dipped significantly. In the age group of 6-14 years, enrollment in private schools decreased to 24.4% in 2021 compared to 32.5% in 2018. This shift is seen in all grades and among both boys and girls.
This is being attributed to the closure of schools in the pandemic and the inability of parents to opt for government schools where the fee is almost nil compared to the huge fee structure in private schools. The low incomes in the pandemic is one of the reasons for the shift, according to a government school teacher in Telangana.
