Chapter 6: Private Primary Schools

Over the past two decades, private primary schools have become one of the most contentious topics of research in the field of international education. In particular, “low-cost” or “low-fee” private primary schools have received a lot of attention. The crux of the issue is often framed in relation to access and quality: the promise of the private sector is that it could provide a higher-quality alternative to public education and one that might be more cost-effective; the threat of the private sector is that it might deepen educational inequality, providing access to quality education for only some children and potentially making it worse for others. This chapter reviews some of the research on the subject. Then with the sample of Ugandan primary school pupils, it analyzes transfer to private primary schools, comparing the educational experience of children in these schools with that of children in the government schools from which they transferred. This analysis accordingly aligns with questions of access (what predicts transfer to private school) and quality (what differences/similarities exist between government and private primary schools).

Highlight

One of the most interesting challenges for research on the private sector is how to define low-cost or low-fee private primary schools. It is often assumed that private schools charge fees while public schools do not. This doesn’t hold in many contexts, though, where even if public education might nominally be “free,” there are still many costs associated with attending school. An additional concern is that even when schools charge fees, it can often be difficult to collect them. Teachers and administrators will work throughout the year to collect fees from children and families.

The following graph illustrates pupils’ responses when asked how much they had currently paid to attend school that trimester, organized by whether they attended a school run by the government (what would typically be understood to be a public school) or a school that was independently run (what would typically be seen as a private school).

A number of conclusions can be drawn from this graph. First, pupils in both government and private schools reported that they paid money to attend school. But also, at the time of the survey (which was a few weeks into the semester), many children had not yet paid anything. More children in government schools reported that they had not yet paid any fees for that semester (close to 50%), but over a third of all of the children who had transferred into a private school also reported that they had not yet paid anything for that trimester.

Pupils were also asked how much their school charged, not just how much they had paid at that time. As a percentage, the amount children had actually paid at the time of the survey in both government and private schools represented just over 40 percent of the total cost of fees and charges reported by the pupils (41 and 44 percent, respectively).

Pupils reported that private school charged more (on average 52,524 UGX ($18.46 USD) as compared to 13,469 UGX ($4.73 USD)) and that they had at that moment paid more (23,097 UGX ($8.12 USD) as compared to 5,555 UGX ($1.95 USD)) but it might be just as important to recognize the overlap and similarity between the two types of schools.