The Economist October 9th 2021 59
InternationalPrivatetutoringSmart buys
S
iina karbin, a Finn living in Vienna,
had never imagined paying someone to
tutor her children. But then in early 2020
Austria’s schools closed because of co-
vid-19. She and her husband struggled to
help their seven-year-old son learn re-
motely while also doing their own jobs. Ms
Karbin signed the boy up for one-to-one
online tutoring provided by GoStudent, an
Austrian startup, assuming he would do it
for a few months. A year and a half later her
son is back in school, and also still enjoy-
ing a weekly session with his tutor. He tells
his mum he is keen to carry on with it.
As a new school year gets under way in
many countries, the harm caused by the
months of closures is becoming ever clear-
er. In America primary-age pupils are on
average five months behind where they
would usually be in maths, and four
months in reading, according to McKinsey,
a consultancy. The damage is almost cer-
tainly worse in places such as India and
Mexico, where the disruption to schooling
has been greater. Even before the pandem-
ic parents around the world were growing
more willing to pay for extra lessons in thehope of boosting their children’s educa-
tion. The crisis will accelerate that trend.
The after-hours industry, sometimes
dubbed “shadow education”, encompasses
packed cram schools, one-to-one tutoring
and paid online courses. Its providers
range from moonlighting teachers to mul-
tinational firms. Business is biggest in East
Asia: some 80% of South Korea’s primary-
school children get extra lessons and 90%
of Japanese children get private help at
some point. Yet there are other hotspots. In
Greece most school-leavers say they have
taken private classes. In Egypt about one-
third of children in the first years of school
get extra lessons, rising to over four-fifths
by the time they leave secondary school.
Before the pandemic the industry had
been expanding in rich and poor countries.
In England and Wales the share of 11- to 16-
year-olds who say they have ever received
private tuition increased from 18% in 2005
to 27% in 2019 (in London it was 41%). The
share of German school-leavers who say
something similar rose from 27% in the
early 2000s to over 40% by 2013. In South
Africa 29% of 11- and 12-year-olds were re-ceiving coaching in 2013, up from just 4%
six years earlier. Tutoring was once “virtu-
ally unknown” in Scandinavia, says Soren
Christensen of Aarhus University, but even
there a small industry has now sprung up.
There are several explanations. Global-
ly more children are enrolled in school
than ever before, notes Mark Bray, an au-
thority on shadow education at the Univer-
sity of Hong Kong. Between 2000 and 2018
the number receiving no education at all
fell by about a third. That means competi-
tion to be top of the class is fiercer. In poor
countries, in particular, parents worry that
the quality of schooling has deteriorated as
rolls have grown. Paying for top-up teach-
ing is one way to compensate.
More youngsters are completing 12
years of schooling. Competition for spots
in leading universities has grown more in-
tense. The demise of old-fashioned jobs-
for-life has made parents keener to ensure
their children get the best start possible.
Underlying this shift are demographic
changes. The global fertility rate has fallen
by half since the 1950s. Having smaller
families allows parents to spend more on
each child’s education. More families have
two parents in paid work. In America that
is true of around half of all two-parent
households, up from less than one-third in- Such couples have less time to help
with homework, and more need for child
care. After-hours services that promise to
educate children hold much appeal.
At first the pandemic brought the in-
dustry’s rise to a sharp halt. Governments
D ELHI, NAIROBI AND NORWICH
Even before covid-19 growing numbers of parents were hiring private tutors
for their children. The pandemic has accelerated that trend