62 International The Economist October 9th 2021
forced cram schools to close along with
formal ones. The owner of a big tutoring
firm in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, says busi
ness is not yet back to prepandemic levels,
in part because the crisis has caused many
of his customers to economise. Felix Ohs
wald of GoStudent says that at the start of
the pandemic families were so “over
whelmed” that fewer than usual sought
out extra classes. Some places cancelled
big exams. American universities allowed
applicants to skip standardised tests. The
axing of exams, naturally, was bad for
firms that teach kids how to excel in them.
Yet as schools return to something re
sembling normality parents’ appetite for
tutoring seems to be sharpening. Those al
ready anxious about their offspring’s pros
pects now worry even more. Sangita Hal
der, a domestic worker in Delhi, says she is
spending three times as much on tutoring
for her 14yearold son as she did before the
pandemic, though her family’s income has
halved. Without this, she says he would
have learned nothing since his school shut
last year. Erica Upshur of Mathnasium, an
American firm whose franchisees run
around 1,000 afterschool learning centres
in a dozen countries, says new enrolments
fell during the worst of the crisis but were
above average this summer. She thinks this
autumn they could be higher than ever.
At a tutoring centre in Norwich in east
ern England that offers courses designed
by Kumon, a big Japanese education firm,
children perch on dinky plastic chairs and
scribble in little workbooks. Clement Tala,
a charity worker, says disruptions to pre
school were one reason he began taking his
son, now four, to see Kumon’s tutors once a
week (the boy gets homework to do on the
other six days). Jummy Udonjo, a mental
health nurse, is happy to pay £200odd
($270) a month for her five and seven
yearold daughters to take courses in
maths and English. When covid19 closed
England’s schools, some days Kumon’s
worksheets were all her children had.
Meanwhile, job losses and lifestyle
changes provoked by the pandemic have
swollen the ranks of those tempted to work
as tutors. GoStudent’s Mr Ohswald says
that during lockdowns the number of peo
ple signing up to provide tutoring through
his platform rocketed. Teachers in many
poorer countries began offering private tu
toring sessions while schools were closed
(remote learning was often nonexistent
and socialdistancing rules only weakly
enforced). They may keep up their lucra
tive side gigs even as their day jobs restart.
Many children in poor countries attend
cheap private schools, some of which have
gone bust during lockdowns. In India
about half of all children attend private in
stitutions; a recent survey suggests that ov
er a quarter of them may have moved to
government ones since the start of thepandemic. Zahid Ali Mughal, the head of a
private school in Karachi in Pakistan, says
the number of children enrolled in his
school has fallen by twothirds. Teachers
who lose their jobs as a result of such shifts
may have to rely on tutoring to make cash.
And governments in countries such as
Britain and Australia are paying providers
of private tutoring to participate in educa
tional “catchup” schemes. This public
money, though temporary, will help priv
ate providers expand. The pandemic has
also encouraged the industry to invest
more in online products, and made par
ents and children more comfortable using
them. The growth of a variety of online
educational services ought to make tutor
ing cheaper and more widely available.Clever business
A boom in private tuition could undo some
of the damage inflicted by the pandemic. A
recent study in England found that before
the pandemic children who used Kumon’s
afterschool maths programme were about
seven months ahead of peers from similar
backgrounds by the age of 11. Other re
search shows that poor children who at
tend highquality testpreparation classes
benefit more than richer pupils, says Steve
Entrich of the University of Potsdam. That
suggests that afterhours classes can be “a
tool to bridge the learning gap” between
richer and poorer kids, he says. That gap
has been exacerbated by covid19.
In practice, private tutoring can have
pernicious effects. In many countries, es
pecially poorer ones, much is provided by
government teachers. Some put more en
ergy into side work than their day jobs.
Corrupt ones compel pupils to pay for extra
lessons by leaving important material out
of regular classtime, or simply by hinting
that they will give lower marks to children
whose families do not cough up. Opportu
nities to profit from private tutoring makeit harder to persuade teachers to work in
remote villages, where families can least
afford extra classes, notes Mr Bray.
Topup schooling will often widen in
equality. In England and Wales the Sutton
Trust, a charity, found that 34% of the rich
est parents (calculated on the basis of
questions about things like car and com
puter ownership, holidays and the number
of bathrooms in their homes) had ever paid
for extra classes, compared with 20% of the
poorest ones. Around the world, less afflu
ent families tend to use shoddier provid
ers. Bad tuition can be harmful if it leaves
kids tired, stressed or complacent. One
study in India found that children who re
ceived private tutoring were more likely to
miss school and that their marks were the
same or worse than those of their peers.
The greatest difficulties arise when
supplementary schooling is so widespread
that it starts to be considered the norm.
Rather than support struggling students,
some teachers in China are now more like
ly to suggest that they seek help from priv
ate tutors, says Wei Zhang of East China
Normal University in Shanghai. She says
some top schools require pupils to learn
part of the curriculum before term starts,
which for many parents means hiring priv
ate tutors. That can make schools look
more effective than they really are. Schools
face pressure to move faster than usual
from parents whose children do a lot of ex
tra classes. That puts classmates who can
not afford them at a disadvantage.
Afterschool educators are often quick
er to try out novel curriculums, teaching
styles or technology than hidebound gov
ernment schools. Their experiments help
useful innovations find their way into for
mal school systems. But they can also
mount resistance to reform—such as im
provements to exams—that firms worry
could reduce demand for their services.
Large such sectors may frustrate policies
far beyond education. China’s Communist
Party is convinced that the high costs of
afterhours schooling are part of the rea
son Chinese families are having fewer chil
dren than authorities would like them to.
In July China’s government banned tu
toring during weekends and holidays and
forbade providers from making a profit.
But with demand growing, policymakers
elsewhere have been seeking to make ac
cess to extra tuition fairer, rather than try
to stamp it out. Efforts in Japan and South
Korea have included creating public alter
natives to private cram schools, and ex
perimenting with voucher schemes that
aim to stop the poorest children from be
ing locked out. “It is very difficult for gov
ernments to roll back shadow education
once it has become entrenched,” argues Mr
Christensen of Aarhus University. “We
have to work out how to maximise thebest
aspects of it, and marginalise the worst.”n