Durban - While wealthy families have been withdrawing their children from public education, low-income parents in sub-Saharan Africa are following suit.
These families are increasingly opting for low-fee private schools, according to an international NGO.
A recent report on learning and equity in education post-2015, by Save the Children, revealed that in many developing countries, community aspirations were changing as many families enjoyed a regular disposable income and experienced the value of education for the first time.
The substantial growth in Africa’s lower middle class (34 percent of the population by 2010), and in the number of households living just above the bread line, had significant implications for education.
With weak state schools in informal settlements, entrepreneurs had been able to benefit from the high level of disillusionment among families, thus accelerating the trend of expanding the low-fee private school sector in developing world school systems.
In Congo, Mauritius, Ghana, Guinea, Cameroon, Gambia and Madagascar, more than 30 percent of pupils were enrolled in private primary schools.
Low-income families were making “extraordinary sacrifices” to find money for fees, sometimes taking out substantial loans, Save the Children said.
This was because while the last decade had seen “enormous progress” in expanding access to classrooms, a mounting body of evidence showed that a crisis of “hidden exclusion” was failing children across the globe.
The term referred to the circumstances of children who were in classrooms, but not learning at all or receiving poor-quality education.
There were 130 million such cases worldwide – a “shocking figure” that was masked by the focus in recent decades on getting more children into schools, the NGO said.
It defined “good quality education” as allowing children to leave school with a wide range of skills relevant to their country’s context and cultures, that would enable them to attain success, prosper and thrive in accordance with their potential.
The organisation cited research by Stellenbosch University academics Nic Spaull and Stephen Taylor, which compared school enrolment rates to “effective enrolment rate”. These were children who were both in school and learning.
In South Africa, while 98 percent of children were enrolled in school, only 71 percent of Grade 6 pupils were learning how to read, and less than 60 percent to calculate.
As access to education increased, schools were teaching more children with poor nutrition, lower levels of parental education, and who have greater pressures to go out and earn money – in addition to attending school.
The challenge to governments was to expand their tertiary education sector as well as achieve primary school access and learning for all.
More children and young people in populations would continue to stretch available resources.
However, in south Asia and Latin America, falling numbers of school-aged children and young people would allow governments to spend more money per pupil on compulsory schooling. - The Mercury