The UK’s role in funding for-profit private schools in the developing world has come under attack by the UN, which fears the spike in private, “low-fee” schools in poor countries could undermine the sustainable development goal of inclusive and equitable education for all by 2030.

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The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said it was concerned that UK aid money was linked to private education providers and called on the UK government to refrain from such financing. The UK government is being drawn into the dispute after investing £3.5m in helping the Nairobi-based firm Bridge International Academies set up 250 low-cost schools in Lagos, Nigeria.

“Rapid increase in the number of such schools may contribute to sub-standard education, less investment in free and quality public schools, and deepened inequalities in the recipient countries, leaving behind children who cannot afford even low-fee schools,” the committee statement said.

Enrolment in primary school education represents one of the big success stories in international development over the last decade or so, with 91% of children in low-income countries now signed up to study. Yet human rights and education groups argue that this is thanks to public investment, a direction of travel that could be reversed if private educators are allowed to set up shop in the world’s poorest areas.

“The scary tendency at the moment is the investors who are saying, we are going to make so much money from education’,” says Delphine Dorsi, a human rights expert and executive coordinator of the Right to Education Project, citing a packed investors’ forum on education innovation in Nairobi last week.

Private education providers have always existed in the developing world, but recent years have seen a spurt in companies setting up in low-income communities in Africa, Asia and South America. For-profit firms such Bridge International Academies are emblematic of this rapidly-expanding “edupreneur” market.

Some critics question the quality of education and professionalism of the teaching staff that low-fee schools provide, but it is the principle of paying for schooling and its effect on free quality education that lies behind the concerns of the UN and others.

Every child who attends a fee-paying school should free up resources for pupils in the state system. In reality, it doesn’t work that way, says David Archer, head of programme development at charity ActionAid and a board member of the Global Partnership for Education. Instead, government schools get caught up in a “spiral of decline” if their better-off students are poached.

Public schools “end up with fewer resources because their income depends on how many children they enrol. If they were struggling already, then their income goes down, so the actual effect is a negative one on the local state schools”, he says.

How low is “low fee” is also a contentious question. Even if the publicised figure is as low as $6 (£4.25) per month, which is around average according to Archer, ancillary costs often see this easily double. For an impoverished family with several children, such fees become untenable.

As a result, parents are left with difficult choices about which children to educate – a decision-making process that typically works to the detriment of girls and disabled children. At present, households living on less than $2 a day spend a reported $51bn per year on private nursery and primary education [pdf].

“It is very clear that when you directly start charging fees for school then there is an active process of exclusion,” says Archer. “This contradicts all [the UK government’s] other commitments, which say that girls’ education is their biggest priority.”

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A spokesperson for the UK Department for International Development defends the government’s position, arguing that the “vast majority” of its funding is directed to the state sector but that it supports paid-for schools where government provision is “weak or non-existent”.

“We do not accept that this in any way undermines the right to education in the developing countries in which we operate,” the spokesperson adds.

Education giant Pearson which has a stake in Bridge International Academies, along with other for-profit firms such as Spark Schools, says: “Low-fee private schools are a legitimate approach to raising access and quality in the developing world. In fact, enrolment in low-fee private schools in developing countries has increased over the last 20 years because millions of parents understand the importance of education as a mechanism for defeating poverty.”

Pro-state education campaigners disagree. Low-fee schools typically focus on urban areas where education establishments already exist, says Sylvain Aubry, a legal adviser at the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a Geneva based non-profit. Rural areas or very poor areas without existing education infrastructure are often overlooked.



Take Bridge International Academies. In Kenya, where the firm first started, the vast majority of its schools are clustered in the better off and more populous south and west. In contrast, the country’s remoter areas bordering Somalia, South Sudan and Ethiopia are much less represented.

Lucy Bradlow, spokesperson for Bridge International Academies, insists that the company incorporates marginalised communities into its portfolio of schools. Over half its schools in Uganda, for instance, are in areas officially designated as rural. She also refutes question marks over the quality of education provided, citing internal research that suggests Bridge pupils are outperforming their state-educated peers in Maths and English.

She defends the affordability of Bridge’s fee structure, arguing that Bridge was set up to be accessible to those parents already sending their children to low-fee schools. Its profitability derives from scale, rather than cutting costs, she adds.

Aubry admits that the state-funded school system is often far from perfect and acknowledges that “no miracle immediate solution” for free universal education exists. In this respect, private providers may have an interim role to play, he says, but they should set up only in areas where there are currently no schools. They should also avoid business models premised on “the lowest costs for the maximum return”.

It could take a decade or more for the investment in teachers and school infrastructure to make universal free quality public education a reality, he says: “In the meantime, we need to think how we can fill in the gap by working with other schools … rather than this anarchic, ad hoc process where the strongest win.”