To gain edge, families spend heavily on extra lessons, new report finds
By Liz Gooch, Published The Straits Times, 7 Aug 2012
ON THE second floor of a Singapore shopping centre, five boys and two girls sat in a small room with the blinds drawn, a whiteboard the only object on the lime-green walls.
Jordan Goh, 12, who began receiving after-school tutoring two years ago, went up to the board to answer a maths problem about time and distance, while Dr Zhong Rui Wen, the founder of tutoring centre Raffles EduHub, gave pointers from the back of the room.
"This place, it has been helping me a lot," said Jordan, who attends the centre three afternoons a week. "It drills me on stuff that I don't understand."
Every week, about 150 children attend this centre, just a handful of the many students taking private tutoring across Singapore, where attending extra lessons after school has become the norm.
Once the domain of the elite, private tutoring has become widespread across Asia, according to a report last month by the Asian Development Bank and the Comparative Education Research Centre at the University of Hong Kong.
Perhaps more surprising is the prevalence of tutoring in poorer countries. According to various studies, 60 per cent of primary school children in India's West Bengal receive tutoring, while a similar proportion of senior secondary students in Kazakhstan attend extra lessons.
Researchers say that private tutoring, which they call "shadow education", can help students academically, but they also found that the quality of instruction varied substantially.
The number of Asian parents spending heavily on extra lessons has risen, said the report, Shadow Education: Private Supplementary Tutoring And Its Implications For Policy Makers In Asia.
"It is becoming a pan-Asian phenomenon and indeed a global phenomenon," Mr Mark Bray, an author of the report and the director of the Comparative Education Research Centre at the University of Hong Kong, said by telephone.
Many Asian families devote vast sums to supplement government education. "The most dramatic number is Korea," said Mr Bray, who is also a professor of comparative education at the University of Hong Kong, "where households are spending the equivalent of 80 per cent of what the government is spending."
The report said that for students in government secondary schools in Bangladesh, an average of 41.9 per cent of the total household cost of education was spent on private tutoring.
Tutoring can range from one- on-one sessions taught by neighbours or older students to classes at franchised centres, as well as over the Internet.
The report also described how "star tutors" who can fill lecture halls have become a phenomenon in places like Hong Kong.
It cited two South Korean celebrity tutors: Mr Woo Hyeong Cheol, who reportedly earns US$3.9 million (S$4.9 million) per year offering Web-based maths classes to 50,000 students; and Ms Rose Lee, "the Queen of English", said to earn US$6.8 million per year, through online classes.
Mr Bray said increased job competition was one of several causes for the rise in demand.
"One of the major factors is globalisation, that families are no longer competing with their own neighbourhood - they're competing with the region and the world," he said.
In some poorer countries, like Cambodia, perceived weaknesses in the school system could also prompt parents to turn to tutoring, Mr Bray said.
Teachers in Hong Kong and Singapore are not permitted to tutor their own students privately for additional pay. But teachers in other countries who do so for extra income may be bolstering demand.
Pakistan, where 60 per cent of the population lives on less than US$2 per day, is an example of a developing country where demand for tutoring has spread beyond wealthier, urban centres.
In the rural part of Lahore, 44 per cent of private school students and 32 per cent of government school children had private tutoring last year, said the Annual Status of Education Report, a survey done by Idara-e-Taleem- o-Aagahi, or the Centre for Education and Consciousness, on behalf of the South Asian Forum for Education Development. In the urban area of Lahore, that percentage rises to 60 per cent.
"It can be said that the incidence of private tutoring is lower in relatively poorer areas," director of programmes Baela Raza Jamil at Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi, said by e-mail. "However, it is definitely no more a phenomena limited to the wealthier families of the country." Overall, 24 per cent of Pakistani students in private schools reported taking supplementary tutoring last year, while it was 7 per cent among government school students.
The Federally Administered Tribal Areas had the highest level of private tutoring in Pakistan, with almost half of private school students and a quarter of government school students receiving tutoring, a rate Ms Jamil attributed to the fact those schools often close because of conflicts along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
The report also found that tutoring could worsen social inequalities, cause stress for families and reduce the time students spent on other activities.
A recent letter in The Straits Times, the biggest newspaper in Singapore, said that many parents wanted a more balanced education for their children and that social mobility might be affected by the heavy reliance on extra tutoring, or tuition.
"How can we tell ourselves that all students stand an equal chance of moving up the social ladder when success in our education system is highly dependent on the extra tuition and enrichment lessons that wealthier parents can afford and poorer parents cannot?" Mr Wily Wan wrote.
Researchers say they are also worried about the impact tutoring is having on formal education.
Mr Bray said: "Even in societies where teachers are not allowed to tutor their own students, if teachers think there is a safety net, they may be less concerned about working hard, about doing what arguably should be their job of helping children, of making sure the children understand and so on."
The researchers recommend that governments monitor more closely the tutoring industry and consider possible regulations. The report also suggests that policymakers look at improving mainstream education to make supplementary tutoring less desirable.
But it seems as if many parents in Asia still feel that tutoring is necessary.
Dr Zhong, a medical doctor and child psychiatrist, said her tutoring centre in Singapore is only for children whose grades are average or below average - those who she said often require more attention than they receive in school. She says she believes that the children can combine tutoring with other activities and that she does not want her students to neglect pursuits like sports.
Jordan Goh's mother, Ms Judy Hii, sent him to the centre to help him with the primary school final exam, which will determine which secondary school he attends.
"Because of the limited time the teacher has with them, they really do need help," Ms Hii said. "The school will say: 'Leave it to the school,' but somehow it's just not enough." She thinks that the extra lessons have paid off because Jordan passed his last mock exam after 10 days of intensive drilling at the centre.
Referring to Dr Zhong, Ms Hii said: "She did some miracle work."
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