Affordability of private schools: exploration of a conundrum and towards a definition of ‘low-cost’

Abstract

The affordability of private education is a contentious issue. While the extent of ‘low-cost’ private schooling is widely accepted, there is no agreement on what ‘low-cost’ means in this context and how this relates to affordability for poor families. This paper addresses the lacuna in the literature by defining ‘low-cost’ in relation to what poor families could afford if they were to send all their children to school while restricting their expenditure on schooling to a fixed proportion of their total family expenditure. This approach links the definition of ‘low-cost’ to internationally accepted poverty lines. Two examples from recent research in South Sudan and Liberia illustrate the flexibility of the new method. The paper also addresses the ‘conundrum’ in the research literature, which suggests low-cost private schools are unaffordable for poorest families, when the same literature typically shows some of the poorest using these schools.

KeyWords:

• Low-cost private schools
• affordability
• international education
• education policy
• private education

Notes

1. The highest fee private schools were reported as costing 32 times more than the lowest fee schools.

2. We are informed by the following here: ‘Whenever possible, consumption is preferred to income for measuring poverty. When consumption data are not available, income is used. Income is generally more difficult to measure accurately, and consumption accords better with the idea of the standard of living than income, which can vary over time even if the standard of living does not. Nevertheless, consumption data are not always available, and when they are not there is little choice but to use income’ (United Nations Statistics Division, 2014).

3. The World Bank sets a global poverty line of $1.25 PPP per day in 2005 as the extreme poverty line which represents the poverty line typical of the world’s poorest countries. The $2 a day poverty line (in 2005 PPP $) is the median (average) poverty line for all developing countries.

4. At South Sudan’s independence, the currency was changed from Sudan Pounds (SDG) to South Sudan Pounds (SSP) at par, so 1SDG became 1SSP.

5. Part of the power of this method is that the starting point can be one of the international poverty lines, a national poverty line, or actual consumption figures of (poor) families from local household surveys.

6. The US dollar as well as the Liberian dollar is legal tender in Liberia.

7. The Liberian dollar started the year at 47 per US$ and ended it at 49 per US$, having peaked at 50 per US$ (XE, 2013).

8. CPI figures from International Monetary Fund (2012).

9. While it is not clear what the income levels are in the slum, the household survey found that 21% of the children aged between 5 and 14 were not in school and only 8% travelled out of the slum to a government school. Seventy-one percent of the children in the slum attended low-cost private schools, suggesting that most families are finding private schools which are affordable to them (Tooley & Longfield, 2014).