If Parents Must Pay Twice, What Is the School Accountable For?

5 days ago

8 min read

From School to Tuition; when do the children get to play?

Almost Every day, I see the same scene in my apartment complex. Young children, some still in primary school and a few still in uniform, arrive for private tuition after a full day at school. Some mothers wait in the parking area until the classes end.

There is nothing unusual about it. Private tuition has been part of Indian life for generations, and I attended home tuitions myself. Yet the scene bothers me. These children have already spent hours in school, and their learning day is still not over.

One apartment complex proves nothing. So I looked at the national numbers before drawing conclusions. They support part of what I see, but they also complicate the argument. My argument is a narrow one: whatever the reasons behind tuition, schools owe parents a clearer account of what they are delivering.

What do the numbers tell us?

The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s Comprehensive Modular Survey: Education, 2025, part of the 80th round of the National Sample Survey, is a useful starting point.

According to the survey, about 27% of students across India were receiving private coaching: 30.7% in urban areas and 25.5% in rural areas.

The share rises with the stage of schooling. Among primary-school students, 26.6% in urban areas and 21.6% in rural areas were receiving private coaching. In urban areas, the share rises at every stage and peaks at 44.6% in higher secondary. So private tuition is not limited to students preparing for board examinations or competitive entrance tests.

It has become part of the learning experience for a significant number of younger children as well.

But there is an important qualification. Nearly three out of four urban primary-school students are not attending private coaching. We should not assume that every child needs tuition or that every school is failing its students.

A separate survey points the same way for rural India. ASER 2022 reported that the share of children in Standards I to VIII taking paid tuition rose from 26.4% in 2018 to 30.5% in 2022. That suggests tuition is not simply an urban phenomenon. The two surveys cannot be compared directly, however. ASER covers rural children in Standards I to VIII, while the NSS covers all school students, so the 2022 and 2025 figures are not a trend.

The numbers establish the scale of the practice. They do not, by themselves, explain why parents choose it.

Paying twice, with caveats

Families carry most of the cost. According to the survey, for about 95% of students, household members were the main source of funding for school education. On average, households spent ₹2,863 per student in a government school and ₹25,002 in a non-government school. These figures cover school expenditure; the survey counts coaching separately.

Tuition is a second payment on top of that. The Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA) at Ashoka University analysed the same survey and found that in urban India nearly half of the students taking tuition (47%) are in private schools, but about a third (32.5%) are in government schools. In rural India, nearly seven in ten are in government schools. This is not only a private-school parent’s burden.

How large is that second payment? Published estimates of India’s private coaching industry run from about ₹30,000 crore to ₹60,000 crore a year. The lower figure comes from GST collections. Business Standard noted that GST collected from coaching centres was ₹5,517 crore in 2023-24, which at an 18% rate implies roughly ₹30,650 crore.

That is a floor, because small tutors below the registration threshold and informal home tuition are largely missing. The higher figure comes from consultancy estimates that are widely repeated but, as far as I can trace, share a single origin. I cannot confirm which is closest to the truth, and some higher figures that circulate cannot be reconciled with the survey data. Even the lower estimate is a very large sum.

At the household level, CEDA’s analysis shows coaching taking about a third of what a family spends on a primary-school child’s education, and close to half by the senior secondary years.

Does the second payment buy learning?

The evidence is mixed. Research using ASER data has linked private tutoring to better learning outcomes. But an Observer Research Foundation analysis comparing states in ASER 2024 found no consistent link between how many children take tuition and how well Grade 8 students read or do arithmetic.

That is a rough comparison, not proof either way. It does suggest that parents are often paying without being able to tell what they are getting.

I do not claim tuition buys nothing. Some children need extra help, some families want enrichment, and a tutor can give attention that a large class cannot. But when a paid second service becomes routine for young children, parents are entitled to ask what the first payment covers.

Has the old justification weakened?

Private tuition is not a new concept. I grew up in a different India, and home tuition was quite common even then.

But the social and family structures of that period were different, at least in the households I knew. Many families lived in joint or extended-family arrangements. Three or four children in a household were not unusual. The eldest and youngest siblings could be separated by four or five school grades. Parents often had limited formal education and were not always in a position to help their children with schoolwork.

I went to government schools, where the fees were almost negligible. In that environment, private tuition often filled a practical gap. It provided additional academic support that the family or school could not always provide.

Today’s urban family looks quite different, at least in the circles I move in. Nuclear families are more common, the number of children is generally smaller, and parents are often graduates, postgraduates or professionally qualified. They invest substantially in their children’s education, frequently choosing private English-medium schools from the early years. In some cases, parents begin paying significant fees even at the playschool stage.

This does not mean educated parents can teach every subject or that they have unlimited time to support their children. Nor does it mean that private tuition was unnecessary in earlier generations.

But it does raise a question. If families are investing much more in formal schooling, and parents are often better equipped to help, why does tuition persist? The data point to part of the answer. Tuition is more common in cities than in villages, and in urban areas it climbs at every stage of schooling. That looks less like a bridge for families who cannot help and more like something families who can afford it choose to buy. Perhaps expectations have changed faster than schools’ capacity to meet them.

Three possible explanations, one larger question

There could be several reasons why parents send their children for private tuition. I see at least three explanations, and they are not mutually exclusive.

First, schools may not be delivering the learning outcomes parents expect.

A child may attend school regularly but still struggle with reading, mathematics, comprehension or the ability to follow classroom instruction. In a classroom with different learning abilities and levels of preparedness, some children inevitably need additional attention.

If the school cannot provide that support, parents look outside. Private tuition becomes a way of filling a gap in the child’s education.

Second, education has become a competition for relative advantage.

Even when a school is doing a reasonable job, parents may feel that their child needs something extra to stay ahead. Better marks, higher ranks, additional practice and preparation for the next examination become reasons to seek tuition.

In this situation, tuition is not necessarily about correcting a learning deficit. It is about securing an advantage over other students.

The distinction matters. A child who needs help understanding fractions and a child attending tuition to move from 90% to 95% are not necessarily facing the same problem.

Third, the school day may not fit the realities of contemporary family life.

For some families, tuition may also serve as a structured after-school arrangement. It provides supervision, routine and an organised activity for children during hours when parents may be occupied with work or other responsibilities.

This is a possibility, not a conclusion we can draw from the national data or from the scene in my apartment complex. But it deserves consideration when we examine why private tuition has become so widespread.

All three explanations may be operating simultaneously. The challenge is that parents often have little information to distinguish between them, a point the ORF analysis also makes.

The three explanations point to different failures, but the same question survives each. If the school is not teaching well enough, it owes better teaching and honest reporting of how children are doing. If tuition is a race, schools and boards owe restraint in the early years, with fewer ranks, tests and homework. If it is after-school care, the system owes families something better than paid lessons.

What about the child?

While we examine the economics and the accountability of schools, there is another stakeholder we should not overlook: the child.

A typical school day already involves classroom instruction, homework, tests, examinations and extracurricular activities. For the quarter or so of urban primary-school children who also attend tuition, how much time is left to simply be a child?

Children need time to play, explore, ask questions, interact with friends and discover interests beyond textbooks. They need opportunities to learn without being evaluated continuously.

Not every hour needs to be productive in an academic sense. Not every weakness needs to be addressed through another class. Not every child needs to be pushed towards a higher score.

I am not arguing that tuition is inherently harmful. There are excellent tutors who provide individual attention, build confidence and help children overcome learning difficulties.

But we should be careful not to turn the entire childhood experience into a continuous academic schedule.

What should schools be accountable for?

This brings me back to the question in the title.

Parents are not simply buying a building, a school uniform, access to a playground or a place for their children to spend six or seven hours a day. They are paying for an educational experience and, ultimately, for learning.

Schools should be able to communicate clearly what children are expected to learn at each stage and how well they are progressing.

If a child is struggling with basic reading, arithmetic or comprehension, the school should have a mechanism to identify the difficulty and provide support within the school system. The default response should not be to leave parents to find an external tutor.

Schools should also examine how much academic pressure they place on younger children. Excessive homework, frequent testing and an unhealthy emphasis on marks and rankings can create the very anxiety that drives parents towards additional coaching.

And parents, too, need to ask better questions. Is my child attending tuition because there is a genuine learning gap? Is it because I fear other children are getting ahead? Or have we simply accepted tuition as an unavoidable part of growing up?

These are different problems. They deserve different responses.

The unfinished question

I do not know why the children arriving at tuition in my apartment complex are there. It could be weak teaching, a race for marks, or a convenient after-school routine, and it is probably different in different homes.

What I do know is that families are spending more on education, private schools have become a major part of the landscape, and a large supplementary tuition economy has grown alongside formal schooling. We need to ask whether this expenditure is translating into better learning, greater confidence and a more meaningful educational experience for children.

Private tuition may continue to have a legitimate place in education. But it should not become an unquestioned second system that parents must routinely pay for because they cannot be certain of what the first system is delivering.

If parents must pay twice, what is the school accountable for?

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