Problem of private tuition classes

by Anton Peiris, 
B.Sc. ( Ceylon ), PGCE ( Kenya ), M.Sc. ( London), DAES ( York ) and Emeritus Coordinator , 
International Baccalaureate, Switzerland.

(‘Reduce O/Level STRESS ‘ – continued)

Many teachers teach only the absolute minimum in the classroom in subjects like mathematics, general science and English. They do not teach the full course in its length, breadth and depth or the finer points of the topics. They teach it in their Tuition Classes in the evenings and during the weekends. This is morally wrong because those teachers get their salary from the school and finally a pension also. Parents keep doling out thousands of Rupees per month to the private tutors. The poor student is a mental wreck because he/she has no time to play or to enjoy their childhood years. When the exams approach, it becomes a rat race.

Other reasons that contribute to the proliferation of Tuition Classes are given below:

1. In Sri Lanka, the salaries of teachers are low. In many countries, a professionally qualified teacher, who has been teaching for 10 or 15 years, can afford to buy a piece of land with his/her savings to build a house, but in Sri Lanka that is impossible. When I was teaching at Moratuwa, 60 years ago, (during an era when private tuition classes did not exist) the situation was very different.  Every Trained Teacher approaching retirement age could look back with satisfaction on his teaching career, for he had either bought or built a house, educated his children to enter the job market, saved some money (for dowries, etc.,) to give his daughters in marriage and the pension was sufficient to have a happy retirement. Now all that is impossible because the cost of living has skyrocketed.

2. The class sizes: put 35 or more students in a class and it has a negative effect on the efficiency of the teacher. The teacher has to spend more time in preparing the lessons and in marking Tests and Exams and it takes more energy to maintain discipline and to get the students to work in class. Teachers become frustrated and the quality of teaching deteriorates. The ideal situation is to have a maximum of 25 students in a class and it is impossible to achieve that in the short term as it involves budgeting enormous amounts of money to create more classrooms and to hire more teachers. The goal should be to reduce the class sizes gradually in small steps over a number of years. 

3. Lack of prospects for Promotion (to obtain a better salary). There are very few posts of responsibility available in a Secondary School in Sri Lanka. A school of 1000 students should have not one but three Deputy School Principals plus Heads of Departments (for Sinhala, English, Mathematics, General Science, Humanities, Computer Studies, Sports) and two CAS Coordinators. The senior teachers holding these posts of responsibility should be placed on a higher salary scale or they should be remunerated with a cash allowance. Job descriptions for teachers holding these posts of responsibility are available Online (go to the websites of well-known public/International schools in the U.K., Europe, Canada or Australia). There is a need to create opportunities for the senior teachers to earn a better salary in exchange for implementing a system of Teacher Evaluation (details given).   

There is a case for improving the salaries of Sri Lankan teachers. The government should seriously look into it but there is a limit to what the government can do about raising the salaries of all teachers. Look at countries like Switzerland, Germany, Australia and Kenya where teachers get high salaries. There is very little private tuition in those countries because teachers are happy and they take their job seriously. In Switzerland, a secondary school teacher who is academically and professionally qualified and has five years of teaching experience gets the same salary as a university lecturer or a staff officer in a Swiss Bank. The Ministry of Education in Switzerland is aware of the fact that teaching and lecturing are two very different things.

Many years ago, a school in Pakistan solved the problem of Tuition Classes. The school, the parents and the teachers making big money by conducting tuition classes entered into a contract: Every parent to contribute 50 % of the money that they normally spend on private tuition per month to a special Fund. The monies in the Fund were used solely to give salary increases to all teachers. In return the tuition masters promised to do a good job of teaching in class and to stop their tuition classes. There were a few exceptions: e.g. there will always be a few very weak students who need private tuition. 

It is impossible to get rid of the private tuition/tuition classes in Sri Lanka but steps can be taken to redress the situation and hence to reduce the amount of money that parents are paying to private tutors.  A combined effort by the three parties involved (The Ministry of Education, the School Principals and the Parents) is necessary.  My recommendations are given below: 

(i)  It is impossible for the government to raise the salaries of all  teachers but it should be possible to allocate funds to create the Posts of Responsibility mentioned in paragraph 3 . This should be combined with a strict system of Teacher Evaluation. 

e.g. the senior teacher who is also the Head of Mathematics Department is responsible for checking whether the maths teachers are doing an honest job. The underperforming teachers should be given advice, guidance, help and finally a warning followed by disciplinary action, e.g.  ineligibility for salary increments and even expulsion from the school.  

(ii)  More money should be spent on Teacher Training. The goal should be to arrive at a situation where no university graduate is allowed to enter the teaching profession unless he / she has a Diploma in Education. During their year of post graduate training they learn psychology, methodology, etc. A professionally qualified teacher is less likely to do a bad job of teaching in class.

Schools should encourage the university graduates on their staff to obtain a professional qualification by giving them full- pay leave for the 9 or 10 months of university training. 

(iii) Every School Principal should form a Committee (chaired by the School Principal ) consisting of two groups : representatives of the parents and representatives of the teachers who conduct tuition classes. The two groups should start talking to each other in order to find a solution to reduce the hours spent on tuition classes. A proposition to set up a Fund to award a cash allowance to all teachers ( e. g. the parents to contribute about 25  % of the money that they normally spend on private tuition in exchange for a better job of teaching in class and less tuition classes and  a reduction of the hourly rate of tuition fees charged by the tutors) should not be ruled out. It is important that the two parties meet face to face and enter into a dialogue.

Then there are the university graduates, engineers, technical officers, former teachers, etc. who are not currently in the teaching profession but who engage in conducting tuition classes as a lucrative job to earn good money. Is there anything that can be done about it? One can only hope that, if the quality of teaching in schools improves, their market will shrink. 

Secondary school teachers who make good money by conducting tuition classes should consider the following:

(i) After doing a full-time job at school, you spend hours in the afternoons giving private tuition. You earn money, but at what cost to your health? You have been on the ball from 8 am till 8 pm during weekdays and after that you are stressed. You have no energy left to devote to other things. Do you realize the extent of the damage that you are causing to yourself and to your family? One famous educationalist (Leo Fernig of UNESCO, Paris) once remarked ‘’ If you want to shorten your life-span by 7 years, give private tuition ‘’. 

(ii) Look carefully at the families of teachers who do not teach in class but perform a good job of teaching in their tuition classes and then look at the families of hardworking teachers who do an honest job of teaching in class. The former group has health and other problems in their families, their children have problems and they never do well in life. The latter group has no problems in their families, their children do well and become doctors, engineers, technicians, accountants, staff officers, etc.

Successive governments have ignored this problem of tuition classes. Prof. G.L. Peiris has drawn the attention of the NIE to a couple of problems in our system of secondary education (e. g. the present method of teaching does not focus on the development of a child’s analytical and critical thinking skills). He should include the problem of Tuition Classes also in his list of priorities. It is difficult to find a family where the children do not attend tuition classes. Something is seriously wrong when millions of school children (many of them from lower middle class and poor families) have to attend tuition classes daily and their parents are forced to make sacrifices to pay their tuition fees. Dr. C. W. W. Kannangara must be turning in his grave. There is no quick solution to this problem but progress can be made if the Ministry of Education, the School Principals, the Heads of (subject) Departments and the Parents get together and start tackling the problem. 

To be continued. The 5th (and final) Instalment:  Revamping of overloaded syllabuses, Teacher Training , Use of Calculators , TVET

(The writer has taught O/L, A/L and IB mathematics and physics for 45 years in Sri Lanka, Kenya and Switzerland).