According to the recently released Niti Aayog report titled Learnings from Large-scale Transformation in School Education, India continues to have five times the number of schools than China for the same enrolment of students.
As per a recent report published by Reuters dozens of international and private schools in China are closing or merging because of tighter regulation, a slowing economy and dwindling foreign student numbers.
The report further cited that in 2020 there were around 180,000 private education institutions nationwide which accounted for more than a third of all education institutions in China. These schools had 55.6 million students' enrollment.
However, international schools, which can only enroll students with foreign passports, have mostly seen student numbers decline due to expatriates from countries leaving after the pandemic and amid rising geopolitical tensions.
"A rapid expansion of schools prior to the Covid-19 pandemic drove a surge of privately run bilingual schools in China offering a western exam curriculum. The business stumbled later as Beijing imposed new rules in 2021 and cracked down on the private tutoring business, aimed at easing pressure on children and lowering family costs," Reuters reported.
Low enrollments in Indian schools
As per the Niti Aayog report, over 50 per cent of primary schools across many states in India have an enrolment of less than 60. The cost of such sub-scale schools in the form of extensive multi-grade teaching, lack of a student and parent community that can demand account ability, poor infrastructure and the same 1-2 teachers also handling all administrative responsibilities in the absence of headmasters/ principals, etc is very high.
The report suggested school mergers as a solution to addressing the lack of enrollments in schools. As per the report, such solution has been executed across SATH-E states and have given favorable results in filling up the enrolments in schools.
"There is often a perceived risk around impact of mergers on access. However, third party studies in SATH-E have also demonstrated that when executed rigorously the benefits of mergers are largely positive and can lead to improved learning outcomes," read the report.
Apart from mergers, the states can also develop a set of large schools with at least 10-20 per cent spread across the state. These schools can be integrated K-12 schools and should provide transport so that all students can equitably access them.
"This has been recommended in the NEP too with the call to setup large school complexes. The report documents details for how school consolidation efforts were undertaken in all three Project SATH-E states and their learnings. The report also has information about the efforts to develop leader schools.