By Prashant Narang and Tarini Sudhakar
In a background paper submitted for UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report 2022, we explore the interface between the state and budget private schools with a focus on licensure, hiring of teachers, inspections, admissions, and grievance redressal. We examine legislation, supplement our analysis with interviews and surveys of school owners, and fill the gap in the literature on this sector. We do so for budget private schools in Jammu and Kashmir, Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Haryana. Finally, we document the impact of COVID-19 on budget private schools. The research questions that the paper explores include:
- What are the existing regulatory frameworks that govern private schools in India? How do they vary by state?
- What are the characteristics of budget private schools, their monitoring, and compliance-related experiences? How do they vary by state?
- How do the regulatory frameworks and experiences contrast within each state? What would explain these differences?
By exploring all the different aspects of the operations of a budget private school, such as regulatory requirements, quality of education, and information for parents, we fill the gap in the literature on this sector.
