COMMENTATOR (COMM):
A school concert in Makoko, a shanty town on the edge of Lagos. Space is precious, so Makoko stretches out into the lagoon. Many of the houses are built on stilts. It hardly looks the place, but new research reveals that parents here are prepared to pay to get their children educated. The research also claims private schools in shanties and slums around the world are doing much better than state schools. Is this hype or reality?

At first sight, it’s a wonder there are any schools here at all. In Nigeria ninety per cent of people live on less than two dollars a day. According to UNICEF, less than half the children of primary school age get an education. But surprisingly the people of Makoko appear to have a choice. Children can go here, to the free state school. Or they can pay at one of these small, private schools. But they are expensive. Average income in Makoko is about fifty dollars a month. School fees can be ten dollars – a significant amount, especially when there is so little cash to spare. So why are they prepared to pay? They think the teaching is better and they want a better life for their children.

FISHERMAN (translation):
In the public school they do not teach very well and even though we are very poor we prefer to send our children to private schools because we want our children trained for the future.

MOTHER (translation):
In the private school they teach them very well, they study very well and the students are sharp. That’s why I prefer to send my children to private school.

FISHERMAN (translation):
I have been working very hard without rest to give my children a goal in life. I want them to have a better life and a higher standard of living. Maybe my son could become a president of a company or my daughter could become a doctor or a lawyer.

COMM:
They work hard to get their fifty dollars a month. The fishermen often catch an early tide at four a.m. Women row from house to house, selling food and basic goods.

The research into how and why these private schools emerged in such unlikely circumstances has been organised by this man, James Tooley. For the last five years he’s been studying private schools in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and in China and India. He claims his research has tapped in to an important and growing trend. These schools, he argues, are making a significant contribution to education.

PROFESSOR JAMES TOOLEY, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
We are finding literally hundreds of schools in the areas that we’re looking at. In every setting we’re found 65 to 70 per cent of schoolchildren from these poor areas are using private schools. That’s the vast majority of children are going to private schools like this one. Now what this means for the statistics is, if a government is saying – in Nigeria for example – fifty per cent of children of school age are not in school – the figure may be only 25 per cent, or even 20 per cent – it maybe even fewer than that, because the children are not accounted for, but they’re in private unregistered schools. This has huge significance I think for universal basic education. It’s a goal that can be achieved more quickly because of the success of these private unregistered schools.

COMM:
This is quite a claim. The idea that private, fee-paying schools will help provide education for all, flies right in the face of orthodox thinking. Not surprisingly the suggestion that education should be left completely to market forces, has its critics.

PROFESSOR KEITH LEWIN, Centre for International Education, Sussex University:
I don’t want to be seen to be undermining the efforts of truly altruistic people who operate not for profit and provide a service where government fails, because government certainly does fail. The question then really is whether the response to that is laissez faire, which is to say these people do what they do and hope they do it well and hope that there is a market which somehow regulates their behaviour. There’s no obvious incentive, to reach out to cash-poor rural areas, to reach out to HIV orphans. The private sector will not do this.

COMM:
The head of education in Lagos has a different reason for not embracing private schools. His concern is parents who pay are simply after status.

PROFESSOR OLAKUNLE LAWAL, Commissioner of Education, Lagos:
You have a situation where you are dealing with a social phenonomena. There is a syndrome. You have a cleaner who earns the minimum, what you say the minimum wage – say eight thousand, ten thousand naira a month – and he pays a school, per term, sometimes five thousand naira. That’s so much for that category of people but he sends the child to the school where he assumes that private school is the key. The assumption is that sending your child to a private school – whether they’re licensed or not – is assumed to be the first step towards breaking away from the low level in terms of status”.

COMM:
Others are more scathing. The woman directly responsible for education in Makoko agrees with her boss, it is all about status. But she also questions the quality of private schools.

MARY TAIMO IGE IJI, Administrator, Local Government District Mainland Lagos:
There are many reasons. No information, ignoramuses, they don’t have that information that the public schools are free. Some of them they chose private schools because they are near their homes. But the most important point is fake status symbol, in quotes fake status symbol, they want to be seen as rich parents, caring parents, who take their children to fee-paying schools supposedly better, which are very poor in facilities, usually, because there is no way you can compare these poor ill-equipped private schools with government schools where all the teachers are qualified, very qualified. At private schools you have three categories – the good, the bad and the very ugly. But the bad and the ugly they’re not approved.

COMM:
She has a point, the condition of many of the private schools leaves a lot to be desired. Usually they have no proper toilets or running water. Often the buildings are little more than wooden shacks, wide open to the elements, no windows, no doors and no proper flooring.

PROFESSOR KEITH LEWIN:
There is a hidden curriculum in all these places. If there are no latrines, if there is no clean running water in the school, it tells you something about the attitude of the management of that school and the motivation of the people that run it. Surely these kinds of things, which are so basic because without good health you can’t be productive, without good health if you’re poor you will get poorer.

COMM:
But the condition of the schools reflects normal life in Makoko. Few houses have running water and if there is a toilet, it’s usually built right over the lagoon. Parents admit the schools might not be great but they still prefer them to what the state has to offer.

PARENT (Man - translation):
Going to the public school here in Nigeria particularly in this area in Lagos state is just like saying wasting the time of day in theory because they don’t teach them anything.

PARENT (Woman - translation):
The public school the pupils they are many, they are not teaching very well. All the primary schools, they don’t know anything that’s why I put my children in my private school.

PARENT (Man again):
The difference is clear, the private school and the children of private school and the children of public school, the difference is so great that the children of private school can speak very well they know what they are doing but there in the public, the children are abandoned.”

COMM:
Private schools are not new to Nigeria. But even in the colonial past – and after the country gained its independence in 1960 – the authorities still wanted private schools regulated.

PROFESSOR KEITH LEWIN:
Interestingly in Nigeria in 1890, 85 per cent of the schools were private or privately owned but then colonial government decided the situation was getting out of hand, these were unregulated institutions which were in some respects behaving, in their terms, subversively, and they wished to provide some sort of control, some sort of inspection and indeed some sort of quality assurance system. Now the independent Nigerian government actually took the same view that it would take over the private schools that existed, after independence and it’s still coping with the consequences of doing that, which is that it is the service provider and should be the service provider and is failing to meet its obligations.

COMM:
State education in Nigeria is free, but it’s not compulsory. And according to UN figures, Nigeria is way behind the rest of sub-Saharan Africa in what it spends on education. In most countries it’s about four per cent of gross domestic product. Nigeria it’s much less – under one point seven per cent.

In Part Two, we weigh up the arguments. Who provides the better service – state or private schools?

PART TWO

COMM:
Makoko, the view from the top floor of the only state school in the area. It’s a big place. There are three schools on one site, with about one thousand seven hundred pupils. And there’s room for quite a few more. Several classrooms have obviously been empty for some time. The official in charge of state education has little time for the private schools, especially the teachers.

MARY IJI:
Well in the private schools the teachers are not qualified, while they are there they are not paid regularly. The sole proprietorship of the school, they can be fired anytime so they are not dedicated and most important they are not qualified. But in government schools the teachers are very disciplined and they are trained teachers. They can be fired for misconduct but it rarely happens.

COMM:
The Education Commissioner admits that in the past state schools had problems, especially with teachers. But he insists things have got better.

PROFESSOR OLAKUNLE LAWAL, Hon. Commissioner for Education, Lagos State:
The teachers were not well motivated because of the challenges attached to their conditions of service. At times you had haphazard payment of salaries and at times outright non-payment for some. However, in the last six years things have changed considerably this public school system is very good now, you have well-trained manpower.

COMM:
Most of the private schools in Makoko were set up in the last five to ten years, but some are much older. This school, possibly the first private school in the area, has been in business for over twenty years. And it is a business – and charging fees to teach children in these conditions is surely little more than exploitation?

BAWO SABO ELIU AYESEMINIKAN, Owner, Ken-Ade Private School:
The fact remains that the parents want something good. And something good costs money. Some of them would rather prefer to go without food or clothes to send their children where they live to learn. The quality of education that they didn’t have the access to. That is why they prefer to take their children where they pay rather than to the school where they don’t pay and the child will be unable to learn up to the standard they desire.

COMM:
But what about the teachers? Staff at these private schools get only a quarter of the wages paid to teachers in the state or public schools. Many are not qualified. Many – like this young man – teach to earn the money to pay for their own university or college education.

LUCKY EGBOWON, Private School Teacher:
I’m not teaching here because of the salary per se. My earnings are alright but the main reason I’m teaching here is just that I like teaching, number one. The second one point that is the great one is that when I teach I also learn, because when I give it out I am going to review it. OK, so I want to teach a pupil – one plus one – so for me to be effective teacher I must go back to the book. What is one plus one all about. It make me to go deep and start again, because I want to teach them I must relearn it. So that is the main reason why I like teaching.

PROFESSOR JAMES TOOLEY:
They’ve got teachers who are very keen and dedicated and committed. We’ve got head teachers, proprietors who make sure the teachers work hard, we’ve got parents who pay their fees and so expect good quality from the schools. Of course in any sector you will find bad apples, we haven’t found, I haven’t found any personally but I’m sure there must be. But that doesn’t counter the fundamental point that in general and on average these private unregistered schools are doing better than the government schools.

LUCKY EGBOWON:
The way we teach here, everybody passing by looking at what we are teaching. If it is not good they will not send their children here. But up there, maybe upstairs. People passing by along the street will not see what the teachers are teaching and whether they are teaching them or not. No way to know that. At the end of the day that’s where the saying now come, the devil you know is better than the angel you don’t know.

PROFESSOR KEITH LEWIN:
In the short term employing people as, on a temporary basis, as teaching assistants, or whatever, it can be very constructive and very useful and can extend access at affordable levels of costs. But you have to have a core of professional teachers who see this as a career, who understand about the cognitive development of children, who are committed to some kind of pastoral nurturing – particularly for primary school children – that gives them values and confidence and a sense of self worth.

COMM:
So is it possible to assess or compare the two systems? Which is better, state schools or private schools? What James Tooley’s research reveals is that in communities like Makoko, parents are voting with their feet. They think the state system has failed. His research certainly seems to show a new and interesting grass roots movement in education. Professor Tooley has tested thousands of children in English and maths.

PROFESSOR JAMES TOOLEY:
We’re looking at the raw scores, that’s when the children write their tests. What do they get on average. We’re looking at a large sample, remember 4,000 children. We find that in the government schools in maths in Nigeria the children got 41 per cent on average. In the private unregistered schools they got 56 per cent on average. In other words there is a fifteen percentage points difference between government and private unregistered schools. The private unregistered schools are doing much better than the government schools.

PROFESSOR KEITH LEWIN: The proposition though that this is a general solution is simply one that doesn’t stand up to any kind of economic analysis. You would have to be paying teachers well below whatever legal minimum wage there might be. And you would have to be convinced that somehow you could access the poor and the ultra poor without subsidy.

COMM:
The Education Commissioner acknowledges that in some cases the state and private schools can work in harmony.

PROFESSOR OLAKUNLE LAWAL:
I do not wish to misinform you by saying that in all cases the schools are the worse, than public/state schools – No. In some, in some cases the schools can be useful and that is where we have not abandoned them or run them out of town. That’s why we have tried to upgrade some of them. It’s comme ci, comme ça, as the French would say, you very have very good ones and you have some that are not too good and some that are outrightly not good at all. Those that are not good at all have not been licensed and I can assure you of that.

COMM:
But those closer to the reality of education in Lagos, have different opinions.

MARY IJI:
So these poorly, ill-equipped unapproveable private schools, mushroom schools, they are causing a lot of damage, a lot of damage. At the end of it the children will come out half-baked, they are not useful to themselves, they end up in occupations like their parents are doing, they don’t progress further, so that’s two generations, three generations, wasted. COMM:
Morning assembly continues at one of the private schools. The future for these children will be a constant struggle for survival. According to the statistics, most people in Nigeria die before they’re fifty. Finding work, finding a home, will be hard Their education is vital. So what does James Tooley’s research mean for future education in the developing world? Is it a step forward? Or is it a mistake?

PROFESSOR KEITH LEWIN:
We would end up with anarchy. Do we really believe that unregulated, unlicensed organisations which are not accountable to anybody except their own proprietors, which have no governance structure, which are only part of the community in the sense that the person who is running them is part of the community, are the best way forward? I think not.

PROFESSOR JAMES TOOLEY, Head of Education Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne:
I believe these private schools are a threat to governments, to international agencies and to academics. They’re a threat to governments because if governments can’t get basic education right then what can they get right. They are a threat to international agencies because they’ve spent billions over the years on public education – perhaps that money’s been misdirected. And they threaten academics’ ideological purity, if you like. They threaten that because they believe in state education – somehow the poor don’t go along with their beliefs.

COMM:
The people of Makoko clearly have different beliefs – certainly in education. Are they leading the way forward? How far does their experience have relevance for other slum communities? Establishing that, could take a little longer.

END

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