Affordable private school owners are a canny lot. They have built these schools up from scratch, they know their constraints and they know their market well. They handle high attrition of teachers, ill-equipped teachers, demanding parents and competition from other APS with their own brand of strategies and strong networking among competing APS. Lesson plans created for APS teachers form part of the support system that service providers offer the school as well as a strategic solution to many of the APS constraints.

Lesson plans that are as detailed as telling teachers to greet students in English, spend the next 10 minutes by discussing part A of Topic X may seem almost robotic to some of us. But it would make sense in the face of the fact that APS hire teachers who are not trained. Given the demographic profile of the teachers, attrition levels are high and are likely to remain so. Teacher training and workshops are not found to be very effective as APS teachers may not implement all they learn. Moreover, with high attrition it is just as likely that they will take that learning to another school in short time. APS school owners, meanwhile, are accountable to the parents of their students, and have to ensure they are consistently and continuously delivering quality education.  

And parents of children going to APS are demanding, make no mistake. They are intuitively aware of how much their child learns at school even if they are not educated themselves. They talk to each other and swap school experiences with parents of children going to other APS in the same locality. They ask questions of teachers and demand answers too. Empowered by choice, they can pull their child from one APS and put them in another with negligible barriers to entry and exit.

Lesson plans hold an instinctive appeal to the school owners, who work with a low-skilled market and are not really comfortable with delegation as they have built their schools from ground up. They view lesson plans as on-the-job training for their teachers, something the school owners can plan and work with. They are also tools that prepare school owners for attrition - they are prepared with material that the substitute teacher can take up seamlessly. And at a subliminal level, it is tangible evidence of the service that they pay service providers for.

Interestingly, lesson plans to the service providers are seldom products in themselves, instead they form part of the overall service – this could be teacher training, Introduction of ICT or providing strategy inputs to school growth - and serve as tools for follow-up to training programs. Lesson plans are also easier to price, with service providers adopting different models of pricing such as bulk amount for given number of hours of training and teaching material or a fixed small amount charged per child, per month round the year which they collect from school owners. Retaining their customers, though, is tough, say some service providers. School owners are savvy, and aware that they are now the focus of education and policy stakeholders. Moreover, they have a strong support system and network constantly about the various services being made available to them and the best products and services to opt for.

Lesson plans are gaining importance – service providers are beginning to experiment with the way lessons are delivered and are hiring the experts for this as their teams consist of experienced teachers and educational psychologists. They use special tools, visual aids and design aids to develop these lesson plans. Their qualifications notwithstanding, these lesson plan designers, must and do bring in strong empathy and understanding of the ethos of target students. Because, ultimately, lesson plans determine how and what education is being imparted to students at the bottom of the pyramid, and therefore, determine whether the ‘education for all goal’ is achieved – in letter and spirit.