At a public policy seminar recently, we sent out students for a field trip to a village nearby. The idea was to know the state of the local health facilities. Most people chose the private counterpart because of the high responsiveness. The apathy of the government doctors and the unavailability of medicines prescribed by them turned them off. At the same time, the government clinic doctors mentioned that the private clinic doctors administered high doses even for basic maladies. And thus the remedies of the private clinic doctors were only superficially effective. All this because the incentives of the private doctors were to show some effect or the other given they were being paid.

There is a grain of truth on both ends. Much of the same maladies exist in the schooling of our government and private schools. While there are a number of areas that need improvement I want to focus on English in this article for reasons that I will go into later at the end of the article.

There are sound arguments against the quick fix approach of English medium teaching and learning. At the same time, the importance of communication abilities in English is highly desired and rightly so.  What passes for teaching of English in a lot of Affordable Private Schools is rote learning of lessons in English textbooks. A lot of English medium teaching is purportedly along with vernacular medium explanation. Nevertheless, it does make sense as the teachers know English well, and the students whose English abilities haven’t developed need the vernacular medium to understand stuff better. All these methods neither help the cause of English medium teaching nor that of improving communication abilities in English.

My own experience in assessing English skills in this sector left me amazed at the gap and the potential. Sometimes when you ask children to read paragraphs from any book, a garble of sounds is all you will get. This happened with a class X child in one of the APSs in Hyderabad. How could he/she prepare for board exams when he can’t even read words let alone understand them?  Just looking closely at the kind of mistakes committed in English from classes 1-10 offers us a window to understand where students are going wrong. I remember looking through the answer scripts of primary school students in various APSs in Hyderabad and being puzzled by the lack of understanding of basics like the placing of periods and the usage of capital letters. I have also been impressed by the usage of multimedia/multisensory products/programs in this arena. One longstanding myth is that children won’t be able to learn English given the home environment. However the brightness of kids and the right kind of program can do wonders.

All this points to an immense opportunity for English Communication products. All the desirable features of a great market are present here. High pain on part of customers, reasonable paying power of schools, and relatively easy identification of customers. At the same time there is a lack of niche players in this space - players who can focus on improving English communication abilities to the exclusion of other school subjects and tie up with schools to provide this resource. There are key challenges like the delivery model and the product development part which needs to be very contextualized with the needs of the children and teachers of APSs. There have been key advances made by various organizations like Russell’s Spoken English, Pratham, Akshara Foundation, Empathy Learning Systems, RUMI Schools, and many others. However there is still space for service providers to focus on this niche area and develop disruptive business models which can offer dramatic improvements in English communication abilities.

Photo Credit: The World Bank