Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

(UNESCO, 2016d). Sometimes, private tutoring also emerges to plug gaps in
schooling stemming from a challenging or frequently revised curriculum, as in
Singapore (Tan, 2009), from the lack of class time to fully cover the syllabus or
from poor quality teaching, as in the cases of Cambodia and Viet Nam (Cambodia,
2010; Dawson, 2010). For these reasons, families in Viet Nam increasingly feel
that supplementary tutoring is essential (Dang, 2008).
Conversely, responding to — or often fuelling — such demand, teachers may
decide to augment their incomes by becoming private tutors (Bray and Lykins,
2012). This can have a highly adverse backwash effect on schooling, incentivising
teachers to limit their pedagogical input during school hours, so as to compel
students (or their parents) to pay for instruction after school. In some cases, this
move is precipitated by the low pay, which in some contexts leaves teachers close
to the poverty line. This situation is exemplified in Lao PDR, where tutoring has
been found to contribute up to a third of secondary teachers’ incomes. Separate
surveys in 2010 and 2008 showed that 4.7 per cent of primary school teachers and
Efforts to regulate, limit
or even expressly forbid
private tutoring have
proven ineffective in
many Southeast Asian
countries, with controls
widely ignored or
circumvented by private
tutors and schoolteachers
14 per cent of lower secondary teachers were
involved in private tutoring respectively
(Dang, King and Waite, 2010). In Cambodia,
too, most private tutoring is provided by
teachers as a means of supplementing their
low pay (Dawson, 2009). Efforts to regulate,
limit or even expressly forbid private
tutoring have proven ineffective in many
Southeast Asian countries, with controls
widely ignored or circumvented by private
tutors and schoolteachers (Bray and Lykins,
2012).
A 2012 report on supplementary private education in Asia, commissioned by
the Asian Development Bank (ADB), cites a range of useful — though somewhat
dated — statistical surveys conducted across Southeast Asia in recent decades
(Bray and Lykins, 2012). One such survey is a 2010 study of 23 schools in the
Philippines, which discovered that 40.7 per cent of grade 6 students and 46.5 per
cent of grade 10 students received private tutoring. Similar surveys in Cambodia
showed an increase in primary school tutoring from under a third to half of the
students between 1998 and 2004, as its costs (and demand) rose. In Viet Nam,
a 2006 survey of 9,189 households found that 32 per cent of primary students
were receiving private tutoring, which rose to 46 and 63 per cent at lower and
upper secondary levels respectively. As the ADB report also stated, a survey in
Malaysia in 2005 found that a fifth of households had spent their budget on
private tutoring. Another survey in 2011 found that nearly 90 per cent of students
from eight schools in the state of Selangor had received private tutoring in
primary school. Such tutoring, in Myanmar, has since 1992 been regarded as
‘virtually indispensable to complete secondary education’ (UNESCO, 1992, p.
132
Chapter 4: Southeast Asia