Keep the focus on investing in education

The education sector has seen a major shift in the last 15 years. In the past, parents sent their children to aided schools, where the school fees were minimal and girls received free education. The teacher child ratio was 1:50 (or even more), and these schools deployed a curriculum that was developed by government-appointed universities, which was not updated thereafter. With large classroom numbers the schools could only follow a rote method of learning.

Over the years, a few enterprising edupreneurs (educationist entrepreneurs) like Pavan Podar, Pinky Dalal, Vicky Oberoi, Jesus Lal and I stepped in to reinvent the educational space. Education is not only about memorising information but a tool to define your success. As edupreneurs, we took the responsibility of bringing about a change. We introduced experiential learning for the holistic development of the child. We made sure that children got individual attention, which means our teacher child ratio is 1:12 in some schools, and 1:30 in others.

Today, parents have a choice of schools with different price points, infrastructure, pedagogy and philosophy. However, parents and the government are choking schools with continuous interference. You want to dictate to us reservation of seats and provision of books etc that we have to find funding to pay for. You want to enforce Teacher Pay Commissions and you want to control our fees, without taking into consideration that we pay commercial bank interest rates, commercial rentals for the schools we operate in, commercial electricity etc.   The government needs to realise that creating blanket archaic unreasonable rules to control independent schools will only hamper in the smooth functioning of a school. Only by encouraging investments and entrepreneurship in education does this country have a hope of increasing schools.

(The writer is  founder of Kangaroo Kids and Billabong High International School)