Tanzania schools to shift to Swahili from English

Tanzania is overhauling its education system. (I haven't been able to find an English translation of the new education policy yet. But the Swahili version seems to be this PDF document: Sera Ya Elimu Na Mafunzo 2014 (Policy of Education and Training 2014).)

A prominent feature of the new education policy is to shift to Swahili as the medium of instruction at all levels. Kiswahili is currently the language of instruction at the primary level, and English is taught as a subject. Thereafter, English becomes the medium of instruction from the secondary level to higher education. This is set to change. But as a news report says: "The document says the government will continue strengthening English in teaching along with Kiswahili during the transition period because using only Kiswahili will require a lot of resources."


However, it is unclear whether this shift will apply to private, fee-paying schools as well. The new policy envisages some regulation of private education. As the news report says: "After years of being driven by market forces, private schools in Tanzania will have a regulator to ensure that the cost of education is realistic and provides value for money. The idea is to make sure that school owners do not overcharge parents who shun public schools in search of quality education in the mushrooming private schools."

But there is no mention in the news report of whether the private schools' medium of instruction will also be regulated. In the absence of that, as one observer warns: "I suspect one effect of this legislation will be an increase in enrollments in private schools that continue to offer tuition in English. Keep an eye open for politicians opening new English medium schools in the near future!"

English-medium education thus will once again create two streams of learners. The first of those in poorly resourced, poorly run government schools which have a non-English medium of instruction. To these will come those who cannot afford the second stream. This second stream being low-cost, fee-paying, English-medium schools. Parents send children to these schools at great expense. But these too have poor learning outcomes. As indeed we have seen in the case of the Andhra Pradesh School Choice Study.


The (urban) elites, in Tanzania as in India, are far removed from these problems, as an observer remarks: "Their children go to international schools [where the language of instruction is English]. We, the poor ones, will continue with going to under-performing and poorly equipped schools and continue with our English of ya, ya, yes no yes no. At the same time their children are speaking English fluently."

Private schools not better than government schools - APF study

An Azim Premji Foundation (APF) 2013 report, "Private Schools Are No Panacea" (PDF; 20 pages - but see Update below) "suggests that contrary to popular perceptions, private schools are not adding value as compared to government schools to the children in the main subjects" (p. 15).

Previous analyses like that by Wilima Wadhwa in ASER 2009, "Are Private Schools Really Performing Better Than Government Schools?" (PDF; 3 pages) did suggest the same: "In the case of reading in the local language, in many cases most of the learning differential disappears once other factors are controlled for – Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. In the case of Madhya Pradesh, the difference is actually reversed – once other factors are controlled for government schools perform better than private schools. In the case of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where government schools had higher learning levels to start with, the gap widens once other factors are taken into account" (p. 3).

APF's School Choice study follows a different methodology. Government school children in 180 villages in Andhra Pradesh were offered a scholarship to study in a private school if they wished to. Then, the scholarship children in private schools, the non-scholarship children in private schools, and children in government schools were all evaluated over a 5-year period (2008-2013).

Analysis of five years of test data shows that:

"1. The scholarship children in private schools (children who were interested and voluntarily shifted to private schools) perform no better than their corresponding counterparts in government schools in the two main subjects - Telugu and Mathematics as also in EVS [environmental science] and English. This is observed consistently across the five years. This implies that private schools are not able to add any significant value in terms of learning achievement of these children.

"2. The learning achievement in general among non-scholarship children in private schools (who would have been in private schools any way) is significantly better than among children in government schools. However, the private school children’s households have a relatively better socio-economic and education profile which may have been a contributory factor.

"3. There are clear and significant differences in the profile of the teachers and the school facilities between the private schools and government schools. The teachers in private schools are younger, less experienced, less trained and with lower educational qualifications and are also paid substantially less. On the other hand, the government school teachers need to handle multi-grade teaching situations.

"4. Interestingly, interviews with parents of the scholarship children in private schools indicate that they are happy with the private schools. A closer look at the responses shows that the parents are possibly evaluating school outcomes on softer factors like uniforms, discipline, attendance in school (both of children and teachers) and social standing in the community.

"It seems clear that, contrary to general perception, private schools are not adding any greater value as compared to government schools to the children in Telugu and Mathematics, the main subjects, as also in EVS and English over five years of primary schooling, after controlling for the background of the households. The reasons for the perception that private schools may be better than government schools may lie in socio-economic, household or other factors. This research has provided rich data on various aspects and there is a need to do further detailed analysis to better understand these complex issues" (p. 1).

This is clearly a report that needs to be more widely known.

Update, July 2018: The report on which this post was based is no longer available on the APF website. It is, however, archived on the Right to Education Forum website here. The APF website has a shorter (6-page) version, "Does school choice help rural children from disadvantaged sections improve their learning outcomes? Evidence from a longitudinal research in Andhra Pradesh". And there is a much shorter (3-page) overview of the research in D. D. Karopady, "Do private Schools Really Ensure Better Learning Outcomes for Children?" Learning Curve, XXV (January 2016). This overview, in turn, draws upon D. D. Karopady, "Does School Choice Help Rural Children from Disadvantaged Sections? Evidence from Longitudinal Research in Andhra Pradesh", Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 49, no. 51, (20 Dec 2014).