Daybreak - Private schools are seeing a drop in enrolment. Where did the kids go?

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

Private schools across the country are going through quite a crisis right now. Just last month, The Ken reporter Atul Krishna saw this play out first hand at a budget private school called Blossoms in Bangalore.  During a visit to its campus, he learnt that its once packed classrooms are now thinning down year after year. From 1,5000 students about five years ago, the count is less than half od that now. And unfortunately, the school’s principal Shashi Kumar predicts that that number will only drop further. Blossom’s is just a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. Between 2023 and 2024  alone, overall school enrolments across the country registered its steepest drop in five years. The enrolment numbers dropped by…wait for it…10 million. And funnily enough, private schools, which make up less than one third of all schools in the country, saw a drop of over 2.2 million student enrolments. That begs a rather obvious question – Where have all the children gone? Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.The Ken is hosting its first live subscriber event! Join two long-term and contrarian CEOs, Nithin Kamath of Zerodha and Deepak Shenoy of Capitalmind, as they discuss the mental models, decision making frameworks, and potential outcomes related to a very real possibility: an extended stock market winter that lasts 24 months or more. Click here to buy your tickets. 

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganesh, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

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Private schools across the country are going through quite a crisis right now. Just last month, the Ken reporter, Atul Krishna, saw this play out firsthand at a budget private school called Blossoms in Bangal. During a visit to its campus recently, he learned that its once-packed classrooms are now thinning down year after year. From 1,500 students about five years ago, the count is less than half of that now. And unfortunately, the school's principal Shashi Kumar predicts that the number will only drop further. You see, Blossoms is just a small piece of a much bigger puzzle.

Between 2023 and 2024 alone, overall school enrollments across the country registered its steepest drop in five years. the enrollment numbers dropped by, wait for it, 10 million. And strangely enough, private schools which make up less than one third of all schools in the country, saw a drop of over 2.2 million student enrollments. That begs a rather obvious question. Where have all the children gone? Are they all suddenly being homeschooled? Well, no, because as of 2023, India recorded only 72,000 homeschoolers.

Experts say one reason for the dip is a change in the government's approach to collecting data for the UDIS Plus. That's the unified district information system for Education Plus, which is a government platform that collects data on school teachers and enrollments. People in the education industry say that this database ended up leaving out a bunch of schools that either didn't comply with the new data collection requirements, as well as the ones that weren't listed in official documents at all. But there's a much bigger reason behind the growing number of dropouts. It's something that's been spoken about extensively since the COVID pandemic, the learning crisis.

For a lot of schools, things have just not been the same since the pandemic forced them to lock up their classrooms and turn to virtual teaching. Somewhere between all the online classes, something was lost in translation. There were massive gaps in learning that up until now, schools are still struggling to fill. The interesting thing, though, is that government schools are shifting gears from being broken and behind. That too, in a country where even the poor are desperate to escape the tag of having learnt at these, quote-unquote, crumbling state-run schools. Somehow, private schools are performing even worse. Clearly something in the system has gone horribly wrong. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken.

I'm your host Rahal Philippos and I'll be joining my colleagues Nika Sharma every day of the week to bring you one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 18th of November. Up until about five years ago, Bangalas Bargulcunte locality had only one private school, blossoms, which we spoke about a little while ago. But today, right now, there are at least five. Now, this is playing out in localities across the country. More and more private schools are mushroom. all over the place, and now they are starting to cannibalize one another. But think about it.

That doesn't really add up, right? If a student is simply leaving one private school and joining another in their locality, the overall enrollment data should still remain the same. And yet, there is a drop of over 2 million students. It also isn't that they're just moving to government schools, because the enrollment drop is quite steep there as well. Now, this isn't a pan-India problem. While three-fourths of the institutes under the Karnatica associated management

of English medium schools are seeing a drop in enrollments, a similar body in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu reported an uptick in the 2000 schools it represents. And something similar is playing out in Kerala as well. Even in bigger franchise schools like the Ryan International Group of Institutions, enrollments are a mixed bag. According to Wenkatesh Babu, who is the general manager of marketing at Ryan Education, its parent company, the group has schools across 20 states,

but is seeing a drop in enrollments mainly in Bangalore. Now, Bharti J., the assistant headmistress of Blossoms, says it's because of the city's techie crowd relocating to their hometown. But Arun C. Mehta, who previously headed the Department of Educational Management Information System at the National Institute of Education Planning and Administration, says it has more to do with the government excluding certain private schools from U.S. because they didn't follow the latest Adhard-based data collection. You see, the government changed its data collection methodology for the latest U-Dice report

published in 2023-24. Typically, schools were supposed to upload the data on the number of schools at each level of education. Now, the ask was to upload data for each student and to connect it to their Adhard. And the ones that didn't comply were left out. That, according to people in the industry, included a bunch of well-known schools with well over a thousand students. And then added to that are about 4.9 million students in India

who study at unrecognized schools, the kinds that don't have a government license. As if this burden weren't enough, private schools also fell terribly short in meeting students and parents' expectations while coming to terms with post-COVID life. Meanwhile, their government counterparts had already zoned past in preparing their students way better.

Stay tuned. After the pandemic, a lot of private schools found it difficult to bounce back. Education, after all, was one of the most affected sectors. Many schools reported a huge gap in learning. Take Ryan's school, for instance. It found that its class one students couldn't write what they learned in kindergarten during the pandemic years. A lot of students were not clear on basic concepts that they should have learned in previous classes. So, after COVID, when kids finally returned to classrooms, these schools were

had to rebuild from scratch. Even the student-teacher Rappo wasn't the same anymore. Some schools provided remedial classes to bridge that learning gap, which meant a class four student was studying class four textbooks in the morning and revisiting class three textbooks in the evening.

But not everyone could handle this. John Arokia Prabhu, manager of St. Mary's School in Chennai, recalled it being a very difficult phase. Only above-a-added students showed real improvement. Meanwhile, at Ryan, some students didn't even attend online classes and examinations. Now, given the quality of teaching, one would expect private schools to continue providing better education, right? But all that progress, be it in terms of reading, comprehension or arithmetic ability, seems to have vanished into thin air.

On the other hand, government schools were undergoing a makeover. They were receiving a lot of organized support during the pandemic. All of it to ensure that the learning continued. Government teachers, even in the remotest of villages, were getting creative. They were doing things like having blackboards installed on walls or renting loudspeakers to broadcast lessons. And the results say it all. The annual status of education report found that only over one third of class three students

in private schools could read a textbook in 2022. Compare that to 2018, when over 40% of students could do the same. It's also not a perfect record for government schools here, while in 2018, over 20% of students could read a textbook, it fell to just over 16% as of 2022. Meanwhile, the National Achievement Survey 2021, which test students in languages, math, environmental studies and social sciences, found that government schools outperform private ones in at least half of India.

And it wasn't just willpower that kept state-run schools on their toes. They never stopped writing checks for the teachers that they employed, even through the lockdown, unlike in private institutions. On the whole, teachers at private schools are heavily underpaid. In budget private schools in smaller cities and towns, they're typically paid anywhere between 7,000 to 10,000 rupees. Now, compare that to a government salary in a state like Tamil Nadu, which is usually 25,000 rupees.

All of this just points to one thing for private schools. It may be time to pull up their socks. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small. sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras.

Head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted by Rahil Filippos and edited by Rajiv Sien.