There is a big boom in private
education all over the world,
you see it in schooling numbers so
the numbers of people going to private primary
has gone up from 10 to 17% over the last 15 years.
Secondary has gone up from nine to 27%
and then if you look in particular countries,
you find for instance in China the big increase
in people going to elite private schools
but also huge business in terms of people getting
online tuition, parents are finding ways to spend money
on the great competition to improve their children's brains.
Yes so the resurgence is happening for a few different
reasons one of them is that incomes are going up,
the birthrates are going down.
So in families all over the world there is more money
to spend on each child.
If you look at the Chinese one child policy,
you can get six people, four grandparents,
two parents, all of them willing to invest in the education
of one child and at the same time,
you've had the hole of the world economy changing so that
there are fewer unskilled jobs everywhere.
Almost all decent jobs require you
to have a qualification of some sort.
So the great advantage of private education
is that it's fantastically good getting children in school
so in countries where people are moving around a lot
which is most of the developing world
and where populations are growing swiftly
where you get this huge swift urbanization.
Governments just can't keep up!
So you'll get governments like Pakistan which
you know in Punjab which is a massive state,
struggling with fast growing cities
has partnered up with the private sector to send
poor kids who would otherwise not be getting schooling
at all into private schools.
And they're doing that with over two million kids.
And private schools can also be really really good
because you know often parents are willing to spend
masses of money and you get
a really high quality of education.
It is a dilemma for society.
Governments need to concern themselves about equality
and about social mobility, things that the private sector
discourages rather than encourages.
The problem with private schools is that they do tend
to increase in equality when parents are allowed to spend
money on their children, they will spend as much as they can
so obviously rich kids go to better schools.
You see China which is increasingly putting controls
on the expansion in the school's business.
It's clearly pretty uncomfortable about it.
Rather than trying to shut it down,
governments need to be trying to work with it.
Now there is a cost, if you allow the private sector
to operate you are gonna get a higher level of inequality.
But I think that that is a price worth paying
for the liberty, for the resources, for the better brains,
for the innovation, for the quality of education,
and the breath of education that you get
if you allow the private sector to operate.
So I think governments must look
at the private sector as a potential partner,
not as they do in some places as an enemy.