This paper brings to the sharp focus the impact of tutoring businesses on educational practices – teaching pedagogy, teaching credential, and student-educator relationship – of formal institutions of education delivery. While the paper draws on the material produced from an ethnographic study conducted in India, the discussions it will produce are of global significance.

The prevalence of private tutoring has been recorded in a wide range of scholarship in the fields of sociology, educational studies, and policy research (Silova, 2009; Aurini, Dierkes & Davies, 2013; Bray & Lykins, 2012; Runte-Geidel & Marzo, 2015). These studies indicate that despite differences in terms of the way tutoring provisions are organised across societies and wide-ranging factors that produce the need for outside-school educational provisioning, the tuition industry has emerged as a prominent system of education delivery. As a rapidly growing industry, which represents a billion-dollar industry worldwide (Dawson, 2010), shadow education is not merely a mechanical addition to the public education system; instead, it carries the potential for profound institutional change (Baker & LeTendre, 2005).

The implications of private tutoring are assessed primarily in terms of educational inequality that it produces – studies have found a strong correlation between students’ participation in shadow education and educational outcome (Buchmann, 2002; Jacob & Lefgren, 2004; Dang, 2007). Beyond educational inequality, the organisational framing of tutoring businesses also results in a specific type of educational experiences, i.e. arguably distinct from what schools offer. These elements of organisational arrangement and implications of private tutoring for mainstream education remains unexamined primarily because schools and tutorial centres are often studied mutually exclusively. The main objective of this paper is to make sense of how shadow provisions impinge on the everyday educational practices of schools. In order to do so, the paper addresses the following two research questions:

1. How the pedagogical approach to classroom teaching differ in tutorial centres and schools; and, how are these, perceived and actual, differences shape students’ perception of educational experiences in both institutions inter-relationally?
2. How does the pupil-teacher relationship differ in shadow and formal institutional frameworks?

Conceptually, the paper argues that tutoring provisions transform the common perception of structural relations and practices of the mainstream system of education delivery – this standpoint opposes the assumption that the former operates in the shadow of the latter. The paper draws on the theoretical framing of institutional change, posited by Wolfgang Streeck and Kethleen Thelen (2005). It identifies that tuition centres ‘displace’ the importance assigned to formal institutions to sustain their logic of social legitimacy.

As such, tutoring provisions cannot replace the formal educational institutions due to the legal and rational authority of the latter due to their capacity to offer valid credentials. Instead of being negated or discarded, these credentials are valued by tutorial centres. Despite being seemingly ‘subordinate’ to the mainstream system, the tutoring provisions rise to salience in the context of overt and covert defects in teaching and learning practices in schools. The institutional incoherence of schools provides space for the rise of ‘deviant’ teaching practices, propagated by ‘shadow institutional framework’ to support their validity scheme.

This paper draws on the data produced as an outcome of an ethnographic study of shadow education. The fieldwork for this research project was conducted between December 2014 and December 2015 in Dehradun city of India. The data provides detailed accounts of the perspective of parents, students, and educators, along with my observation of teaching and learning practices in schools and tutorial centres. My approach to interpreting social behaviour and actions within specific institutional frameworks and making sense of the relationship between structures and practices is based on Dorothy Smith’s work on ‘institutional ethnography’ (Smith, 2005). I interacted with teaching and managerial staff that were engaged in education delivery to students at secondary levels (Class IX to XII) in two private secondary schools – Himalayan International School (henceforth, HIS) and Sharda Secondary School (henceforth, SSS) – and 12 tutorial centres. A total number of 38 teachers and 22 tutors were interviewed individually. In two private schools, HIS and SSS, with which I continued my association for the entire fieldwork period, I observed sessions of parent-teacher meetings, interacted with the staff and students informally on a regular basis, and observed ten sessions of classroom teaching of Class XI Economics (students aged 16-17 years). In SSS, I carried out six sessions of focus-group discussions with two separate groups of about 15-20 students who were studying in Class XI. Regular visits to two tutorial centres facilitated my informal interactions with students and tutors; in one of these centres, I observed ten sessions of classroom teaching of Class X (students aged 15-16 years) Mathematics. In addition, I interacted with parents from 53 middle-class families whose children were studying in either HIS or SSS at secondary educational level (between Class IX and XII). The use of multiple methods – observation, individual and group interview, focus-group discussion, informal conversation, and participant observation – facilitated my interactions with a diverse group of stakeholders—parents, teachers, tutors, and students—in various institutional settings such as homes, schools, tuition classes, and coaching centres. I also observed and recorded the ‘construction of the educational landscape’ in the city by developing field notes and taking photos of publicly accessible advertising materials. Interviews with the research participants were audio recorded and later transcribed for analysis. The materials generated from informal conversations in schools and tuition centres were recorded in field notes and subsequently digitalised.

In the era of mass-education, success is often determined by scholastic achievements. Tuition centres offer valuable resources for meeting academic aspirations, and tutors are highly motivated to meet individual students’ needs. In comparison though, schoolteachers not motivated to improve their approaches to classroom teaching and facilitate effective learning. Students’ lack of interest in classroom teaching and teachers’ indifferent attitude towards depleting quality of interaction between them and their students defeats the imperatives and agendas of progressive transformation in teaching and learning practices in formal institutions of education. At the same time though, inadequate academic education in schools does not seem to instigate in parents a need to demand additional resources because they already invest in extra-school tutoring which supplies these missing resources. Generally, parents tend not to complain about ineffective teaching methods in schools for the fear that their child might be discriminated against by the schoolteachers; instead, they begin to rely more heavily on education provided by tutorial centres. Moreover, operating within the broader framework of the formal education system, schoolteachers often fail to develop an engaging and dynamic relationship with their students. Their work in schools is mostly managerial and bureaucratic, which does not provide space or scope for informal conversations with students; as a result, the student-teacher relationship in formal institutions is founded on the traditional hierarchical model of guru and shishya; this model is not merely challenged but effectively dismantled in the organizational framing of tutoring provisions. Overall, the presence of tutoring provisions enables schools to continue their ineffective, disengaging educational practices, while at the same time, common knowledge of schools’ failure in delivering academic support strengthens the position of ‘shadow educational framework’ in the education market.

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