This article investigates ways in which informal educational setups, such as private tutoring, gain social legitimacy in contemporary society. To do this, the article examines institutional and affective tutoring practices, in relation to formal schooling. It draws on the perspectives of tutors, school teachers, teacher-tutors, students and their parents, produced through an educational ethnography conducted in Dehradun (India) in 2014–15. In so doing, this article shows that strategic adoption (adhering to formal education practices) and tactical deviation (diverging from typical schooling norms) are central to tutoring centres’ attempt to project themselves as academically relevant and desirable spaces for teaching and learning. By offering a nuanced understanding of the interactions between formal (schools) and informal (tutoring provisions) educational institutions, it argues that private tutoring serves as a critique of formal schooling in the empirical context.

The article contributes to the conceptual discussion on the social legitimacy of private tutoring by drawing on the connections between tutoring and schooling practices.

Some scholars view the social legitimacy of private tutoring in terms of the rising demands for individualised educational support in contemporary societies where educational credentials are construed as critical determinants of future life opportunities (Baker, 2014). Indeed, as indicated earlier, many parents and children consider the ‘extra’ academic inputs that tutorial centres offer as essential or desirable, depending on the context, for excelling in the school appraisal system (discussed in Bray, 2017).

The mass adoption of private tutoring is also influenced by the nature of its supply, particularly, and arguably, the transfer of embodied educational resources (for example, teachers) from schools to the tutorial market. Whether in the form of corruption (where schoolteachers force their students to attend after-school paid lessons – see Dawson, 2009) or teacher entrepreneurialism in neoliberal education spaces (where educators consider tutoring and schooling sectors as markets where they sell their services, see, for example, an Indian case in Gupta, 2019), the involvement of trained and qualified teachers in tutoring businesses signifies the quality of the tutoring sector, promoting their value as centres for effective learning (see, Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2020).

The social legitimacy project of tutoring enterprises is also revealed in their structure. Drawing on a study of edu-businesses in Canada, Janice Aurini (2006) argues that these businesses adopt a ‘hybrid institutional framework’ – that is, ‘by engaging in strategical isomorphism and by responding to new pressures in the technical environment’ (p. 83) – to secure legitimacy in the education market. Put simply, instead of complying fully with the structure of the formal education system, tutoring businesses combine attributes from the system with the elements derived from the market demand for academic input in order to be perceived as legitimate teaching and learning centres.

All of these views – the demand, the supply, and the structure – inform the contemporary understanding of private tutoring as a complex phenomenon, intertwined deeply with the formal schooling system. Building on this body of scholarship, this article focuses on tutoringpractices (institutional and affective), looking specifically at the ways in which these resemble – and deviate from – formal schooling in an Indian context. The analysis, thus produced, would allow for unveiling the implications of private tutoring for schools as well as for the educational landscape more broadly.

This article draws on a range of qualitative data, produced through an educational ethnography, conducted in Dehradun (India) between 2014–15. I interviewed 22 tutors in 12 tutorial centres (tutorial centres in this study are considered as informal educational setups, as compared to schools which are formal institutions of education delivery). Two of these centres were visited more frequently for classroom observations and for informal conversations with tutors and students – I observed 10 tutorial sessions of Grade 10 Mathematics (students aged 15–16 years). Moreover, I interacted with 38 schoolteachers in two private unaided schools and had ‘opportunistic chats’ (O’Reilly, 2012) with students and teachers during the fieldwork. Some of these teachers also shared their experiences of being part-time tutors. In both schools, I observed ten classroom teaching sessions of Grade 11 Economics (students aged 16–17 years). The data above are supplemented with my interviews with parents in 53 families. Formal interviews and informal conversations were equally important in this study – particularly, the latter helped to overcome barriers to collecting what might be regarded as sensitive information about private tutoring (the methodological challenges pertaining to unwillingness, due to shame and suspicion, to share information about people’s engagement with tutoring is well documented and articulated in Bray, 2010, for example). Such sensitive information, in the empirical case presented here, includes tutors, parents and students being open about their experiences; schoolteachers’ acknowledgement of the problems in their own practices, identifying and speaking about the prevalence of private tutoring and sharing opinions about tutoring businesses. I audio-recorded interviews and kept fieldnotes of informal interactions. Both offered me insights into participants’ perceptions and their experiences of teaching and tutoring practices. After the fieldwork, I transcribed the audio recordings and digitalised the fieldnotes. For data analysis, I first coded the transcripts for generating ‘concepts and for allocating excerpts of the material to categories’ (Flick, 2014, p. 373). This process entailed ‘unfolding, unravelling, breaking up, separating, disassembling or fragmenting’ the material (Boeiji, 2010, p. 77). Next, I reassembled the transcripts and looked for ‘patterns, searching for relationships between the distinguished parts, and finding explanations for what is observed’ (Boeiji, 2010, p. 76). The relevant themes that emerged from the analysis about the institutional practices of private tutoring in relation to formal schooling are outlined in the following section. I have used pseudonyms to protect the participants’ identities.

This article has offered insights into the project of social legitimacy of private tutoring by focusing on its institutional practices with reference to that of the formal schooling system in an Indian context. It has shown that tutoring practices strategically conform to and purposely deviate from the prevalent formal schooling practices, to respond effectively to the market demands for beyond-school educational support. This finding can be compared to Aurini’s (2006) suggestion of edu-businesses using a ‘hybrid institutional framework’ for their operation (as discussed earlier), where private tutoring complies with and challenges the formal education system simultaneously. Furthermore, instead of merely shadowing the formal education system, I argue that tutorial centres operate as active agents of education delivery that function alongside – and in relation to – mainstream schools. Conforming to the mainstream education system helps tutoring businesses to project their image as academically relevant additions to formal schooling, whereas it is the deviation from other prevalent schooling practices that strengthens their position as desirable spaces for teaching and learning. For example, tutors tend to: foreground their ability to help students to achieve academically rather than their own educational qualifications as a measure of their credential; strive for developing familial and friendly connections with students instead of following the distanced and hierarchical model of formal schools and adopt student-centric as opposed to textbook driven teaching approaches to foster learning. These approaches are instrumental in shaping societal perceptions of tutorial centres as trusted, reliable, and useful educational spaces. Hence, private tutoring gains social legitimacy not just by using valued pedagogical approaches (as also shown in Punjabi, 2020; Sriprakash et al., 2016) but also through responding to the affective needs of students more effectively than schools appear to do.

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