This symposium presents the research results of the Network of Education Policy Centres’ (NEPC) comparative qualitative project exploring educational stakeholders’ perspectives of the private tutoring (PT) phenomenon and the collaborative development of policy options for the regulation of PT in five countries: Estonia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Georgia and Azerbaijan. PT is defined as fee-based instruction in academic school subjects that is complementary to instruction mainstream schools provide free of charge. The aims of the project were threefold. First, the project aimed to explore the stakeholders’ perspectives on the educational, societal and economic causes and effects of PT. Secondly, it aimed to develop possible policy options in each participating country. Thirdly, the project aimed to explore congruencies and dissimilarities of findings and policy options across the participating countries.
Identified as a ‘world megatrend’ (Baker & LaTendre, 2005), PT has recently attracted considerable academic interest. Research on this topic has been conducted in contexts as diverse as the USA (Nishio, 2007), former socialist countries including those participating in the present project (Silova, Budiene and Bray, 2006), Bangladesh (Nath, 2008) and Portugal (Ventura, Neto-Mendes, Costa and Azevedo, 2006). Whilst these research efforts provided important insight into the phenomenon, they mostly relied on quantitative methodology and were often less successful in advocating change and developing effective policy options for addressing the phenomenon.
There have been numerous calls for more empirical research examining PT from diverse methodological approaches (Bray, 2011), with very few qualitative research endeavours probing this phenomenon in particular. Comparative qualitative efforts are even less common, both in educational research generally and in PT research in particular. One of the aims of the present project was to address some of these methodological shortcomings in the field. Individual semi–structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with selected educational stakeholders. This methodological choice was deemed appropriate due to the selected number of educational stakeholders, a need for a deeper understanding of stakeholders’ perspectives, and an orientation towards the co-creation of appropriate policy options. The participant selection process was coordinated in all five countries in order to ensure adequate levels of comparability. Purposive sampling was used to identify educational stakeholders from governmental, political, professional, parental, educational, media and academic spheres. In total, 102 interviews and 24 focus groups were conducted. All of the materials were recorded, transcribed and coded in triple temporal fashion.
The introductory paper presents the research design and the analytical framework developed in order to be applicable in the five participating countries. The three consecutive papers deal with three specific topics that emerged through the data analyses in all comparative contexts: characteristics and quality of pre-service teacher training and PT; pupils’ individual characteristics related to the use of PT; and the social equity issues related to PT use. The symposium offers the opportunity to discuss the original research design and results but also the potential of educational research in shaping educational policy on sensitive issues in different contexts and contributing to the improvement of the quality of mainstream educational systems.