“While remedial or individualised help may benefit students, the time and money allocated to tutoring can undermine student well-being and strain household budgets,” the report said. It also blamed tuitions for worsening inequality in education, saying, “Better-educated households in urban areas with children attending private schools were more likely to pay for private tutoring.” The report cited a study published in 2016 that said that in India in 2007-8 about 40 per cent of urban secondary students received private tutoring, compared with about 26 per cent of rural students. Explaining the findings of the report, the Unesco Director-in-Charge of it, Manos Antoninis, told reporters on Thursday that in some countries “there is an attempt to use test scores to hold teachers and schools accountable, to sanction them.” “But we draw attention to the fact in particular that it is a tool that has not worked,” he said. “On the contrary it is a tool that is (to the) detriment of what it is precisely to be supposed to be doing because it rrows curriculum, forces teachers to teach to the test.” At the same time it was very important for having a system to evaluate how learning is accomplished so citizens can hold governments accountable, Antonini said. For this there were “extremely sophisticated systems” developed in many countries as altertives to the tests, he said. “But trying to impose those, export those to countries with weaker capacities is quite a complicated story,” he added.
