When Paul Skidmore, the CEO of Rising Academy Network, decided to open low-cost private schools in the West African countries Sierra Leone and Liberia, he had no idea he was walking into a humanitarian crisis. In 2014, as Skidmore and his team were busy working round the clock, the country was silently heading toward an epidemic of the Ebola virus that by 2015 would claim 5,000 lives in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea.
As with many African countries, Liberia and Sierra Leone’s education systems leave plenty of room for growth. According to the Center for Global Development, “more than 60 percent of school-aged children in Liberia aren’t in school, placing Liberia in the lowest percentile of net enrollment rates in the world.”
The numbers in Sierra Leone aren’t much better. Nearly half of all Sierra Leonean children between the ages of 5 and 14 are involved in child labor, according to WE Movement, leaving over half of the country’s girls illiterate.
Skidmore wanted to reverse these statistics, using a radical approach: opening a network of private schools that would be affordable to low-income families, also known as “low-cost private schools.” His organization now runs 10 such schools in Sierra Leone and helps manage 29 in Liberia.
Across Africa, a growing number of parents are opting for schools like those in Rising Academy Network. It is estimated that by the year 2021, 1 in 4 children in Africa, or 66 million children, will attend private schools.
However, these initiatives have come under criticism, with some considering them outsourcing and commodification of education. Others say that education should be a right available to all children regardless of their families’ ability to pay, and that privatizing educations shifts the onus from governments to citizens.
Paul Skidmore recently discussed these issues with Ravi Gurumurthy and Grant Gordon of the Airbel Center, the research and development arm of the International Rescue Committee. Gurumurthy and Gordon host the Displaced podcast on Vox Media, which examines conflict and crises around the world. Here is an excerpt of their interview.
Ravi Gurumurthy: I can remember when you first said you were going to set up a private school in Sierra Leone. And, with brilliant timing, you managed to set it up in Sierra Leone in the September that Ebola broke out. Tell us about that first year in Rising Academies and how you managed to innovate.
Paul Skidmore: It was an incredibly bad bit of strategic foresight on my part. We started the school in September 2014 as the Ebola crisis broke out. We had spent six months doing a lot of homework in terms of what the need was, where the gaps were. We started to recruit our first teachers. We started to develop a curriculum. And then it became clearer and clearer through July and August that [the Ebola crisis] wasn’t going away quickly and that, by September, all schools in the country were going to have to close. So we found ourselves with a real dilemma — we had made a set of promises to staff, and more importantly, to parents and kids.
We talked to parents and said, “Would you be up for some kind of home schooling approach, alongside information on Ebola prevention?” And so we got going, initially with 20 kids, and then that became 50, and by February of the crisis, it was up to about 150.
Paradoxically, it ended up being a really important part of our story, partly because we learned a lot about the model in these constrained environments—where you’re literally teaching in somebody’s front room — but also because we ended up putting values and ethos absolutely at the heart of what we do. The courage those teachers showed in the most difficult of circumstances has become part of our DNA.
Grant Gordon: Can you tell us what Rising Academy is, and how it differs in its approach to government models or NGO models for providing educational services?
PS: Sure. In Sierra Leone, we are a network of low-cost private schools. The customer, so to speak, is the parent or the caregiver, and they are paying us a fee to educate their child. Over in Liberia, it’s a different model. We essentially run government schools on behalf of the government, and the customer in that sense is the government of Liberia. But what we actually do [in both countries] is similar, which is to try and bring about a different model of teaching and learning in schools from what you would typically find.
The elements of that model are firstly around values, culture, ethos, and being intentional about how you reshape the atmosphere of schools to make it a safer space for learning. How does it become okay for a child to not be sure if they know they answer, but put their hand up and try anyway? In most traditional classroom settings, that’s a very, very brave thing for a child to do. Through the things we celebrate, through the words we use, through the ways that we train our teachers, at every single point, we try to create a culture where everybody feels like a learner, whether that is the students themselves, the teachers, the school leaders, or us in the head office.
The second thing is around content and the materials that we equip our teachers with. To some extent, this is done through teacher training, but more importantly, through very detailed lesson guides our teachers deliver. We think this is absolutely key to helping relatively low-skilled teachers deliver really engaging forms of pedagogy.
The third area for us is around coaching. We’re always stunned and inspired by how far teachers can come with the right kind of culture of feedback. So in every one of our schools we have what we call a “master teacher” who has no teaching timetable of their own but who uses their time to work intensively with each of the teachers. They watch their lessons, give them feedback—a lot of coaching work.
The final part is about oversight: much more hands-on management of what is happening in schools using data and technology.
RG: I want to just step back and place your work in context, because over the last decade, you’ve seen a huge increase in access to schooling that free for the user. But you’ve also seen, in parallel, a massive growth of low-cost private schools where parents are actually prepared to pay. How would you characterize the market? It feels like some of them have come up from the grassroots, where a mother’s been pissed off that the quality of education is not good enough. Yours is more sort of top-down or external, foreign-owned organization.
PS: As you say, the market has grown a lot. It is overwhelmingly that kind of grassroots model that dominates, even if some of the larger networks get the lion’s share of publicity. What’s striking is just how few [school networks] there are of any real scale. So for example, Nigeria has tens of millions of children to serve, but you’re still primarily seeing these very very small operations. I think is a feature of both how challenging it is to to run these networks, but also broader issues around how difficult it is to grow businesses in many countries.
And so that’s exactly the same issue around access to finance. How do you grow a school network when your best option is a bank loan at 25, 30, 40 percent? How do you strengthen that sector in terms of making some of these financial products more linked to solve certain educational outcomes? Are there ways of kind of federating them and networking them so that they benefit from some of the same economies of scale that larger networks do?
The exact same question applies in the government sector, where arguably the kind of ultimate network is traditional government schools, where government is both the financier and provider of all schools.
One of my frustrations with the current debate is that people are still tending to make a very binary discussion about public vs. private schools, rather than to recognize the massive heterogeneity of performance in both sectors. On average, the difference between private sector and government sector tends to be pretty marginal. The literature basically says private schools generally do a better job, and they tend to do it with that kind of lower cost. But the differences are fairly marginal. What’s striking is how much variation there is within the private sector, and to just make the focus “should you go private or should you go public” is quite unhelpful.
What you really want to know is what the successful bits are, and how do we scale more of those up — both within the private system and potentially within the public system too.
GG: Why did you decide to go into the private versus the public sector? How has your thinking evolved, given that there is so much variation between the sectors?
PS: To me, what I found compelling about taking the private route rather than a more traditional not-for-profit route were a couple of things.
One, there’s something about the power dynamic that I find much more compelling in the private sector. There are lots of really interesting things going on in the not-for-profit world around user feedback and how you make sure that you’re delivering what your users need. But it’s just really hard to not end up in a situation where “who pays the piper calls the tune” and all that sort of stuff. Even the language that ends up getting used — I find it very difficult, the language of “beneficiaries” and stuff — it all situates power in one very clear place. What I like about [the private route] is it’s just really clear that if my parents in Sierra Leone don’t like this school, then they don’t send their kid. I lose out, and I like it that way.
The second thing has been around the ways in which private finance allows you to do certain things that more traditional finance doesn’t, particularly for a growth stage organization like mine. I think the classic argument around scale is that it’s just really difficult and a lot slower to scale organizations when you’re constantly wondering how you’re going to keep the fundraising pipeline going down, compared to when you’re able to offer some form of return to investors, even if it’s only a modest one.
We opened our first school essentially three years ago, and we now have 39 schools and about 8,000 students. And I just don’t think we would have been anywhere close to that on a not-for-profit model.
GG: I actually want to pull up the counter-argument and ask you how you think about giving education in places like Sierra Leone, a poor and fragile state. You said that you’re a low-cost private school and I want to understand what that means. Because I think the contention or concern with this is that people shouldn’t pay for education. This is functionally a state service that should be provided for free, obviously through tax revenue. So how do you think about access issues, and what the state should be providing versus what you’re providing?
PS: In Sierra Leone, we charge 150 dollars per child per year, including basically everything except food and transport. I personally don’t love the language of low-cost private schools. It’s not my language. It’s a term that people have used, and they used it originally to differentiate this sort of segment from the high-end private schools. To me, low-cost is a terrible way of putting it because low-cost is in the eye of the beholder. That 150 dollars per year is absolutely nothing to some people in Sierra Leone. It’s an unreachable fortune for others.
The question that people need to be wrestling with are questions around what the in-context examples of really effective school provision are—not just a school program but an actual organization that is doing well and how to scale that, how do we actually grow more of that. I think there are examples of that to be found in the private sector and there are almost certainly examples to be found in the government sector. But until we start to look beyond some of these binary issues, I think we’re gonna miss [the point].
Read more from our series on Equity in International Education.
