If India's Government Schools Were the Ones Families Chose

Today the government school is what families leave when they can pay. For that to reverse, four things would have to be true: families would stop paying to leave, every child would get a strong teacher, results would stop following family income, and the gates would reward thinking.

Today the government school is what Indian families leave when they can pay. This piece asks the opposite question: what would have to be true for it to be the school they choose? It is a question, not a forecast, and every number below is one we could check.

Where things stand

In 2025-26, 48.1% of India's 24.72 crore school children were in government schools and 40.0% in private unaided schools. Two years earlier the government share was 51.4%. In those two years government schools enrolled about 86 lakh fewer children and private unaided schools about 88 lakh more. [1] We set out the numbers, state by state, in Four in Ten.

Families pay for that move. India's 2025 household survey of school spending found an average of ₹2,863 a year per child in a government school and ₹28,693 in a recognised private unaided school, about ten times as much, and more than a quarter of school children also took private coaching. [2] That is the private tax.

For the movement to reverse, four things would have to be true.

1. Families would stop paying to leave

A family pays ten times as much because it believes the private school lowers a risk for its child at the next gate: the board examination, the entrance test, the admission. A government school families choose would have to lower that risk at least as well, for free.

That is the whole test. A public school does not need to look like a private one. It needs to give a parent the same confidence about what comes next.

2. Every child would get a strong teacher

A private school can pay for the teachers it wants. A public system has to decide where its teachers go, or the strongest gather where life is easiest.

Japan decides. Its prefectural boards of education move public-school teachers between schools on a regular cycle. [3] A study of high schools in one prefecture found that the public schools spread teacher quality more evenly than the private ones, without lowering the average. [4] One prefecture is not a country, and rotation has costs: a principal who trains a teacher expects to lose her. But it shows that where a strong teacher works can be a decision, not an accident.

3. Results would stop following family income

In most countries, children from richer homes score higher. The question is by how much.

In PISA 2022, Estonia's students scored above the OECD average in mathematics, reading and science, and 85% reached the basic level in mathematics, against an OECD average of 69%. The gap in mathematics between its most and least advantaged quarter of students was 81 points, smaller than the OECD average of 93. [5] That gap has widened in Estonia since 2012, which is a reminder that a fair system has to keep being made fair.

4. The gates would reward thinking

The last condition sits outside the school. As long as the gates into university reward rehearsal, families will buy rehearsal, however good the classroom is. We make that case in the reward problem.

Other systems show parts of the change. Finland's national core curriculum asks every school to offer at least one multidisciplinary learning module each year. Singapore's Full Subject-Based Banding lets a student take each subject at her own level instead of being placed in one stream. [6, 7] Neither is a model to copy whole, and neither removes examinations. Both change what the system asks a child to do.

Why it matters beyond school

The economist Daniel Waldenström's history of wealth in the West argues that the middle class grew because political and institutional change let people become educated, earn more, and build wealth through housing and pension savings. His policy conclusion is to raise the wealth of the bottom and the middle rather than to cut the top. [8] A public school good enough that no family has to buy its way out is that idea applied to childhood.

It also matters for the universities at the top of the system, which can only build on the thinking their students arrive with. India has none in the global top 100 yet. [9]

What this cannot tell us

None of this says what India's government schools would cost to transform, how long it would take, or which reform would work first. The countries above are not India, and each mechanism was measured in its own setting. A shift in enrolment also does not tell us why families moved, or that the same families moved.

Where Ilanooo stands

Private schools are where change can start, because that is where families are paying for an answer today. A public system good enough that no family has to buy its way out is where it has to end.

That has a consequence for us. Ilanooo works with parents now. If government schools become the ones families choose, fewer families will pay for extra help with how their child thinks. That would be the right outcome.

Sources

  1. UDISE+ dashboard, official enrolment by school management, all-India, 2023-24 and 2025-26, read on 15 October 2026. Shares are computed from those counts.
  2. Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, National Statistical Office, NSS Report No. 595, Comprehensive Modular Survey: Education, 2025 (NSS 80th round).
  3. Complete exchange mechanisms (arXiv, 2025), which describes Japan's prefectural teacher rotations.
  4. Seebruck, study of teacher distribution across public and private high schools in one Japanese prefecture, Education Policy Analysis Archives, 2021 (49 schools, 1,456 teachers).
  5. OECD, PISA 2022 Results, Country Note: Estonia; Estonian Ministry of Education, Country note.
  6. Finnish National Agency for Education, basic education core curriculum.
  7. Singapore Ministry of Education, Full Subject-Based Banding.
  8. Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Richer and More Equal: A New History of Wealth in the West, Daniel Waldenström, Polity, 2024.
  9. India Needs Five Universities in the Global Top 100. It Has None.