Quality of Education in Independent and Franchise Private Secondary Schools in Pakistan

Abstract

Pakistan has a variety of privately managed schools. Inspired by thecorporate model the large school systems offer franchise to the smallschools in the name of better quality education leading to better marketacceptability. This study was conducted to find out the difference in thequality of education provided by the franchise and independent privatesecondary schools. Ten schools of a renowned large spread schoolsystem were selected conveniently and ten independent schools wereselected from the same localities for ensuring similarity of the context.Quality of education was define dalong input, process and product/outputindicators. Opinion of Head Teachers (HTs)/ School principals wasgathered through a questionnaire consisting five point rating scale oninput and process indicators. Opinion of HTs about input indicators wasvalidated through direct observation of the input indicators in the schoolsby one of the researchers. Students’ achievement scores in thematriculation examination conducted by the Board of Intermediate andSecondary Education, Lahore were the indicator of quality output. TheHTs of the two types of schools perceived no significant difference in thequality of input and process at their schools but the independent schoolsscoring slightly better on each of the two indicators. However, theindependent private schools were significantly superior to the franchiseschools in quality of output in terms of students’ pass percentage anddistribution over grades. Thus, the claim of franchising for better qualityeducation was not supported by this research.