Jaspal Sidhu (Jaspal’s Substack)
One of the biggest challenges facing developing countries like Indonesia is the struggle to deliver high-quality education at affordable school fees, especially in the cities away from the capital. Ranked at the bottom of the OECD’s PISA rankings, developing countries like Indonesia need innovative solutions to ensure access to world-class learning for everyone, not just the privileged few. Our Group of Schools (SIS Group of Schools and Inspirasi Schools) have successfully expanded our brick-and-mortar footprints into big, mid-sized and emerging cities in the archipelago and beyond, adapting Singapore’s top-ranked education system to the local context.
We did it with our award-winning Half-Fees Model —a simple yet transformative approach that lowers fees while maintaining quality and profitability.
How the Half-Fees Model Works
The Half-Fees Model is meticulously developed to scale and open access to a completely new demographic that has been underserved in education.
Here’s how it works:
When we establish a new K-12 school, we deliberately lower the tuition fees by 50% compared to those of our previous school. The core philosophy behind this dramatic reduction is rooted in our mission to serve entirely new communities, especially those that are unable to afford the conventional school fees in their region.
In a large Tier A city, tuition fees are typically higher, reflecting the city’s wealth and cost of living. For our school in a Tier B mid-sized city, we halve those fees—50% less than the previous school—so that we can reach a different segment of the population, one that might not be able to afford the full cost but still values quality education. We apply the same approach when we move to a smaller or emerging city, Tier C, halving the fees once again, to make education affordable for families with even lower incomes.
These schools are connected through a highly collaborative ecosystem powered by technology, where pedagogical and operational ideas are shared throughout the year. This ensures that no school within our network operates in isolation, creating an environment that thrives on collective innovation and support.
When our schools across various regions become interconnected, it allows the sharing of best practices, teaching methodologies, and operational strategies in real time. Teachers, administrators, and staff from schools in Tier A cities can easily collaborate with their counterparts in Tier B and C cities, ensuring that innovations in curriculum design, classroom management, and resource allocation are swiftly disseminated and adapted to local contexts.
In addition, technology has facilitated virtual workshops, professional development sessions, and peer mentoring programs across our network of schools. Teachers and administrators have used cloud-based platforms to share data, ensuring that every school, no matter its location, has access to key insights on student performance, teacher effectiveness, and curriculum outcomes. Since the curriculum and program are consistent across our schools (only tuition fees differ), this system has enabled detailed comparisons of how the respective school programs have been delivered and how effective they have been. The collaborative sharing of these kind of insights have helped elevate the performance of the entire system.
This collaborative network allows even the smallest schools to benefit from the collective expertise of the entire system, ensuring that quality remains consistent while adapting to the unique needs of each community.
While collaboration is fundamental to our operations, we ensure that it is not driven solely by more experienced individuals, dominant personalities, or better-resourced schools in the upper segment of the tuition fee pyramid. To achieve this, we have implemented a “structured collaboration” model.
We have seen that a more structured collaboration model is essential for fostering a thriving collaborative ecosystem among our schools, particularly in overcoming cultural and social barriers that might obstruct open, spontaneous communication. This is even more important when teachers come from diverse background and nationalities. Our approach involves scheduled, mandatory meetings where leaders from both large and small cities come together, taking turns to chair the discussions.
By giving each leader, the opportunity to chair these meetings, even those from smaller schools gain a sense of importance and validation, knowing that their contributions matter. This encourages active participation and shared responsibility, as the challenges faced by smaller schools often resonate with those encountered by larger institutions. The process breaks down hierarchical barriers, fostering an environment where everyone feels empowered to voice their perspectives and share solutions.
The result is a unified culture where all leaders, whether from big or small schools, see themselves as part of one mission—delivering quality education to underserved communities. This approach dismantles any sense of snobbery or isolation that may linger, reinforcing the idea that everyone’s voice is valuable, and the collective wisdom of the group leads to more effective problem-solving.
By promoting an inclusive environment, we ensure that every leader, regardless of their school’s size, plays a vital role in the broader network. This collaborative framework nurtures relationships, encourages problem-solving, and enhances the collective capacity to drive positive change across all schools.
Today, we are in 15 locations, spanning 11 cities and 4 countries, and growing. Every single school, up and down the tuition fee pyramid, is profitable, while performing above international benchmark examinations.
Why a 50% Reduction?
The decision to cut fees by half, whenever we move to a new city, rather than by 20% or 30% is deliberate. When you discount fees by 20-30%, you’re still operating within the same market, essentially attracting the same types of families who may be taking advantage of seasonal offers. Most private schools already offer discounts in this range during promotional periods, so this level of reduction isn’t enough to expand into a truly new market.
However, when you slash fees by 50%, you make education accessible to a completely different socio-economic group. By cutting fees in half, we aim to serve this new market, providing high-quality education to a much broader spectrum of society.
A New Market: Who Are We Serving?
With the Half-Fees Model, we are targeting families from working-class backgrounds in smaller and emerging cities away from the capital.
By focusing on these cities, the Half-Fees Model does more than just create an affordable option—it reshapes the educational landscape in these cities. It allows us to enter markets where quality education is lacking.
By halving fees, we’re taking a bold step that disrupts traditional pricing strategies in education. It is precisely this boldness that allows us to create real change. It’s not about discounting; it’s about redefining who we serve. We are building schools for a whole new segment of the population, allowing more children access to the education they deserve.
This gradual reduction in tuition fees is achievable through a deeply interconnected ecosystem that links all our schools, driven by technology. No school operates in isolation. Teachers, administrators, and support staff across every location continuously share best practices, educational innovations, and operational strategies in real time. This seamless exchange of knowledge guarantees that even our most remote schools stay updated with the latest advancements. The system ensures they have access to the same high-quality practices as our larger, better-resourced schools.
Today every school within our system, regardless of its location on the tuition fee pyramid, operates profitably while outperforming international academic benchmarks.
International validation
In 2019, our work was acknowledged by the World Bank (IFC) and the Financial Times (UK) with a Global Award for the transformative and impactful possibilities it brings.
The Challenge of Scaling: Teacher Recruitment
As we extended the Half-Fees Model into smaller, emerging cities, a significant challenge emerged—finding teachers with experience in best practices.
Recognizing that the problem required an unconventional solution, we looked outside the education sector for answers. We partnered with Deloitte (Singapore) to examine how global companies like Google and Starbucks scale their workforces across borders and into smaller markets.
The year-long project saw us interact with more than 25 top corporations across the world, where we looked at their cutting-edge HR recruitment and training techniques. There were many learnings.
The key insight we gleaned was the principle of “Hire for attitude, train for skills.” This became a cornerstone of our teacher recruitment strategy.
This was a huge “Ah-Ha” moment for us; Attitude is not the monopoly of big cities.
We recognized the existence of local community teachers who were earnest, enthusiastic, open-minded and yearned to be transformed into great educators. This was evident especially in smaller cities, as they understood the problems of their communities and were keen to uplift the future of their children and their neighbors.
The Solution: EFFECTOR Model and Playbook
Using the research conducted with Deloitte, we developed a unique playbook for hiring and training based on a set of essential attributes that we believe drive strong teacher-student engagement for better student outcomes. These attributes are outlined in the EFFECTOR model—Earnestness, Funny (Humor), Firmness, Enthusiasm, Consistency, Timeliness, Open-mindedness, and Research-mindedness.
By focusing on hiring individuals with these qualities, we have and can build a network of teachers who not only deliver academic excellence but also embody the values that foster a nurturing and engaging learning environment. This approach has allowed us to scale our Half-Fees Model effectively without sacrificing the quality of education.
The Impact: A New Paradigm for Education
This successful model demonstrates that high-quality education can be made accessible to communities beyond the top tier of the tuition-fee spectrum. Through a scalable approach, supported by innovative recruitment strategies and collaborative learning networks, every student—whether in a major city or a developing one—can access the same world-class education.
The Half-Fees Model is a call to investors and education leaders alike: quality education can be both impactful and profitable. By rethinking traditional school models and leveraging new approaches to teacher recruitment and collaboration, we have the ability to create sustainable systems in Asia, India, Africa and other frontiers and bridge the gap between affordability and excellence.
(Much of this was also shared on September 16, 2024 in Bangkok during a global leadership gathering from the Cambridge University Press, University of Cambridge. The talk I did was entitled; Code Cracked: Affordable Education, Impact, and Profit).
Source:
https://educationonthebrain.substack.com/p/the-half-fees-model-making-quality
