A Journey Along the Frontier - My Attempts to Bring Accountability to Shadow Education in Australia and Beyond

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by hdkawk

A teacher-trained tutor recounts a first-person journey into private tutoring (“shadow education”) in Australia, focusing on how weak accountability harms families and undermines educational interests. Triggered by a student’s experience, the author investigates tutors through multiple roles and finds opaque offerings, missing disclosures on qualifications and screening, punitive refund practices, and unverifiable achievement claims. The narrative argues that self-regulation is insufficient and calls for a national peak body positioning students’ interests as equal to providers’ commercial ones.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages20

Reading Time50 min

AccessFree to download

Highlights

Stakeholder challenges and self-regulation

Author’s first-person narrative and investigation

Key findings on disclosure, qualifications, and refund practices

Call for stronger accountability and peak body model

A Journey Along the Frontier: My Attempts to Bring Accountability to Shadow Education in Australia and Beyond Mohan Dhall University of Technology Sydney ECNU Review of Education 2024, Vol. 7(1) 111–130 © The Author(s) 2023 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[DOI: 10.1177/20965311231192675](DOI: 10.1177/20965311231192675)[ ](DOI: 10.1177/20965311231192675)[journals.sagepub.com/home/roe](journals.sagepub.com/home/roe) Highlights • This article provides insights into stakeholders’ challenges while bringing educational accountability to private tutoring providers through a self-regulation model. There is no participant involved in this narrative inquiry study. • Policymakers may be ambivalent about bringing accountability as their families may beneﬁt from private tutoring. • This account is written from the perspective of a teacher-trained tutor who has worked with policymakers to address some of the challenges. • This ﬁrst-person narrative describes the experience of establishing a national peak body to bring greater accountability to private tutoring providers. This peak body is unique because it positions the educational interests of students as at least equal to providers’ commercial interests. • The author believes that greater accountability for tutoring businesses is required in all marketsand that issues will not resolve through self-regulation alone. Corresponding author: Mohan Dhall, University of Technology Sydney, FASS Floor 4 Building 10, Broadway 2007, Australia. [Email: mohan.dhall@uts.edu.au](Email: mohan.dhall@uts.edu.au) Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as speciﬁed on the SAGE and Open Access page ([https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage](https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage)). Keywords Coaching, coaching colleges, shadow education, tuition, tutoring Date received: 22 February 2023; revised: 16 April 2023; accepted: 17 April 2023 In 1996, I was in the fourth year of my teaching journey at a disadvantaged Western Sydney High School. A student, who was the daughter of Russian immigrants, asked if I could help her with physics. At the end of the two-hour session, the girl’s eyes welled up, and tears dropped down her face. I asked her whether everything was ﬁne. She replied, “I learned more in the last two hours than I learned in 18 months of tutoring.”1 I asked,“Why does that make you cry?” She said, My father is an academic but works in a factory, and my mother sews clothes in our apartment. I have spent a lot of their money on tutoring …so much of it is wasted. We don ’t have much money, and Ifeel ashamed that I have wasted it. More tears rolled out. The words of this Russian girl, trying her best to make her way in a new and strange country,ﬁlled me with anger. I felt protective of her and her vulnerable family and angry that people could take this family’s money with little accountability or regard. I decided to investigate what tutors and their businesses offered. I spent the next two weeks, after teaching, ﬁnding all the tutor advertisements in the classiﬁed sections of local newspapers and reached out to as many as possible. In this investigation I posed in three different guises. My ﬁrst set of inquiries was from a parent’s viewpoint seeking information on what was on offer. My second set—made a few days later—was from a tutor’s perspective seeking work from each business. About a week later, I called them a third time, posing as a Year 12 (ﬁnal year) student. The results of this invest

FAQs

What prompted the author to investigate private tutoring?

The author’s student shared that she learned more in two tutoring hours than in 18 months of tutoring. The author felt anger and concern that families’ money could be taken with little accountability.

How did the author conduct the investigation of tutoring businesses?

After teaching, the author spent two weeks contacting tutors through classifieds and approached them in three different roles: as a parent, as a prospective tutor, and as a final-year student.

What accountability problems did the author find in the shadow education sector?

Common issues included lack of disclosure to parents, unclear information on tutors’ qualifications and child-protection screening, punitive refund policies, and unverifiable claims about student success and exam outcomes.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by hdkawk