Introduction

Advocates of government social investment strategies across the world almost always highlight the critical importance for societies of spending on education. Developing human capital through education spending is often viewed as being almost a silver bullet for solving countries’ problems – boosting economic growth, promoting equality of opportunity and preventing ‘wasted talent’ among disadvantaged groups. At the same time, one typically neglected area of policy analysis relates to families’ simultaneous private spending on education, particularly in unequal societies, and the ways this spending may at times actually undermine key aims associated with the government's social investment efforts. Rather than reducing educational inequalities, these are often maintained through families’ private spending, as parents seek to ensure their children remain one step ahead of the game. Over time, problems of education overconsumption can arise which are suboptimal not only for growth but also for citizens’ wellbeing, even if they do drive apparently positive outcomes such as countries’ high performances in international education league tables. Where strong, long-term incentives exist in a society for families to buy private alongside public education, private tutoring industries can grow dramatically in size and can become very difficult for governments to regulate – again compromising many aims of public social investment. The quote above from a South Korean politician in 2017 highlights such problems in the context of one particular society – South Korea – where families’ private spending on ‘shadow education’ outside the formal school day is known to have reached a staggering 2.79 per cent of the national GDP in 2006 (Kim and Lee, 2010: 261).