Ludhiana-based maths teachers have been recruited for a unique outsourced and online project that involves the coaching of 10 and 11-year pupils at a UK government school in North London.

India is a popular destination for many British companies looking for savings by moving their back office and customer service centres to the subcontinent. This has never happened before in the education sector.

Just as in business, the same principle of getting better value for money applies in the education sector as well. London tutors can charge up to £40 (Rs 2880) per hour, compared to the Ludhiana rate of £12 (Rs 864).

BrightSpark Education, which employs the tutors, is a company registered in both India and the UK. It was set up by a former teacher called Tom Hooper. He has been cited in the British media as saying that he turned to India because maths tutors are in such short supply in the UK.

The UK registered less than 6,000 maths graduates last year, compared to more than 600,000 maths and science graduates from India.

On its website, BrightSpark explains: “Our tutors are all maths graduates, trained in the UK curriculum, providing one-to-one tuition, for students aged 7 to 16. It adds that ‘focused and personal, learning with our tutors online boosts students’ confidence and enjoyment in maths.’

The deal with BrightSpark was revealed by a London assistant head teacher Rebecca Stacey who told the Times Educational Supplement, “We quickly realised it was having a positive impact, so now half of our Year Six pupils are using it. It provides one-to-one help which would otherwise be too expensive to facilitate. Each of our pupils who have used it have improved and become more confident in their ability.”

Stacey is employed by the Ashmount Primary School in the London borough of Islington where a large percentage of of ten and 11-year-old pupils are given one-to-one tuition in maths in addition to normal lessons.

They are each given a headset before logging on to a website where they interact with the tutor in Ludhiana while following their instructions on the screen.

Ashmount’s head teacher Pana McGee also praised the scheme, saying, “We would have paid an assistant at least £30,000 (more than Rs 21 lakh per year), so that’s how much can be saved in a year,” she said. “The teaching resources that are used and the quality of teaching are excellent.

But BrightSparks’ innovative scheme has received a mixed response from other concerned educationsts in the UK. According to Dylan Wiliam, Director of the Institute of Education at London University, the future of such online teaching will depend on the quality of the tutors’ English, as well as understanding different cultural conventions.

“For example, long division is laid out differently in different countries,” he told the British media. “Having said that, I am sure that this will become commonplace in time. If brain surgery can now be done remotely, why not maths teaching? As with many things in education, it’s not a silly idea, but as we have discovered in recent years, a lot of things that appeared to be good ideas at the time turn out to be useless, or worse,”

A spokesperson for the UK teachers union, NASUWT, told the Guardian newspaper, “Why aren’t teachers making sure that they teach these pupils themselves, rather than go for remote learning from India?” she said.

“I am concerned about the precedent this is setting. What next - do without maths teachers? What about the follow-up lessons for the pupils, and the interaction with teachers?”