Inside Bengaluru’s private schools: How workplace hierarchies are impacting teacher well-being

Inside Bengaluru’s private schools: How workplace hierarchies are impacting teacher well-being Premium

Largely characterised by the model of missionary founded schools which existed as the first private schools in the city, Bengaluru's mid-range to high-income private schools continue to be the benchmark of ‘quality education' for most urban middle-class parents. This image, now more than a few decades in the making, finds its place amongst a larger nation-wide phenomenon of commercialised private schooling that is characterised by similar features across infrastructural and intellectual factors.

The private schooling phenomenon, as it were, has been highlighted by scholars who suggest that the growing perception of good education continues to attract the middle-class to elite sections of parents for whom private schooling whether mid-range or high-income is the norm.

India's private school sector is the 3rd largest school system in the world just behind China's school system and India's Public Education System. Some 73% of students in urban areas attend a private school.

The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) posits private schools as one of the key examples of educational development that should be emulated in public schools. It proposes a twin-development model by which simultaneous advancement of both private and public school can take place with the public school emulating the management style and “efficiency” of a private school. However, beneath the seemingly “efficient” functioning with lakhs of students passing out of the ICSE, CBSE and International curricula every year is an unanswered question of hidden workload and labour code violations that have lost their cases multiple times in the Indian court.

Names of all teachers in this article have been changed to preserve their anonymity.

Legally, teachers in India do not fall under the category of “workmen” or “workers”. This exclusion is rooted in a consistent line of Supreme Court judgments that have sought to define the nature of teaching as distinct from the categories of labour covered by India's industrial and labour laws.

The prevailing judicial interpretation hinges on the view that teaching is an intellectual and moral activity, not aligned with the manual, clerical, or operational functions typically associated with industrial employment. This position was firmly established in Sundarambal v. Government of Goa, Daman and Diu (1988), where the Supreme Court held that teachers are not “workmen” under Section 2(s) of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947. The court reasoned that including teachers within this category would undermine the “nobility” of their profession and fail to capture the essence of their intellectual labour.

The demographic profile of private school teachers in India reveals distinct patterns compared to their public school counterparts. According to existing data, private schools, particularly in urban areas, tend to attract younger, highly educated female teachers. The average age of a private school teacher is 34 years, notably younger than the average of 40 years for government school teachers.

This younger age profile also corresponds with differences in household status—private school teachers are significantly less likely to be heads of households, especially in urban contexts (29% in urban areas versus 42% in rural areas). In terms of educational qualifications, private school teachers are reported to possess tertiary education, with 88% in urban areas and 75% in rural areas holding degrees at the undergraduate level or higher.

Outside the research and legal precedents into teacher labour is the work culture that currently exists and affects the occupational well-being of these teachers with a clear distinction of who reports to whom. Occupational well-being is affected by a number of factors ranging from physical exertion to emotional labour performed at the place of work. In this instance, teachers were asked to respond specifically to structural and operational systems in workplaces and its effects.

Teachers often reported either rigid hierarchies or flexible hierarchies- both of which had a clear impact on their work lives. Ms. Hemathy, a biology teacher in one of Bengaluru's mid-range private schools reported, “In my school, if a teacher approaches a principal directly, they'll be asked, ‘Why didn't you approach your HOD first?'”

One teacher also spoke to how person-dependent the hierarchical structure makes other systems of functioning, “My coordinator puts the relevant systems in place, but if she leaves, the structure will fall apart. There's no official channel between teachers and management.”

Rigid hierarchies are usually maintained in institutions to reduce the time spent completing an administrative task so as to ensure labour hired is efficiently used. Counterintuitively, and as reported by teachers, the presence of a rigid hierarchy did not result in better efficiency towards reducing teacher workload.

Several teachers in mid-range to high-income schools reported being subject to multiple administrative layers in their reporting structure, “We submit lesson plans to at least three people before approval”, a middle-school Geography teacher, Ms. Edvina says. “It becomes more about how much can be presented on paper more than what I can actually execute in a classroom”. Teachers interviewed noted that these processes created feelings of being over-monitored and undervalued mainly because of the administrative workload that is redundant to the classroom but serves to maintain power structures outside of it.

A mirror image of this evidence also strengthens the causal connections. In schools where teachers said the hierarchy was the most flexible part of the school's operations, they pointed to the better working standards and were more satisfied in the way that they taught.

However, teachers in this environment were extremely aware and are quick to point out they are the anomaly. A teacher of Mallya Aditi International, a well-known high-income school in Bengaluru, says: “I say this to everyone I meet, I know I struck the lottery when I joined Aditi. I wouldn't get this treatment anywhere else.”

The corporatisation of schools is part of this phenomenon, says retiree and formal head of department, Ms Shobita. The movement creates more and more power vacuums and ambiguous structures where there is no platform to address issues related to workload.

In certain environments, particularly older schools where seniority is perpetuated across the years, that is, seniormost teachers taking position as head of subject departments, the culture toxifies over time. “There was a culture where seniors would dictate even how you wore your sari and what materials such as chiffon or georgette could be disallowed,” says Ms. Sucheta

Teachers consider having good superiors as “lucking out”. To them, it dictates the tone for the academic year altogether. Ms. Sucheta, an ex-commercial studies teacher, taught at the same school for 13 years. While praising her department, she says, “But I saw across departments with friends, there was 50% to full control over teachers' lives whether it was the number of classes they took, how they taught, what they did, how they corrected or evaluated the papers. Sometimes it would drain them out”.

A culture of protection and community is built when there is a lack of an institutionalised guarantee of workplace ethics or workload compensation. A lot of work occurs under the guise of teachers as vessels of the school's legacy. They are expected to perform teaching tasks and carve out time within the spaces to facilitate events.

Culture was also perceived to “trickle down” from leadership. As one teacher explained, “The principal being fair sets the tone for the rest of the employees.” The emotional labour of teaching continues to remain an ambiguity when formal well-being systems were absent, teachers relied on peer bonding to fill emotional gaps. As one teacher noted: “There's a very strong sense of community among teachers, but no formal system for their well-being.”

(Zoe is a recent graduate of the Public Policy programme at the NLSIU in Bengaluru. The material for the above article draws from her dissertation.)

Published - September 22, 2025 04:55 pm IST

Source: The Hindu
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