For more than a decade, education professor Mark Bray has been intrigued by the growing phenomenon of students attending tutorial centres. Haven't they had enough class time after a day in school? His fixation with the phenomenon made him a leading author as well as advocate in the area.
His 2009 book Confronting the Shadow Education System: What Government Policies for What Private Tutoring? was published while he was director of Unesco's International Institute for Educational Planning in Paris between 2006 and 2010. It challenges governments worldwide to tackle the largely unregulated business and has been translated into a dozen languages.
His book last year, The Challenge of Shadow Education: Private Tutoring and Its Implications for Policy Makers in Europe, was published by the European Commission, drawing attention to the rise of the business over there.
'It's growing in Europe and if they are not careful these countries will have the same problem as in Hong Kong, Korea and everywhere else,' says Bray, who was appointed the Unesco chair professor of comparative education and director of the Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC) at the University of Hong Kong in May.
Announcing his appointment, the university said Bray's field of expertise was 'the study of private supplementary tutoring, a sector that allows wealthy families to secure a good education for their children while those from low-income families fall behind'.
Led by South Korea, where nearly 90 per cent of its elementary students receive some sort of shadow education, Asia is home to the tutoring business. A survey by Bray last year found an astonishing 72 per cent of sixth-formers in Hong Kong get tutoring help. As is the case elsewhere, the service providers range from university or even secondary students finding ways to augment their income to large tutorial-centre chains listed on the local stock market.