Fraser Newman: Juggling state with private

China is booming. When I lived there, I managed a private English training school. We had to grow 23 per cent a year just to stand still.

I would love to have that problem in New Zealand. It is such a different environment but there are still a number of lessons for for-profit education that can be transferred back to New Zealand.

Private education can bring out the best and the worst in people.

There is a constant tension between turning a profit and providing a meaningful education - parents often pressured schools to put children into inappropriate classes.

Any grey area and you could bet it would go in favour of the business.

Victims of "business first" at crunch time also included staff training, teaching resources and quality of teachers.

For students, there could also be added costs. With the booming industry, there were winners and losers. I saw training schools rise and fall in short time. It led to uncertainty and disruptions to routines that had to be worked out.

One of the attractions of the company I worked for was our resilience and so parents often turned to us after being previously burned elsewhere.

For business though, there was one major problem. Education is just one of those things government can't help but get involved in. You can't blame them either. Governments are tasked with promoting the public good. It just makes things risky.

Law changes could come out of left-field and it wasn't easy to predict the regulatory environment from one year to another. With all this said, there were some real success stories.

A minority of companies managed to put education first, thought long term and came out on top.

However for every company that made it, there were a dozen others that fell by the wayside.

Another one would take their place, competing on price or flashy advertising.

It was a brutal, competitive game which led to enormous profits for the winners, efficiency for the operators and loss for those at the other end.

We have to be careful how this is done in New Zealand.

Personally, I don't think education works well in a for-profit environment but I am also a realist.

It is a growing trend and isn't going to go away soon.

I just hope we go into it with our eyes open and develop a measured approach.

Fraser Newman is the manager of McLeods Booksellers in Rotorua.