Recently, the Union Education Minister has released the Report on Unified Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2019-20 for School Education in India

Status of Government School Enrolment

• One out of every eight students enrolled in a school or college tends to drop out midway without completing the education and over 62% of all dropouts happen at the school level.
• More than one-third of the dropouts happen at the secondary and upper primary levels of education while 19.8 per cent students discontinued education at the secondary level.
• About 20.4 per cent boys and 19.2 per cent girls stopped their education at this level which is followed by the upper primary level for boys and diploma (below graduate) level for girls.
• More than 40 per cent of girls drop out because of marriage or engagement in domestic (household) work, while most boys leave education to involve in economic activities to support families.

Reasons for falling Government School Enrolment

• India’s meritocracy is sabotaged by flailing government schools: The cynical confiscation of 25 per cent of private school capacity by the Right to Education Act is a tacit acceptance of state failure and parents’ “revealed preference”.
• Poor academic record: Apart from few government schools, all other government schools show low or moderate academic achievement in the board exams.
• School participation in competitions: The competitive approach is almost missing in many government schools and the private schools are in a position to win the competition to popularize their schools.
  • The government schools are not in a compulsion to popularize their school whether the children win the competition or not because it does not affect their earnings.
• Professional ethics is diminishing: It has been observed that many teachers involved in business like money lending, giving vehicle on lease, taking tuitions, running groceries and few are running tour and travels too.
• Engaging teachers for non-teaching work: The Directorate of Education puts many teachers on clerical work and they are drawing salary for teaching children but actually they are doing clerical work.
• Lack of incentives: The measures to incentivize school going children like providing bicycles, free meals and improving infrastructure, have not really helped in making public education attractive.
• Ill-equipped teachers: The education officers admit that the qualification of teachers for primary and higher primary schools which is PUC+D.Ed is insufficient.
• Parents do not value education: They do not think that education would make any difference to the child’s life as an adult.
• Financial constraint or non-affordability of education: One-fourth of the boys have had to leave education and about 17.7 per cent of girls drop out from different levels of education due to financial reasons.

Implications of falling Government School Enrolment

• Increase in burden on private schools: The burden on private schools is increasing exponentially and with the enrolment in government schools declining, the huge physical and social infrastructure in government schools will become redundant.
• Little improvement in ability to read: The students of private schools showed a little improvement in their ability to read, whereas the students of government schools showed no sign of improvement.
• Prevalence of Illiteracy: One in three children does not complete his or her schooling in India i.e. one third of India’s population turns out to be not adequately educated and skilled to realize their true potential.
• Indian children behind Asian children: The proportion of India’s children attending a government school has now declined to 45 per cent as compared to 85 per cent in America, 90 per cent in England, and 95 per cent in Japan.
• Low primary-secondary school ratio: For every 100 primary schools, there are only 8 secondary schools, which is a huge disadvantage in the system.
• School dropouts are more irresponsible than non-dropouts: They have higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, and fall into criminal activities more often than those who complete their schooling.

Measures to be adopted to address falling Government School Enrolment

• Padho aur Badho (PAB) Programme: It should focus on improving learning outcomes and promoting holistic development in marginalized children to augment their competency for facing the world.
• Project Based Learning (PBL) pedagogy and curriculum: It should disseminate through well-trained and compassionate educators belonging to the slum itself.
  • The educational experts should design and develop PBL pedagogy and curriculum in order to understand the style correlating with day-to-day lives.
• Increase in financial aid to government schools: The central and state governments should develop and devise schemes for government schools to increase the financial assistance.
• Classroom management: It needs assessment by classroom observation of learning (teaching often happens without learning), physical set-up, instructional differentiation (for process, product, and learning styles), and communication (clarity, questioning, responsiveness).
• Fragmentation of education needs revisiting: India’s constitution wrote Education Policy into Lists I (Centre), II (State), and III (concurrent jurisdiction).
  • It needs revisiting because it tends to concentrate decisions that should be made locally in Delhi or state capitals.
  • The recruitment at the block level will minimize teacher absenteeism and reduce the stakes and payments on the “transfer industry” and school consolidation will reduce teacher shortages.

Road ahead

• The governance must shift from control of resources to learning outcomes i.e. learning design, responsiveness, teacher management, community relationships, integrity, fair decision making, and financial sustainability.
• The governance must enable performance management to be substantive and replace the current system best captured by the Tamil aphorism i.e. I will pretend as if I am beating you, you pretend as if you are crying.
• The NEP 2020 proposes to improve the infrastructure so that each student (pre-primary to Class 12) receives safe and engaging school education in order to ensure universal access to education and that no student drops out of school.
• For a new India, to mark its superior presence in the global arena, education is the key which can open the door for our ‘young nation’ to forge ahead as an economic super power and global leader.

• It is the fundamental duty of the state to deal with falling enrolment because a quality, free and regular school education represents our most potent infrastructure of opportunity.