Enrolment in Delhi schools poor: Report

NEW DELHI: Neither municipality nor Delhi government-run schools have been fairing well in the national capital, according to the annual report published by Praja Foundation about the state of public education here.

Enrolments have reduced and ‘quality’ of education has deteriorated, despite increased spending on education, and councillors and MLAS do not deliberate on issues of education, according to the foundation.

Speaking of the quality of education, they said that while 98.55% of the students in Class 7 made it to Class 8, only 56.95% of the students from Class 9 transitioned to Class 10 from the academic year 2015-16 to 2016-17. While over two-third of Class 8 students scored between 40 and 100 marks, only around 40-45% of students have been clearing the Class 9 exams.

Anjali Srivastav, the assistant manager of Praja Foundation, said that this shows that “students were promoted irrespective of learning levels in the earlier years and the teachers either were callous in their approach or the monitoring of RTE norms was not stringent.” The no-detention policy, which allows students to move onto Class 9, could be a possible factor for the discrepancy in numbers.

SISODIA WRITES TO L-G ON REGULARISATION OF GUEST TEACHERS

After the Delhi HC asked the authorities to issue a fresh advertisement for teacher recruitment by December 20, Delhi’s education minister Manish Sisodia has written to the L-G to clear a path for guest teacher for regularisation. Sisodia has asked the L-G to either give these guest teachers some weightage in the recruitment process, or grant consent to the bill.

Guest teachers, who were essentially recruited earlier to fill leave vacancies, according to the Directorate of Education, now form almost a third of the total number of teachers in Delhi, because of a backlog in recruitment that has build up in almost 10 years.